Nicolas van de Walle

McGovern skillfully unmasks the financial interests at stake in the country’s politics.

Veit’s book fills a void. He argues that like previous state-building missions in the region, MONUC lacks the legitimacy and capacity to act alone.

One of the great merits of Denov’s book on the civil war in Sierra Leone is her refusal to either mythologize or demonize that war’s child soldiers as she meticulously chronicles their abduction by rebels (almost invariably the method of recruitment), their experiences during the war, and their attempts to reintegrate into society after the conflict ended in 2002.

On March 21, 1960, police in Sharpeville, South Africa, shot hundreds of people protesting laws that restricted the movement of blacks. Sixty-nine protesters died, and the massacre became an iconic moment in the struggle against apartheid. Relying on fascinating archival testimonies of demonstrators -- but little from the police -- Lodge explains that the protests had been organized by the Pan-Africanist Congress, which was then at the peak of its influence in the anti-apartheid movement.

These days, cholera is largely an African disease, with over 95 percent of all cases worldwide over the past two decades occurring in Africa. In his informative history of the seven cholera pandemics that have hit the continent since 1817, Echenberg shows that this was not always so.

Stearns' readable account of the ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is concerned with the perceptions, motivations, and actions of an eclectic mix of actors in the conflict -- from 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.

Reading these three fine books on Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe produces something of a Rashomon effect, so different are the elements they emphasize and the information they put forward.

South Africa is now well into its second decade of postapartheid rule, and these three recent books by South African scholars reveal a good deal about the country.

As Tripp makes clear in her thoughtful study of the Museveni regime in Uganda, the real, if limited, democratic progress of the 1990s has stagnated and in some cases been reversed, while Allen and Vlassenroot's collection demystifies the Lord's Resistance Army by placing it squarely in the context of several decades of conflict in Uganda, Sudan, and Congo.

Eichstaedt's book tries to respond to the new interest in Somalia, with a breezy account that, despite its often melodramatic prose and occasional lack of careful analysis, is often informative.

Two new books survey the contemporary Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), following close to two decades of state collapse and civil conflict.

With the referendum on southern Sudanese independence slated for January 2011, Collins’ concise history of Sudan since the onset of British colonialism offers a useful perspective on contemporary events in the country.