Patrick Marnham
The Horror
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
By Jason K Stearns
Perseus Books 380pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Jason Stearns is an American writer who has worked in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2001. In that time his contacts with the United Nations and various aid and human rights groups have made him a valued source for journalists and other visitors. In this, his first book, he sets out to give a detailed account of the political in-fighting behind the violence that has afflicted the country for the last sixteen years.
The statistics are horrible enough. Eight hundred thousand people were murdered in Rwanda in three months, with one million Rwandans, including about 200,000 killers, taking refuge in the Congo; refugee camps contained up to 400,000 people, of whom 1,500 a day were dying of cholera. Sixteen years of
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
In this month's crime round-up, @NJCooper_crime reviews thrillers by @JohnBrownlow, @SGMacleanauthor, @HelenMTakhar, @valmcdermid, @emstylesauthor, @AvaGlassBooks, @RuthWareWriter and @VaseemKhanUK.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/august-2022-crime-round-up
'Such a start in life might seem to presage a pleasant existence of leisure and luxury, but the career of Henrietta Maria ... was as full of trouble and strife as the most harrowing of hard-luck case histories.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony