3 summer reading recommendations

I was inspired by Karen Grepin’s post on global health summer reading recommendations (and an email from my aunt!) to post my own suggestions. While these books have nothing to do with Liberia, they also have everything to do with Liberia.

Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo. This is the best book I’ve ever read. Seriously. It’s a novel about aid workers who start off shipping relief supplies to Southern Sudan. They end up fighting with each other, sleeping with each other, smuggling arms to rebels, dead, or all of the above.

Emma’s War by Deborah Scroggins. The true story of a British woman who becomes infatuated with Sudan in her early 20s. She is passionate, compassionate, extremely energetic, and naive. She is as stuffed full of contradictions as a human being can get. She ends up marrying a senior SPLA commander, and is never able to see or internalize his murderous ways. She goes native, yet at the same time is more blind about Southern Sudan politics than the other expats. She dies before she turns 30.

The late Emma McCune with her husband, Riek Machar, now the vice president of Southern Sudan. Picture from here.

Mating by Normal Rush. A novel about an anthropology PhD student who goes to Botswana to do dissertation research. She falls in love with another anthropologist who is attempting to create a utopian village where women are in control. Like the two books above, Mating is about the complications of development projects and the ironies of aid.

An easy criticism of this list is that these books focus on white people in Africa. But I have found that this window helps me become more engaged in topics I might not otherwise be inspired to learn about. For example, I know little about Sudanese politics, but through the story of Emma, a woman I can sort of relate to, I now have a basic understanding of Sudanese history and the north-south conflict. I suspect there are others out there who feel the same way.