The Zanzibar Chest was absolutely fascinating. It’s terrific reading, so good it was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. It is far more than a mere memoir or travelogue. Hartley was born in Kenya and still resides there, so he can write about events on on the continent of Africa with a legitimacy an outsider could not. He actually blends three tales here: the history of his family and its generations of participation in colonial Britain; his own life from his idyllic childhood in Africa, schooling in England, and culminating with the gut-wrenching horrors of his days as a war correspondent covering Africa for Reuters news agency; plus his efforts to research the final days of Peter Davey, his father’s best friend, whose diaries Hartley’s father passed to his son.

As a journalist, he covered the world's hotspots such as Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Croatia during the 1990s, a decade marked by violence and genocide. He witnessed inhumanity on a grand scale, much as Roméo Dallaire (UN commander during the Rwandan Genocide) describes in his memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil. I wish I had read it before I completed my own novel about genocide; it would have been a valuable resource. Harley gives a truthful picture of journalism and news networks, including how much of what is reported is falsified or twisted to draw in readers. He also shows the heroism as well as the flaws and foibles of his colleagues and depicts their heavy use of alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, and other drugs such as heroin, codeine, and kat.
The reader will learn some things about journalism and the news networks, or perhaps have their worst suspicions confirmed: what is reported as fact is often untrue or twisted by the network in order to draw viewers or readers. He admits, though, that what he and his colleagues saw and begged to have publicized (such as the Rwandan Genocide) was largely glossed over. We saw this ourselves in American journalism in 1994 when Tanya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, and O.J. Simpson received more publicity that the happenings in Rwanda did. I admit to having to read this is small chunks—I could only take so much horror at a time—but the book was well worth surviving.

really strong stuff - authentic account

I like this book really love it.

A bit Meh! Interesting stories, but author appears a little too unlikeable for me to enjoy too much.

Compelling story, beautifully written

While the first 100 pages or so were hard to get through due to the boasting tone Hartley took as he listed off all of his adventurous British ancestors, this changed as he began writing about his own experiences as a reporter in Africa. His account of this time was amplified due to him being witness to (or involved in) every major conflict to grip Africa in the late 80s and 90s. Ethiopa, Rwanda, Somalia - they are all here and in a vivid detail I had not encountered before.

What makes Hartley's writing so compelling is the brutal honesty. He spares no-one, not even himself. He lays bare his own weaknesses, dalliances, and regrets. He also pulls no punches when it comes to those around him. Most novel for me was to hear him lay the blame for the conflicts he saw squarely at the feet of the participants. While he did call out the UN and some multinational forces for mismanagement, inefficiency, and unrealistic goals - he focused his blame for the root cause of the problems the UN was trying to fix on the Africans. Some of his descriptions of life in Somalia, and the mindset of a Somali tribal fighter, were truly mind-boggling. His account of the Rwandan genocide was harrowing, and will stay with me.

Given such powerful stories, the "other" narrative he weaves throughout the book - his attempt to piece together the life of his father's friend - pales in comparison. I'm sure it was an important journey for him personally, but it is difficult to connect with.

Overall a great read - after page 100 I couldn't put it down.

This is one of my favourite books of all time. It manages to nail both the fascination of exploring the different places in Africa and the Eye Opening Horror of some of the Events which happend there in the last 30 years. I really could not put this down even for a minute, even when reading about the attrocities of an african civil war.

This book was excruciatingly difficult to read and I thought I might never finish it but am glad that I did. When I purchased it I had no idea what I was actually getting into. War, genocide, and brutality are detailed with graphic description, but so are introspection, honesty, and insight. I am thankful that I did not turn away from learning of the horrors this world holds for many, and the beauty, love, and affection that can be discovered in the midst.

Truly 5 stars. Such a beautiful, interesting, absorbing book, hard to believe that it didn't win every possible medal/prize for Non-Fiction. I know why it didn't--because it unflinchingly tells the truth about the UN and USA, the UK and their actions in Africa.
I suspect many of the leaders of those entities would NOT want any of us to read this book. So--please READ THIS BOOK--if you have any interest in Africa WHATSOEVER.
The author was a foreign correspondent in the early 1990's in Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, the Balkans, and probably other countries that I can't recall. Hartley turned 30 in 1995. He was born in Kenya and raised in England and returned to Africa after Oxford, which makes his life fascinating just with those facts alone.
The book recounts his travels and experiences during the Ethiopian famine, the Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda and the conflict in Somalia. Hartley and his friend actually coined the term "Warlords" to describe the militia tribal leaders.
I loved that he writes clearly, factually, without anger, regarding the events that led to his severe PTSD.
In between Hartley's experiences, there is a separate story regarding his father's friend, Peter Davey and Davey's murder in 1947. Hartley wanted to tell this story because he inherited Davey's diaries, which his father stored for 50 years in "The Zanzibar Chest." However, I did not feel Davey's story was nearly as compelling as Hartley's, and it didn't really belong in this volume.
Hartley, despite being a professional newspaperman, had to work hard to put this book together. Parts of it aren't as smooth as he would have liked, no doubt.
Parts of this were slow-going for me, until I caught on. Caught on to what, you ask?
At around page 101, I started to highlight interesting sentences. Then, at about page 139, I started writing a letter "C" in the margin next to sentences/paragraphs which contained Contrast. I realized Hartley thinks in terms of Contrasts and expresses himself as such. Some of the Contrasts were true Irony, others were simply contrasts. For example: contrasts between poor/rich, what is/what should be, truth/fantasy, story/propaganda, fact/distortion, violent/sweet, love/hate, angry/welcoming, tall/short, beautiful/ugly, beautifully alive/horribly dead, beliefs/the actuality, war/peace, gorilla versus human behavior, shame/accomplishment, passion/calm.
Once I realized this, the book (especially the chapters recounting his own first-hand experiences) became AWESOME.

Some great quotes in this book:
"At least I get to do what they taught me in the foreign service and have drinks with a room full of mass murderers."
"Encouraging the militias to form a government was like appointing the Mafia to run Manhattan."
"But the challenge was to make audiences appreciate that naked, black, Muslim Africans were worth caring for."
"Mogadishu was so dangerous and out-of-this-world that Reid Miller, the veteran AP correspondent used to say, 'I wouldn't even send my first wife there.'"

And there are hundreds of other moving/funny/incredible/horrifying sentences in this book-the above are entirely random.

READ IT.

Brilliant

An absolutely riveting, sublime piece of literature, weaving several stories together, often seamlessly, conveying the real guts and glory of humanity in its most ghastly and beautiful moments simultaneously.

This is not well-written, the plot was thin and I almost stopped reading it. But I always finish a book I start. (It's an annoying quirk of mine.) I'm glad I did, because I got a view of the Rwandan genocide I did not have before. And I used to live in that area. It was as if someone I knew was there and writing to me about what he saw. The thing is, it takes a long time to get there. Hartely wanders around Africa for quite a while before he lands in Rwanda. Some of the parts about Somalia were worth reading, too.

I'd be lying if I said reading this book didn't stir up some misguided feelings of wistfulness. Misguided because while I've often fantasized about a career in wartime reporting—what I imagine in my flights of fancy tend to involve the wearing of a multi-pocketed flak jacket while simultaneously dodging heavy artillery and taking notes in a hail of gunfire—the reality is, I'm far too neurotic and high-strung to deal with the prospect of imminent death or disease in my immediate surroundings. The vicarious thrill I get from reading war correspondent memoirs will just have to do for now.

I was pleasantly surprised by how engaging and readable this book was, mostly because I expected it to be written in the dry, impersonal style that many journalists are encouraged to write in to avoid obfuscating the facts. Luckily, Aidan Hartley doesn't care much for the tenants of journalism, and he peppers his stories with an abundance of detail about places that most will never see but through the eyes of a correspondent: Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, etc...The grim realities of famine in which newspaper editors scrounge for footage of the most emaciated children are contrasted with the beauty of monumental desert sunsets and the preservation of culture many thousands of years old.

Though some reviews have lambasted Hartley for being a “whiny expat” I disagree. He acknowledges his family legacy of colonization in Africa and I get the impression that part of his MO in writing the book was to acknowledge and raise awareness of the upheaval that white rule caused on the continent for the majority of the developing world who only pay attention when something like the Rwandan genocide happens.

The book is fascinating, horrific, exciting, and deplorable all at once, and one that I won't soon forget.