A great book! Remarkable!

This book isn't for people who want a neat, linear story. Stick with it and you'll be richly, painfully rewarded. Having worked in global health and swooped in and out of Africa for 2 years, I recognized many characters, including myself, but felt the immense guilt for that lifestyle. I can't help but wonder how this tale was even published, but its brutal honesty makes it essential reading for anyone seeking that sense of purpose.

I picked this up without knowing anything about the book apart from the positive blurb. The first few chapters were a bit of a chore but when Aidan moved onto his own war reported recollections the book became a lot more interesting. While we're all aware of Somalia, Rwanda and other African conflicts I found Aidan's commentary from inside the war zone rather compelling and enlightening. Sure in a sense he was always floating above the chaos, rather than being a participant, but that remove does allow him to describe the madness somewhat dispassionately. Worth a read if you have an interest in Africa and war reportage in general.

I don't think I can ever forget this book. At first, in the beginning of the book, I was mistaken to think he was glorifying colonialism, but with time as I read on, I began to love what this book was about. Everything was so amazingly narrated-from his family's memoirs, Davey's life and his own life as a war correspondent.
Aidan Hartley is an excellent writer and I am glad to have come across this book. For one thing, many of the events during his war correspondence days, happened when I was too young to remember(I am Kenyan). But his book has done well to clarify them for me because they had been misrepresented when told to me by others. I am glad to have read a first hand account from Hartley.
To think that I once did want to be a war correspondent, even had a stint at CNN Nairobi as an intern. Boy I'm I glad my interests changed. I wouldn't want that life. This book is a MUST READ.

Not too much about Zanzibar but a great read about Africa.
On one level the book is about the author. How he is/was as a journalist a violence junkie. and the writing is a purging of his demons.
Prompted by discovering the chest - see title - and the writings of a friend of his father. and too about his father and family and his relation to them. He a brit born in Africa with family roots in Empire. this percolates throughout the story.
Mogadishu, Serbia, Ethiopia, Rwanda and so forth keep the story going. Have a strong stomach and hopefully little proclivity for nightmares if you choose to read this book.
A top of the line well written read.

Found this book in a charity shop, and had absolutely no idea what to expect when I started it,

This book, and the author grew on me as I read. At first I found the book pretty boring, and the author came across as somewhat arrogant.

Bu as the 2 stories (one of Davey, and the other of Aidan’s life) continued, I found real interest in both of these. And as a British person who both converted to Islam, and married an girl, it was very interesting to read about Davey, who was in a similar place all those years ago.

Overall a very interesting book.

This is a compelling story - litany - history of West Africa and its legacy of colonialism by a journalist of a British colonial officer, who loved Africa and took on many roles throughout his life there. After his death, his son, Aiden, finds a chest containing many documents of his father’s life and friendships. He weaves these into a history, integrating his own experiences growing up and working as a frontline journalist witnessing the sequence of terrible wars and famines, that resulted from the disintegration of traditional cultures as Western occupiers tried to impose their political structures, supported changing factions and ultimately abandoned West Africa to chaos in the 1990s.
The eyewitness accounts reported are utterly awful in their detail and intimacy by a writer who spares no detail in both the events he saw and his own (and other journalists) lifestyle of personal irreverence in always seeking to be closest to the “story”.

Fascinating insight into the horrors of Somalia and Rwanda in the 1990s - and yet I found the author quite unbearably smug and unlikeable. Perhaps that is the point - he admits to suffering from post traumatic stress in later years, and the book is perhaps cathartic for him, but I never really warmed to him throughout. However - read this book for the chaos of late 20th century Africa, and the intertwined tale of early 20th century African colonialism that he weaves into it.

Profound and graphic, brilliant story told well, majestic reportage. Deeply thought provoking and impactful

I really loved this.

Aidan undoubtedly encapsulates why people can fall madly in love with East Africa, its landscape, its people, its stories, its diminishing but strong feeling of being a final frontier.

I understand why this can be seen to romanticise huge swathes of the African experience, even glamorising the more horrible realities, but we who call East Africa home can't help but feel homesick when reading it.

Easily one of the most interesting and exciting books I have ever read. If you enjoy adventure and travel then pick this up. Aidan Hartley gives an amazing, yet sad, recount of his experience in East Africa as a Reuter's journalist during the 1990s. His job and love for breaking news take him to Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia and the Congo where he witnesses some of the world's worst atrocities. Hartley not only shares his own personal adventures, but he traces his family history in the region as well. Hartley pays particular attention to his father's best friend, Peter Davey, and his life in southern Arabia. Very balanced accounts and hard to put down even when you yourself are driving across some of the bumpiest roads in Africa. It's that good.

In many ways, this is a 5-star book. Horrifying, inspiring, bloody, real. Once I got sucked in, I wanted to read this book every. single. minute. and at the same time toss aside my peaceful, happy life and do what I already knew that I wanted to do. For me, reading this book was both utterly absorbing and incredibly painful: how could I bear to sit and read when there is SO MUCH going on out there? (Out there, you know, the greater world, adventure, war, sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll: that familiar joint pull to your chest and gut that good movies and books do so well)

Hartley charts his family history as intertwined with the rise and fall of the old British empire. Throughout, he mixes in his own story: born in Kenya, educated in England (yawn), and finally a war correspondent for Reuters in Africa through the 1990s. You know what that means. (If you don't, here's a start: Famine in Ethiopia. State collapse in Somalia. Genocide in Rwanda. And you know what, it's not Africa, but what the heck, let's through a little bit of Serbia during the Balkan Wars in there too.)

He sees, and does, it all. And writes honestly about it. One of the strengths of this book, aside from engrossing storytelling (Which. Is. Amazing.), is Hartley's brutal honesty when exposing the idiocy of the current international system - news companies, aid agencies, religious organizations, the military (being a Brit, he is naturally hard on the American military -- which is probably 100% deserved as you will see), even the much-revered UN and African Union (formerly the OAU). Oddly enough, he didn't seem quite as realistically critical of the British Empire -- those criticisms seemed much more philosophical to me. But now I'm rambling.

Hartley's good writing is 5-stars all around, up and down. I found the book a bit flawed -- for me, the side story of a family friend in Yemen lacked meaning, his own sort of bragging through the first few chapters, and his family history almost meant I didn't make it to the meat of the book: Hartley's adult life. I wanted to tear through sections in haste so I could get back to what I liked. I must admit, however, that the book is almost even more lovable because of this. It becomes more real.