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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
True Knowledge from the Ground, December 27, 2003
This review is from: Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Paperback)
This book details Kaplan's reporting from the African famine zones in the mid-1980s. While specific events are getting outdated, Kaplan does provide plenty of insight and realism about famine and power in Africa. This book mostly covers developments in Ethiopia, with important details on the separatist provinces of Tigre and Eritrea. Despite the book's subtitle, there is only some tangential coverage of Somalia as it related to events in Ethiopia at the time. Note that Somalia's well-publicized disasters hadn't happened yet. The same is true for coverage on Sudan, except for the latter parts of the book when obscure struggles in the inaccessible southern parts of the country caught Kaplan's attention. Also note that this new edition is supplemented with an enlightening update from the newly independent nation of Eritrea. What matters most in this book in Kaplan's use of realism when interpreting events in the Horn of Africa, as he has done in all his other books covering various hellholes around the developing world. While the famines in the mid-80s shocked the world, most Western people (and governments) thought that drought was the unavoidable culprit. However, Kaplan proves through ground-level experience that the famines were really the outcome of murderous political policies, as food (and the withholding of it) was used as a weapon by the ruling regimes to control dissident groups, while never-ending civil wars and power politics impeded distribution of aid money and supplies. Beware that this book nearly collapses in Part 4 as Kaplan analyzes the actions of the US and USSR when the Horn became embroiled in Cold War politics. Kaplan behaves like a Monday morning quarterback in criticizing the actions of both sides, with a rather bigheaded display of second-guessing toward the actions of international leaders, that only demonstrates Kaplan's unfair advantage of 20/20 hindsight. Fortunately, this problem (which also infects several of Kaplan's other books) does not sink this mostly powerful study of how ground-level knowledge from such Third World hot spots, and a truly realistic outlook, are the only ways to understand what's truly going on behind attention-grabbing stories of war and famine. [~doomsdayer520~]
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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Timely Insight Into Africa, August 3, 2004
This review is from: Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Paperback)
When I recently bought a book on Rwanda, it was from a book display with books about Africa, I also picked up Surrender Or Starve by Robert D. Kaplan, since I was a fan of his writing for Atlantic Monthly and his other books (The Coming Anarchy, The Ends of the Earth, and Balkan Ghosts). His journalism reads like a travelogue with interesting asides about the history and culture of the region supplemented by political analysis. I find his writing extremely informative. This book is no exception. He sets out to explain the reasons behind the famine that gripped sub Sahara Africa in the early-mid 80s. It is a reissue, but important if you consider what is being done the black African southerners in Sudan and the fact that Sudan and Yemen are home to some of the most dangerous terrorist in the world.
I find two observations quite profound. One, the famines that received some much notoriety in the 80s from Live Aid and other charitable organizations werenÕt caused by droughts, but were mainly due to ethnic civil wars and politics. Kaplan meticulously describes the factors that resulted in widespread famine. He points out that more often than not the real reasons weren7t printed due to lack of motivation and the inaccessibility of gathering facts from remote regions where this story was taking place.
The other revealing observation concerns the Africans themselves. It seems that 1000s of people dying of hunger caused little concern or outrage among the middle/class elite in the countries described. One aid worker described it to being like the Russian noble in pre-revolutionary Russia that walked the streets and only saw people like themselves. As usual Kaplan provides an interesting portrait of a little known region and give expert political analysis on the region. I think that Kaplan is one the best foreign correspondents around.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Kaplan argues the West is naive about African starvation, August 2, 2004
This review is from: Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (Paperback)
Kaplan takes Henry Kissinger's concept of "realpolitik" to another order of magnitude: Kaplan argues that the West has been incredibly naive in obsessing over starving Africans. The theme of his book is that the African elites themselves don't care about starvation among out-of-favor minority groups, and in many instances, such as Ethiopia and Sudan, governments intend starvation to happen. In such cases, foreign aid does not reach the intended recipients and does not win any friends for the West. The book's scope is limited to the countries named in the title. The title is a bit misleading, however, in suggesting that this is a travel narrative. Instead, it is a political analysis, although Kaplan does describe what it is like to visit impoverished, war-torn regions of Sudan and Ethiopia where few journalists dare to tread.
Eritrea is the one country that receives unabashed, effusive praise from Kaplan. I question whether any nation can be as noble and high-minded as Kaplan portrays the Eritreans, but if there is any truth in his descriptions, Eritrea provides an example of what Africans can accomplish despite war, colonialism, religious diversity, and starvation.
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