This Sunday’s New York Times Book Review features focuses on two books on Africa. The Times’ East African correspondent Jeffrey Gettelman reviews the respected Africanist Gerard Prunier’s book Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. And the Times’ former South Africa correspondent Suzanne Daley takes a look at Mark Givisser’s A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, a fairly significant abridgement (the original weighed in at more than 900 pages) and update of his 2007 book Thabo Mbeki: A Dream Deferred, which was published in South Africa. Both books receive qualified thumbs up.
Not so generously received is Dambiso Moyo’s book Dead Aid, which Michael Gerson hammers in The Washington Post. Moyo has become a darling in conservative circles for her “aid is bad” argument, which Gerson rightly points out as being simplistic and just plain wrong, or as he writes, “the book is something of a marvel: Seldom have so many sound economic arguments been employed to justify such disastrously wrongheaded conclusions.” We may never settle the question of what aid works best, but an argument that asserts that no aid works is bound not to get us anywhere, except perhaps invitations to swank conservative cocktail parties.
