Customer Reviews

Blood Diamonds: Tracing the Deadly Path of the World's Most Precious Stones

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Campbell writes compelling narrative with a fascinating array of characters - corrupt dictators, warlords, mercenaries, peacekeepers, child soldiers, missionaries, shady Middle Eastern merchants, diamond buyers, jewelers, diplomats, et al. - weaving in the tragedy that the pursuit of instant riches in the alluvial diamond fields of West Africa has wrought. The result is a modern morality tale about the scarce resources, globalization, and violence.

The book, however, is flawed by its author's failure to properly situate his narrative within the historical and political context of subregional conflict involving Liberia and Sierra Leone. The reader would thus do well to supplement this volume with a good political narrative like Pham's LIBERIA: PORTRAIT OF A FAILED STATE (Reed Press) or Ellis's MASK OF ANARCHY (New York University Press) in order to get a complete picture.

Mr. Campbell (no relation) has an engaging style and has written an informative, though skewed, account of the forces at play in the Sierra Leone tragedy. He skillfully describes how the greed for diamond sale revenue enabled this country to descend into chaos and unspeakable horror. However, he attempts to make this a Western guilt trip by emphasizing how willing market players are to look the other way, thus absolving themselves of any culpability for the bloodbath. Campbell builds on a thin reed indeed, and fails to make analogies with other resources from other strife ridden African countries, such as Angola and its oil, that would more accurately demonstrate how free markets work in an amoral, rather than immoral, environment. I don't see Campbell advocating boycotting Angolan oil because of the atrocities being committed in that conflict. Nor should he, because those transactions occur outside the frame work of a nation's internal affairs, no matter how unjust or cruel those may be. The fact is, African countries have been pursuing the path of self destruction for 5 decades now with no other incentive than for one ethnic or ideological group attempting to acquire wealth and power at the expense of the nation. Attempts to lay this at the West's feet are misguided, disingenuous and unhelpful on many levels, but especially for the average African themselves. While I recommend Campbell's readable volume for its conciseness and wit, please do not limit yourself in seeing other dimensions to this, especially the corruption of ECOWAS and its military mission as well as the ethnic jealousy involved between natives and the economically dominant Lebanese.

I lived in Sierra Leone for quite a number of years and hence had the opportunity to experience what it was like to live sorrounded by poverty and diamonds (the Kono area). Unfortunately for me and my family, security reasons forced us to leave the country in the nineties.
Nowadays I live in Madrid, Spain. I'm a doctoral student and my research area is the diamond industry of Sierra Leone and its implications on the underdevelopment of Sierra Leone.
Mr. campbell's book has been very valuable to me because of the information it contains (for my disertation) and because it has sadly/happily brought me back to the country that I love most in the world.
Thank you Mr Campbell!
I strongly recommend the reading of this book.

I have always questioned the materialism of friends and family after years and years of seeing DeBeers on Tv, magazines, and newspapers senselessly pounding their marketing into my head. I've never been one to go along with the crowd, and I've met some Sierra Leonians and heard their stories of how they'd escaped. I quote this book whenever someone asks me about the jewelry I wear--the ever-present, "Oh, BUT YOU don't have any diamonds." I refuse to give up my political beliefs (enormously illustrated in this book, take a hint Family and Friends!) in order to wear a shiny piece of carbon. A diamond is forever? So is death, mutilation, bloodshed, and amputation. Mr. Campbell, you've done the entire Western world a great service by exposing all in this book. This is a pulverizing read, impossible to put down. You will never look at the words "engagement ring" and feel the same ever after reading this book.

Do we need a PR firm to boost the value of human life over a diamond? BLOOD DIAMONDS is an amazing book, filled with detail and stark commentary but , more than that, presenting a story of contemporary times in a small African country that most of us didn't know.

I thought back to what was happening in my life in 1999 and 2000. I knew a home health aide from Sierra Leone who told me her country was in a civil war, that her relatives could not come or go and that she sent them whatever she could. Blood Diamonds' author Greg Campbell fills in the awful details of her story.

We are working on becoming the small world and community some would like to be. Could we contribute by shutting down the Sierra Leone mines, buying their mangoes instead and letting the people there really go to the beach in a place called FREETOWN?

What a well-written story; it should touch your heart and soul.

This is a thoroughly engrossing portrait of the chaos that devastated Sierra Leone throughout the 90's. Campbell weaves the many disparate strands that coalesced to cause this tragedy together into a compelling narrative that is far more readable than anything else I've come across on the topic. The work ultimately has little new to say about solutions to such situations, mostly because it reveals the full complexity behind the conflict and the lack of any clear or easy answer. I was pleased to see in the film Blood Diamond that many of the evocative details from this book had been preserved, making it a powerful, and hopefully very important, movie.

1. This is a tough book to review.

2. On the one hand, it's fairly well written. The author presents information about the history of Sierra Leone and the past / present data in re: diamond industry. Furthermore, he graphically portrays the numerous horrors of the war there and the resultant utter human misery.

3. The problem is that (as I see it), the author is another among a seemingly long line of western authors who seem to suffer from some liberal guilt about western colonialism and thus blames most of the various ills in Africa to those things that are associated with the Europe /America, including... those buy / sell diamonds. But along with all naive people, the author always looks to the west in fixing all of Africa's problems. If the above statement seems to be illogical, it's largely because the book is in many ways, illogical and based on faulty underlying premises.

4. If one can get beyond the above, then the book is educational for the pure data content... although wading through the pages will get a bit frustrating at times (obviously depending on one's point of view).

This book was not at all what I had expected, in that it features a lot of superfluous personal touch that, in a story that isn't Campbell's, just doesn't belong. I wish that it had contained more statistics and factual research than just tales of his visits to Sierra Leone, with less-than-necessary intervals of fact. However, it was still an interesting read, and I definitely recommend it to someone who's seeking a general outline of the history of blood diamonds.

The best parts of this book deal with the disjoint between the popular perception of diamonds as the ultimate symbol of love and romance, and the utter brutality that attends their production and distribution. It is an illusion that has been covered much more thoroughly and much better by Janine Roberts in "Glitter & Greed - The Secrete World of the Diamond Cartel." So I was not really looking for Campbell to give me futher exposition on the same matter. My impression, perhaps erroneous, was that Greg Campbell was drawn to Sierra Leone by the horrors of a lingering civil war. Having lived in Sierra Leone, I hoped that he as an outside observer, would at least suggest probable causes for the failure of the Sierra Leone state in particular, and of African nation states in general.

Boy, was I disappointed! Campbell regurgitates all the usual popular stereotypes, all of which are way of the mark in my opinion: Corruption; only a country in name, and so forth. Corruption is of course endemic in Sierra Leone. But after a few years in the country, one gradually realizes that corruption and other popular bogeymen are in fact consequences and not causes, of more fundamental dysfunctions. Campbell documents many of the savage MO of the RUF rebels, which is useful. But if you are an Africanist and a Sierra Leonephile as I am, chances are that you have followed the blow by blow march of despicable terror by a brutal band without a discernable agenda. In which case Campbell's narrative would not add much to what you already know.

I think it is very important that expatriate experts look beyond popular stereotype and contribute to an understanding of why Africa is so unstable and also to how the instability can be cured. How important is the legacy of highly centralized colonial governance models without checks and balances? Post independent African governments have adopted these same centralized structures. The result is that there is nothing to stop the free fall inspired by petty dictators in such a system. Blood Diamonds will entertain many. Unfortunately is missed an opportunity to contribute to a real understanding of the problems and to lasting solutions.

Mr Campbell's book is a compelling account of his investigation into the brutal decade-long conflict that plagued Sierra Leone from the 90's to the early 2000's. It is a very helpful book if you want to understand the local, regional and international ramifications of this purely economic war; a war fought over control of the country's diamond resources.
His tracing of the smuggling of these diamonds into the hands of international terrorist networks is very eye-opening and the most fascinating part of this book to me.
This book is an easy, quick read as the author makes this difficult subject easy to understand. You could perhaps criticize this for not being the most academic-structured work instead having a more sensational type literature style. But he is a journalist after all.

The only quibble I have with this book and for which I deducted one star is he fell into the same trap which a lot of non-Africans do and this is his generalization of Sierra Leone as Africa. He must realize his experience of Sierra Leone is unique to Sierra Leone and not typical of the second largest, most ethnically and racially diverse continent in the world. His references to an 'African sun' (hello, the entire solar system only has one sun. Africa does not get its special sun), 'African market', 'African city' were very annoying. There are over 60 different countries on the continent. Making large sweeping generalizations based on a tiny country the size of North Carolina is for lack of a better word; ignorant.