Van Reybrouck a panoramic history of a vast and complex nation accessible, intimate and particular., Van Reybrouck makes a good case for the importance of Congo to world history and its ongoing centrality in a time of resurgent economic colonialism, this time on the part of China.|9780062200112|, Van Reybrouck tells his story. presents a panoramic account of Congo's turbulent past., Van Reybrouck's carefully researched and elegantly written book takes in the reader with compelling portraits of ordinary people that enrich what would otherwise be a fairly conventional historical narrative., Congo is a remarkable piece of work. Van Reybrouck interweaves his own family's history with the voices of a diverse range of individuals-charismatic dictators, feuding warlords, child-soldiers, the elderly, female merchant smugglers, and many in the African diaspora of Europe and China-to offer a deeply humane approach to political history, focusing squarely on the Congolese perspective and returning a nation's history to its people.īalancing research with personal testimonies, Van Reybrouck.

Here are the people and events that have impinged the Congo's development-from the slave trade to the ivory and rubber booms from the arrival of Henry Morton Stanley to the tragic regime of King Leopold II from global indignation to Belgian colonialism from the struggle for independence to Mobutu's brutal ruâ‰¤ and from the world famous Rumble in the Jungle to the civil war over natural resources that began in 1996 and still rages today. Van Reybrouck takes us through several hundred years of history, bringing some of the most dramatic episodes in Congolese history. Epic in scope yet eminently readable, penetrating and deeply moving, David van Reybrouck's Congo: The Epic History of a People traces the fate of one of the world's most critical, failed nation-states, second only to war-torn Somalia: the Democratic Republic of Congo. more exciting than any novel' (NRC Handelsblad),David van Reybrouck's rich and gripping epic, in the tradition of Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, tells the extraordinary story of one of the world's most devastated countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Congo by David Van Reybrouck