Nicolas van de Walle

China's evolving relationship with Africa has generated a great deal of hyperbole. This collection of essays separates the facts from the myths.

The end of Thabo Mbeki's presidency and the settling in of Jacob Zuma provide an opportunity to assess the 15 years since the fall of apartheid. Russell's and Feinstein's assessments are both excellent and disquieting.

Both of these books eschew the broad generalizations and provocative anecdotes that mar most books about aid and instead describe the great variance in outcomes across the continent.

These two timely books offer useful introductions to Somaliland. Bradbury's account is the more comprehensive, providing both a history of the region and a fairly complete assessment of recent state-building efforts. Lewis, a longtime observer of Somalia, has written a shorter and more pointed account of recent events, grounded in his deep knowledge of Somali culture and history.

Walker's well-written and informative book tells the story man's fascination with ivory, from prehistoric amulets to the massive global trade in the nineteenth century and discusses the impact of the international ban on the ivory trade that has been in effect since 1990.

This book, which resulted from Butcher's 44-day trip by motorbike, dugout canoe, UN motor boat, and helicopter, provides a gripping story and an absorbing look at a country that has been moving backward for half a century.

Although a common explanation for the African continent's mediocre-to-disastrous economic performance for the last 30 years has been the weakness of the private sector and its political subordination to a state elite that is less interested in long-term sustainable growth than it is in staying in power and profiting from rent seeking, relations between the private sector and the state vary across the region, as Handley makes clear in this well-informed book.

The ethnic violence that disrupted the 2007 elections in Kenya is well analyzed in this account of that country's recent democratization and constitutional debates by Mutua, a prominent Kenyan legal scholar.