The memoir and the movie have only scratched the surface. Black Man's Grave tells what happened to place the boy-turned-soldier in jeopardy and why Sierra Leone's diamonds acquired their bloody tinge. Meet the greedy politicians who hijacked a fledgling democracy, the rebels who brought them down, and the villagers who struggled to survive the country's chaotic descent. The cast includes Sierra Leone's "big man," Siaka Stevens; RUF leader Foday Sankoh, whose grandfatherly demeanor belied the viciousness with which he sought to impose his "revolution"; and one who aspired to the big man role, Charles Taylor from next-door Liberia. Taylor's support for Sierra Leone's rebel war expanded from initial hostility toward Stevens's handpicked successor into a commercial venture that supplied arms in exchange for diamonds. In an offshoot of that pernicious trade, links between Sierra Leone's diamonds and al Qaeda have been traced. The revelations of Black Man's Grave help us understand the frustrations that simmer throughout much of the third world and threaten a peaceful future.
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These authors draw upon a rich vein of personal experience...[in] Sierra Leone to depict that country's brutal civil war....Dozens of letters from local leaders add to the vivid reality of this book....Clearly and concisely written...with the addition of interesting personal perspectives. Summing Up: Recommended. --Choice magazine, September 2007
What is new in this book--and what makes it enormously readable and of enduring interest--are the letters from Sierra Leonean friends of the two American authors, formerly Peace Corps volunteers.... Gary Stewart and John Amman, who know the country well, are clearly very nostalgic about it, providing an eloquent context for the letters, and making this book a valuable historical document.... The letters are a testament to the tragedies as well as the pathos of a war driven by forces barely understood by the majority of Sierra Leone's people, but which changed their lives and their country profoundly. --Other Facets, Partnership Africa Canada
The book tells a gripping tale....It is so well structured and carefully written that it makes almost lucid what in certain respects must always remain utterly incomprehensible. The analysis begins with historical context centered on the capital city, Freetown, from which at a steady pace it broadens in scope and complexity. The authors wisely refrain from blatant editorializing as they delineate the sequence of events, allowing the awful facts to speak for themselves, which they do, loudly and clearly. Thus Stewart and Amman create the necessary big picture while extracts of correspondence from their former neighbors provide helpful close-ups along the way. --Ted Boothroyd, The Beat
What is new in this book--and what makes it enormously readable and of enduring interest--are the letters from Sierra Leonean friends of the two American authors, formerly Peace Corps volunteers.... Gary Stewart and John Amman, who know the country well, are clearly very nostalgic about it, providing an eloquent context for the letters, and making this book a valuable historical document.... The letters are a testament to the tragedies as well as the pathos of a war driven by forces barely understood by the majority of Sierra Leone's people, but which changed their lives and their country profoundly. --Other Facets, Partnership Africa Canada
The book tells a gripping tale....It is so well structured and carefully written that it makes almost lucid what in certain respects must always remain utterly incomprehensible. The analysis begins with historical context centered on the capital city, Freetown, from which at a steady pace it broadens in scope and complexity. The authors wisely refrain from blatant editorializing as they delineate the sequence of events, allowing the awful facts to speak for themselves, which they do, loudly and clearly. Thus Stewart and Amman create the necessary big picture while extracts of correspondence from their former neighbors provide helpful close-ups along the way. --Ted Boothroyd, The Beat
About the Author
Gary Stewart is the author of Breakout: Profiles in African Rhythm (U. Chicago), Rumba on the River (Verso), and dozens of articles and reviews. John Amman is a co-editor of Surviving the New Economy (Paradigm) and a business representative for International Cinematographers IATSE Local 600 in New York.
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More About the Author
Gary Stewart began writing as a freelancer for London-based West Africa magazine and went on to contribute to, among others, Option, Folk Roots, The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, and, most frequently, The Beat. His interest in things African stems from service in the Peace Corps in West Africa, an experience that led to his books and articles on African music and to the chronicle of Sierra Leone's horrific civil war, Black Man's Grave. In addition to his books and magazine pieces, he contributed entries to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and has written liner notes for a number of records and CDs, including the vinyl version of S.E. Rogie's Palm Wine Guitar Music; Putumayo's The Best of World Music, African; Rumba 'Round Africa by Ry-Co Jazz; and, The World is Shaking and Africa Boogaloo from the London label Honest Jons. Visit Stewart's new web site for the book Rumba on the River at http://rumbaontheriver.com/.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Eyewitness reportage from an unusual perspective,
By
This review is from: Black Man's Grave: Letters From Sierra Leone (Paperback)
The authors are well qualified to write on the subject of Sierra Leone, having lived in a village there as Peace Corps volunteers. They report on what the "fly-in-photograph-an-amputee-fly-out" press corps has called a "civil war," but what Sierra Leoneans more accurately call the Rebellion. Their primary sources are letters from friends, people who lived through the violence and who stayed in contact throughout the whole terrible time. The people writing the letters create a vivid picture of the physical and economic devastation they endured, and the authors place these pictures in a larger context that includes what was going on in Liberia at the time. I commend them for resisting the urge to editorialize, and for letting the facts speak for themselves.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Voices that should be heard,
By
This review is from: Black Man's Grave: Letters From Sierra Leone (Paperback)
I finished reading Black Man's Grave recently and found it very interesting; I read it in two days, and I am notorious for prolonging or abandoning books that I don't like, to give you some idea of context here. It was a story I really had very little idea of. When civil war afflicts a country like Sierra Leone, it only tends to get into the American media every few years when there is major combat in a major city. I had never seen the issues and the personalities laid out with such clarity, let alone guessed the impact on people trying to lead ordinary lives (economic, social, family) in the community. I would imagine, not unruefully, that the reason the book did not find a major publisher is that it's in the voices of the authors' friends in Fadugu, Sierra Leone. Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You, which is also a very good book, has an edge in terms of marketability in that it is a "voice-driven" book by a Western reporter. Gourevitch relays what others tell him, just as Stewart & Amman do (he was not an eyewitness to the Rwandan genocide), but he does it as a first-person character; it's part travel book, odd as that seems. By giving people from Sierra Leone such a major voice in Black Man's Grave, having them truly speak for themselves, Stewart & Amman probably lost a potential American audience - or to be accurate, went beyond publishers' willingness to find out whether such an audience exists. I think that publishers sell their public short sometimes.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Evocatively written, carefully researched,
By Fearless Reviews "D. Patrick Miller, Editor" (Berkeley, CA United States) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE)
This review is from: Black Man's Grave: Letters From Sierra Leone (Paperback)
According to urban gang expert David Kennedy it takes relatively few thugs to begin utterly terrorizing a neighborhood -- or, as Gary Stewart, John Amman, and their informants in Sierra Leone can testify, an entire country. Black Man's Grave is contemporary African history as viewed by a journalist and an academic, professionals whose assessments are deepened by a patina of nostalgia. Both Stewart and Amman were Peace Corps volunteers in Sierra Leone, and they mourn the imperfect paradise they knew from their work in the same northern village, Fadugu (which means in Mandingo, "a town where one is well fed"), where three ethnic groups converged more than a century ago and managed to co-exist and thrive. Rounding out their insights are letters from old Fadugu friends: teachers, agricultural technicians, and other citizens who somehow, but not always, survived Sierra Leone's genocidal 1992-2002 civil war. Evocatively written and carefully researched, Black Man's Grave can't really be done justice in a short review. Stewart and Ammans's combination of history and reportage, and the letters' poignantly matter-of-fact close-ups, take the reader from Sierra Leone's days as a refuge for former slaves through the nineteenth century, when regional chiefs cannily manipulated their British masters, into the last century of cultural progress and relative affluence. Sierra Leone was eventually devastated by greed, with the struggle to control its diamond mines resulting in mass killings and punitive mutilations, sexual violence, and the enslavement of child soldiers, a nightmare orchestrated by the country's rival leaders and neighboring Liberia's president Charles Taylor. A number of publishers inexplicably turned down Black Man's Grave, although declaring it "remarkable" (Thomas Dunne Books), "quite compelling" (Beacon Press), and "the kind of book [we'd] love to publish here" (Basic Books). The Special Court for Sierra Leone, set up jointly by the government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations, is now underway in The Hague, mandated to try Charles Taylor and other leaders for war crimes committed in Sierra Leone since November 30, 1996. As of this writing, Mr. Taylor's case is in the defense phase, so Black Man's Grave is a particularly timely read. Fifty percent of its profits will go to projects benefiting the people of Fadugu. -- Melanie Lawrence for the FEARLESS REVIEWS
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