Matthew Green
In Kony’s Shadow
The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army
By Wojciech Jagielski (Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones)
Old Street 305pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
Joseph Kony could never have imagined it. Once an obscure warlord traipsing through the central African bush, he has been catapulted onto the leaderboard of global villains. Schoolchildren have been riveted by an internet video of his atrocities released by Invisible Children, a group of American activists. Their film has garnered more than 89 million hits on YouTube since March. Some viewers rallied behind their Kony2012 campaign to call for the Ugandan rebel’s arrest by the year’s end. Overnight, Kony has become the world’s favourite bogeyman.
It is fortuitous then that the English translation of The Night Wanderers by Wojciech Jagielski, a veteran Polish journalist, has arrived at just the moment when ever larger numbers of people are curious to learn more about Kony, his child soldiers, and the conflict they spawned.
Anyone hoping for an adrenaline-fuelled
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Within hours, the news spread. A grimy gang of desperadoes had been captured just in time to stop them setting out on an assassination plot of shocking audacity.'
@katheder on the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/butchers-knives-treason-and-plot
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger