The Best Books of 2012 on Africa

Jagielski's semifictional account of child soldiers in Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army paints a bleak picture of northern Uganda, where Kony’s rebellion has scarred the population and corroded the Ugandan army and state.

The increased Chinese attention to Africa has been one of the region’s big stories during the last decade, not least because it seemed to come just as the West was losing interest in the continent. Shinn and Eisenman’s book usefully situates this development in a broad historical context, showing important areas of continuity with earlier Sino-African links.

Lomborg believes that better policies can come only from dispassionate cost-benefit analysis—which is just what his organization, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, claims to produce. In this book, he tackles the HIV/AIDS crisis in Africa.