 | What Is the What (Vintage) by Dave Eggers
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $3.00 also on my top all-time list; one of the best non-fiction works ever. This started off a lot of the others on my list.
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 | We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $1.00 an excellent primer on the Rwandan genocide
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 | Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza
Buy new: $10.17 / Used from: $6.17 a personal account of the Rwandan massacre. Horrifying and somehow inspiring. A good companion to Gourevitch's reporting.
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 | Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan
Buy used from: $4.45 stories told from the point of view of African children in different predicaments. Hands down, the saddest work of fiction I've ever read.
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 | Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
Buy new: $15.21 / Used from: $13.21 an inspiring, well-told tale of a Burundian man who fled his country during the genocide there. I am a fan of Kidder in general and was glad he focused his efforts here.
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 | The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier
Buy new: $10.85 / Used from: $9.50 Collier is incredible - a development economist who knows what works in Africa and when and why.
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 | The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey Sachs
Buy new: $11.05 / Used from: $4.00 a good pairing with Collier's book - more hopeful, more specific, though perhaps more naive
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 | A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
Buy new: $8.64 / Used from: $3.00 this one seems to have sold a lot, but it's also one of the few books I've given up on. I think it was because I tried to read it right after Eggers' book, to topic was similar, and it fell so flat by comparison
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 | A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipaul
Buy new: $10.20 / Used from: $0.01 very different from most of the other books on this list. A novel set in a time when Africa seemed on the cusp of fulfilling its great promise, and when people from other continent emigrated there to seek their fortune, and not just from natural resources. The writing alone makes this worth the read.
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 | Things Fall Apart: A Novel by Chinua Achebe
Buy new: $7.92 / Used from: $1.24 I read this about 10 years ago, so it's not really part of this phase. This timing may explain why, despite the Nobel and recognition as the classic African novel, it didn't stick with me as much as any of the others on the list. Maybe I should reread it now...
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 | Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Buy new: $4.99 / Used from: $0.99 I re-read this for the first time in ~20 years because its absence on this list was conspicuous. The racism is abhorrent. Granting him "mores of the time", etc., I was able to get past it in the second half and realize it's a great book once you think of it as not about Africa at all. The writing itself is especially humbling when you realize Conrad didn't even learn English until his twenties.
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 | King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild
Buy new: $10.80 / Used from: $3.00 next on the list
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Listmania!
