Author: Jason Stearns File Type: mobi ReviewDancing in the Glory of Monsters is riveting and certain to become essential reading for anyone looking to understand Central Africa. --The Wall Street Journal, April 1, 2001br The best account [of the war] so far more serious than several recent macho-war-correspondent travelogues, and more lucid and accessible than its nearest competitor. --Adam Hochschild, The New York Times, April 1, 2011br Kirkus, February 15, 2011br Impressively controlled account of the devastating Congo warThe books greatest strength is the eyewitness dialogue Stearns discusses his encounters with everyone from major military figures to residents of remote villages (he was occasionally suspected of being a CIA spy)An important examination of a social disaster that seems both politically complex and cruelly senseless.Booklistbr Covering the devastating effects of these deadly contests on the Congolese infrastructure, Congolese institutions, and peoples lives, Stearns informatively reports on affairs for students of African politics.br New York Times Book Review, April 3, 2011The best account [of the conflict in the Congo] so far more serious than several recent macho-war-correspondent travelogues and more lucid and accessible than its nearest competitorThe task facing anyone who tires to tell this whole story is formidable, but Stearns by and large rises to it. He has lived in the country, and has done a raft of interviews with people who witnessed what happened before he got therehis picture is clear, made painfully real by a series of close-up portraits.br hr Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2011br *He is a cracking writer, with a wry sense of understatementMr. Stearns has spoken to everyonevillagers, child soldiers, Mobutus commanders, Kabilas ministers, Rwandan intelligence officers. In these conversations he found gold, bringing clarityand humanityto a place that usually seems inexplicable and barbaric. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is riveting and certain to become essential reading for anyone looking to understand Central Africa.Foreign Affairs, MayJune 2011br Stearns is more concerned with the perceptions, motivations, an actions of an eclectic mix of actors in the conflictfrom a Tutsi warlord who engaged in massive human rights violations to a Hutu activist turned refugee living in the camps and forests of eastern Congo. He tells their stories with a judicious mix of empathy and distance, linking them to a broader narrative of a two-decade-long conflict that has involved a dozen countries and claimed six million victims.br Washington Post, April 24, 2011Enter Jason Stearns. One of Congos most intrepid observers, he describes the war from the point of view of its perpetrators. He has tracked down and interviewed a rogues gallery of them. The resulting book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, is a tour de force, though not for the squeamish.Economist, April 28, 2011[Stearns] is probably the most widely travelled and the most meticulous and empathetic observer of the war there. This is a serious book about the social and political forces behind one of the most violent clashes of modern timesas well as a damn good read.Global Post, April 26, 2011br Stearns is a leading authority on the region, having lived there for years working for the United Nations and the International Crisis Group. He has built up a superb knowledge of Congo and how it articulates with its neighbours, particularly Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi. He frequently imparts his understanding to journalists far less well-informed than he. And now he has produced a book where he makes the whole convoluted and confusing war in Congo a little more comprehensible, which is quite a feat. If you want to understand modern Congo then Stearns book should be required reading.br Telegraph, May 13, 2011br A brave and accessible take on the leviathan at the heart of so many of Africas problems Stearnss eye for detail, culled from countless interviews, brings this book alive I once wrote that the Congo suffers from a lack of institutional memory, meaning that its atrocities well so inexorably that nobody bothers to keep an account of them. Stearnss book goes a long way to putting that right.hr The Spectator,strong May 8, 2011*br (t)his courageous book is a plea for more nuanced understanding and the silencing of the analysis-free the horror, the horror exclamation that Congo still routinely wrings from Western lips.hr Sunday Times, May 1, 2011*br Stearns has done a fine job of amassing vast amounts (of material), much of it based directly on interviews with the participants and victims, to bring to light details of a scandalously under-reported war (T)his book succeeds in providing a vivid chronicles of this rolling conflict involving 20 rival rebel groups.The Shepherd Expressbr a vivid chronicle of the carnage that helps illuminate a tragedy too enormous to comprehendFinancial Times, June, 24, 2011A serious, admirably balanced account of the crisis and the political and social forces behind it, providing vivid portraits of both victims and perpetrators and eyewitness accounts of the main events perhaps the most accessible, meticulously researched and comprehensive overview of the Congo crisis yet.At the heart of Africa is Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal and unstaunchable war in which millions have died. And yet, despite its epic proportions, it has received little sustained media attention. In this deeply reported book, Jason Stearns vividly tells the story of this misunderstood conflict through the experiences of those who engineered and perpetrated it. He depicts village pastors who survived massacres, the child soldier assassin of President Kabila, a female Hutu activist who relives the hunting and methodical extermination of fellow refugees, and key architects of the war that became as great a disaster as--and was a direct consequence of--the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Through their stories, he tries to understand why such mass violence made sense, and why stability has been so elusive. Through their voices, and an astonishing wealth of knowledge and research, Stearns chronicles the political, social, and moral decay of the Congolese State.

Author: Greg Bottoms File Type: pdf The Reverend Howard Finster was twenty feet tall, suspended in darkness. Or so he appeared in the documentary film that introduced a teenaged Greg Bottoms to the renowned outsider artist whose death would help inspire him, fourteen years later, to travel the country. Beginning in Georgia with a trip to Finsters famous Paradise Gardens, his journey-of which The Colorful Apocalypse is a masterly chronicle-is an unparalleled look into the lives and visionary works of some of Finsters contemporaries the self-taught evangelical artists whose beliefs and oeuvres occupy the gray area between madness and Christian ecstasy.With his prodigious gift for conversation and quietly observant storytelling, Bottoms draws us into the worlds of such figures as William Thomas Thompson, a handicapped ex-millionaire who painted a 300-foot version of the book of Revelation Norbert Kox, an ex-member of the Outlaws biker gang who now lives as a recluse in rural Wisconsin and paints apocalyptic visual parables and Myrtice West, who began painting to express the revelatory visions she had after her daughter was brutally murdered. These artists works are as wildly varied as their life stories, but without sensationalizing or patronizing them, Bottoms-one of todays finest young writers-gets at the heart of what they have in common the struggle to make sense, through art, of their difficult personal histories.In doing so, he weaves a true narrative as powerful as the art of its subjects, a work that is at once an enthralling travelogue, a series of revealing biographical portraits, and a profound meditation on the chaos of despair and the ways in which creativity can help order our lives.

Author: James Diedrick File Type: pdf With Mathilde Blind Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters, James Diedrick offers a groundbreaking critical biography of the German-born British poet Mathilde Blind (18411896), a freethinking radical feminist. Born to politically radical parents, Blind had, by the time she was thirty, become a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of writers, painters, and critics, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, William Michael Rossetti, and Richard Garnett. By the 1880s she had become widely recognized for a body of writing that engaged contemporary issues such as the Woman Question, the forced eviction of Scottish tenant farmers in the Highland Clearances, and Darwins evolutionary theory. She subsequently emerged as a prominent voice and leader among New Woman writers at the end of the century, including Mona Caird, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. She also developed important associations with leading male decadent writers of the fin de siecle, most notably, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. Despite her extensive contributions to Victorian debates on aesthetics, religion, nationhood, imperialism, gender, and sexuality, however, Blind has yet to receive the prominence she deserves in studies of the period. As the first full-length biography of this trailblazing woman of letters, Mathilde Blind underscores the importance of her poetry and her critical writings (her work on Shelley, biographies of George Eliot and Madame Roland, and her translations of Strauss and Bashkirtseff) for the literature and culture of the fin de siecle. **

Author: Arun Shourie File Type: epub Shourie has the anecdotal reasoning of Nirad Chaudhuri married to the writing style of Robert Ludlum. Both are in ample evidence in this book. - India Today In this incisive commentary, Arun Shourie documents the ways in which our history textbooks have been doctored by leftist historians. Thoroughly researched and riveting, this study brings to light the techniques and frauds that a cabal of some of our best-known academicians has used to promote themselves, and to acquire control over institutions. And then to put these supposedly academic institutions to use. Shourie shows how, in the process, this cabal has perverted Indias historical narrative, and thereby vitiated the countrys public discourse. Two new chapters bring to light recent developments in the field how, with their holy scriptures having been repudiated in their holy cities, these historians strive to retain their perches by dominating niche domains how these efforts are bound to fail but how their trajectory holds vital lessons for those who seek to replace them. A must read for every Indian who has an interest in the countrys history and a stake in its future.