In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review journalist Joshua Hammer gives a positive review to Michela Wrong’s latest book, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower. Here is the lead paragraph:
Michela Wrong has built a distinguished literary career telling stories of African corruption and Western complicity. A former Africa correspondent for Reuters and The Financial Times, Wrong attracted wide attention with her first book, “In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo,” a chronicle of societal collapse in the country then known as Zaire. She followed that with “I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation,” which told how an Eritrean rebel movement, ignored by the West, defeated a much stronger Ethiopian Army, then transmuted into an autocratic and bankrupt state. In “It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower,” her third book, Wrong’s subject is John Githongo, a newspaper journalist who became Kenya’s first anticorruption czar. Two years later, he tendered his resignation and fled the country after unearthing evidence of graft at the highest levels of government. Githongo, an old friend of Wrong’s, took refuge at her London flat and hid there for weeks while the press corps, along with Kenyan secret agents, searched the city for him in vain. Githongo’s sojourn with Wrong was the genesis of a fast-paced political thriller — with echoes of Graham Greene and John le Carré.
Wrong’s previous books have been remarkable examples of solid reportage about Africa, and this one, which I have not yet read, seems to follow in their footsteps.