Love, Africa

April 24, 2017
A journalist juggles a relationship and overseas adventure in this hectic memoir. Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Gettleman recounts his dangerous reporting from global hot spots: interviewing Taliban POWs in Afghanistan; surveying firefights and suicide-bomb carnage in Iraq; and exploring famines, insurgencies, tribal massacres, and a pirate café in East Africa, where he is the Times bureau chief. Sharing many of his exploits is his wife and sometime colleague Courtenay; their star-crossed relationship, including bouts of infidelity, complicates his wanderlust. Gettleman’s narrative has the virtues and limitations of journalism; it’s colorful, evocative and immediate, but also distracted and somewhat shapeless. Many episodes are riveting: Gettleman was abducted by Iraqi insurgents (he escaped by pretending to be Greek instead of American), and he and Courtenay accompanied Ogaden rebels on a gruelling desert trek only to be thrown in prison by Ethiopian soldiers. Unfortunately, the storm-tossed-romance theme feels inflated; it bogs down in bickering between Gettleman and Courtenay, and sometimes entices the author into purplish prose (one illicit tryst in Baghdad “ a wet spot on the sheets as blood settled into pools out on the streets”). Africa definitely feels like the more compelling of Gettleman’s passions, rendered here in engrossing reportage.

April 1, 2017
A passionate debut memoir bears witness to political turmoil.For Pulitzer Prize winner Gettleman, East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, his response to Africa was nothing less than love at first sight. Yearning to return after a summer trip, in 1992, he left Cornell University, where he was an undergraduate, for "a whole glorious year" of exploring. Naive, enthusiastic, fearless, and woefully unprepared, he counted among his adventures nearly falling off Mount Kilimanjaro, being arrested for climbing without a permit, getting mugged, and twice losing his passport. Nevertheless, he felt sure that East Africa would become part of his life forever. The path to realizing that dream involved an internship in Ethiopia, just emerging from 30 years of civil war. The country was broken: dead animals rotted in the streets, and beggars roamed everywhere. Later, as a journalist, the author documented the atrocities of other wars: in Iraq, where the American invasion had unleashed "horrific and random and multivectored" violence; in Somalia, where America's support of Ethiopia's invasion, overthrowing "a popular, grassroots, and surprisingly effective Islamist administration," led to chaos, "high-seas piracy," terrorism, and ultimately devastating famine. Reporting from a region of 3.3 million square miles, 400 million people, and a dozen "fragile and poorly governed" countries--including the hot spots of Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Kenya, and Burundi--Gettleman focused on human rights abuses and terror resulting from conflicts among warlords, religious and ethnic factions, Western-backed rebels, and opportunistic militias "very good at murder on a shoestring." Caught in those conflicts, he was kidnapped, imprisoned, and beaten. Gettleman is forthright about condemning American policies and U.N. failures, and he underscores his struggles to find language to convey the reality he witnessed. He haggled with his editors, for example, "over hacked versus killed, tribe versus ethnic group," each of which "expressed value judgments or paternalism." Besides his career, the author chronicles his long, sometimes-fraught relationship with the woman he finally married and with whom he settled in Kenya. A stark, eye-opening, and sometimes-horrifying portrait by a reporter enthralled by the "power and magic" of Africa.

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May 1, 2017

Gettleman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, chronicles his career, along with the hardships that accompany his unique and often perilous profession. The author falls in love with Africa during a college trip and is determined to return, but this infatuation causes discord with his girlfriend Courtenay. The book plods at the beginning but gains momentum when Gettleman takes a job at a Florida newspaper. Inspired by journalist Rick Bragg, he resolves to root out intriguing stories. This persistence lands him overseas post-9/11, reporting from the Middle East and Africa. Gettleman demonstrates the toll that itinerant journalism takes on a relationship and how it contributes to a perpetual state of disquietude. He also reveals the hubris and naivete that can be associated with the quest for the next groundbreaking story. Complex political issues pertaining to Africa lack sufficient context and depth, and the love story component is not compelling enough to make up for this. VERDICT Despite its flaws, this book is a vivid and valuable contribution to the literature of war correspondents. Readers should also seek out the work of Philip Gourevitch, Janine di Giovanni, and Megan K. Stack for more rigorous narratives.--Barrie Olmstead, Sacramento P.L.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2017
Gettleman recounts his two decades in journalism in this exciting, harrowing memoir that aptly displays why he's a Pulitzer Prize winner and a New York Times bureau chief. In college at Cornell in the 1990s, Gettleman discovered his two true loves: East Africa and a beautiful, bright fellow student named Courtenay. These two passions end up being at war with each other: the more Gettleman seeks out a career that takes him to the region he feels at home in (first in a brief stint as an aid worker, and then as a correspondent), it puts both geographical and emotional distance between him and Courtenay, who is pursuing her own dream of being a public defender. But even as Gettleman's job takes him to war-torn countries like Afghanistan and Iraq (and into other women's beds), he can't quite let go of the hope of a future with Courtenay. Whether he's recounting a terrifying encounter with a child killer or running afoul of the Ethiopian government, there's a thrilling immediacy and attention to detail in Gettleman's writing that puts the reader right beside him. Combining that with his gimlet-eyed observations on East Africa and his love for the region, especially Kenya, Gettleman's memoir is an absolute must-read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)