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Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
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Review
An Economist and Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year"He is a cracking writer, with a wry sense of understatement... Mr. Stearns has spoken to everyone-villagers, child soldiers, Mobutu's commanders, Kabila's ministers, Rwandan intelligence officers. In these conversations he found gold, bringing clarity-and humanity-to a place that usually seems inexplicable and barbaric. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters is riveting and certain to become essential reading for anyone looking to understand Central Africa."―Douglas Rogers, The Wall Street Journal"The best account [of the conflict in the Congo] so far; more serious than several recent macho-war-correspondent travelogues, and more lucid and accessible than its nearest competitor. . . . [Stearns] has lived in the country, and has done a raft of interviews with people who witnessed what happened before he got there... his picture is clear, made painfully real by a series of close-up portraits." ―Adam Hochschild, The New York Times Book Review"Enter Jason Stearns. One of Congo's most intrepid observers, he describes the war from the point of view of its perpetrators. He has tracked down and interviewed a rogue's gallery of them. The resulting book, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, is a tour de force, though not for the squeamish." ―The Washington Post"[Stearns] is probably the most widely traveled and the most meticulous and empathetic observer of the war there. This is a serious book about the social and political forces behind one of the most violent clashes of modern times-as well as a damn good read."―The Economist"A serious, admirably balanced account of the crisis and the political and social forces behind it, providing vivid portraits of both victims and perpetrators and eyewitness accounts of the main events... perhaps the most accessible, meticulously researched and comprehensive overview of the Congo crisis yet." ―Financial Times"[A] tremendous book. This is a very complicated, largely unfamiliar subject that's basically off the radar of the American media and he's managed to produce a genuinely readable and engrossing account. To the extent that it's possible to breeze through a book about a years-long bloody civil war I breezed right through it." ―Matthew Yglesias, ThinkProgress.org"The subject he has tackled is vast and impossible to cover in one book. But for anyone interested in the Congo and the Great Lakes region this is a great read-one I highly recommend."―Stephanie Wolters, Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg)"Perhaps the best account of the most recent conflict in the Congo."―Foreign Policy"A brave and accessible take on the leviathan at the heart of so many of Africa's problems . . . Stearns's eye for detail, culled from countless interviews, brings this book alive . . . I once wrote that the Congo suffers from 'a lack of institutional memory,' meaning that its atrocities well so inexorably that nobody bothers to keep an account of them. Stearns's book goes a long way to putting that right."―The Telegraph
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About the Author
Jason Stearns is a CIC Senior Fellow and Director of the Congo Research Group. Jason has been working on conflict dynamics in Central Africa since 2001. He has worked for the International Crisis Group, the UN Group of Experts on the DR Congo, and the Rift Valley Institute.
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Product details
Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: PublicAffairs; Reprint edition (March 27, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1610391071
ISBN-13: 978-1610391078
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 1.1 x 8.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
139 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#59,379 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I am one of those guys who wants to know a little about a lot of different international conflicts since that was one of my focuses as a political science student so I picked up Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. I think Jason K. Stearns comes as close as anyone may come to explaining the complicated structure of alliances and factions that seem to move like tectonic plates and have led to three different stages of war over the last couple of decades.Stearns laments that the international community doesn’t understand the conflict or chooses not to understand the conflict. It is my view that people in general prefer the black and white, one side good, other side evil, and any conflict that can’t be hammered into that prism is problematic. So when you are talking a six sided conflict, you shouldn’t be surprised when people turn the channel so to speak. Still Stearns does a really impressive job of laying out why the conflicts have started and why they have proven so difficult to put out in a relatively brief 340 page format.
In the hundred years of bloodshed that was the 20th century, the Congo War is a tragedy that has mostly been ignored by the West, and forgotten by history. Something like five million people died, placing the Congo War as the the 6th largest mass killing in the 20th century, the deadliest event since the Second World War, and the 27th largest in recorded history, according to The Great Big Book of Horrible Things. And there is a reason for this, beyond Western dismissals of Africa in general. As Stearns puts it in his introduction, "How do you cover a war that involves at least twenty different rebel groups and the armies of nine countries, yet does not seem to have a clear cause or objective?"Stearns does his best, using his skills as an investigative journalist to move through the key players in a rolling series of conflicts that started with the Rwandan Genocide in 1994, and linger today, despite a peace conference in 2002. While no one can speak for all the dead, Stearns tries, letting the survivors of genocidal attacks, epidemic ridden refugee camps, death marches, mass rape, and induction into armies of child soldiers tell their stories in their own words. It is impossible not to be moved.On the broader political front, Stearns has a lot to say about the failures of institutions. The Congo was systematically hollowed out, first by the colonial slave trade, then the nightmare of King Leopold's Free State, and then by the decades long rule of Mobutu Sésé Seko, who turned divide and rule into an art, leaving a military that was incapable of conducting a coup against him, but also incapable of mounting any sort of defense against the innumerable rebel groups, foreign armies, and bandit gangs who rose up in the void. When the Rwandan government sought vengeance on Hutu génocidaires who had fled to the Congo with millions of refugee/hostages and were planning a return, the Congo was unable to resist. Rebel leader and new President Laurent Kabila had barely a year before the international coalition that installed him tried to oust him. This aggression, undoubtedly Tutsi lead, inspired retaliation against the Tutsi minority inside the Congo, and instigated a spiral of ethnic violence. It's impossible to blame people for turning to their primary loyalties, their family and ethnic group, and also impossible not to see the political exacerbation of ethnic tension as a major driver of violence. Whatever one's affiliation, it is too easy to see people with differently shaped noses as vermin to be exterminated.There's also plenty of military daring and horrific absurdity to go around. Rwandan military plans involved marching 1,000 miles from the border to Kinshasa, about the same distance as Moscow to Berlin, except this time it's through practically trackless jungle. Congolese soldiers deserted in droves, their armor-heavy columns cut to shreds by motivated guerrilla bands of child soldiers. Laurent Kabila's authoritarian regime imposed taxes which would come to 230% of profits, if they were ever payed. At one of the collapses of the government, the minister of finance announced "Gentlemen, I have taken the precaution of emptying the treasury. It is in bags in trucks outside. You each get $22,000. Do the best that you can."As I write this, President Joseph Kabila is planning to step down after elections in December 2018, after unconstitutionally extending his rule for two years, and the country may be slipping into war again. It's hard to fault the international community for not doing more, in a country with such terrible infrastructure, and without a clear moral narrative to support. There's always money to be made in turmoil, with the Congo's mineral wealth is available to the daring and unscrupulous. The people of the Congo deserve better. If not justice, they at least deserve a honor memorial for their dead.
A superb look at the tragedy that is DR Congo, through the eyes of a journalist who never afraid to go right to his sources. What is special about this book is that Stearns never lets you forget that he was covering the conflict and the aftermath as a journalist, it made you feel that you were going along with him interviewing victims and perpetrators of one of the greatest tragedies of all times. Stearns' angle for Dancing in the Glory of Monsters was not to point fingers at individuals (though in some cases it was truly unavoidable), but rather to showcase that the Congolese themselves were victims of colonial rule, Cold War gamesmanship, and neglect as a whole - and this he did brilliantly.I HIGHLY recommend this book to anyone who has an interest in modern history.
An important, highly readable account of the war raging in heart Africa over the past decade and a half. Nine nations border the Congo, and nearly all have at one time or the other been part of the violence that has consumed millions of lives and left those who survive searching for justice.Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns (@jasonkstearns) shed light on a subject which I knew little about, but even the small bit I thought I knew turned out to be incorrect. That we in the West do not understand how and why the conflict began is a bitter truth that bears examination.The conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo parallel the timeframe for much of the Great War of Africa, yet consider how much more media coverage those much smaller conflicts received in the West. The size of the Congo is roughly the same as all of Western Europe, yet the shameful truth is this: sub-Saharan Africa does not have the "strategic" value that would create enough interest in the West to engage or at least attempt to understand what happened.And the key word there is "attempt" as Stearns points out in an impassioned conclusion:"The Congo war had no one cause, no clear conceptual essence that can be easily distilled in a couple of paragraphs. Like an ancient Greek epic, it is a mess of different narrative strands -- some heroic, some venal, all combined in a narrative that is not straightforward but layered, shifting, and incomplete. It is not a war of great mechanical precision but of ragged human edges."Stearns points out early in Dancing in the Glory of Monsters the difficulty of unraveling the puzzle, but then he does an admirable job of doing just that by centering much of the narrative around the people involved. Heads of state, politicians, soldiers, refugees and villagers, Stearns interviews them and uses their stories to illustrate and illuminate what happened. It is a powerful way to approach this subject, and the writer does well to remain in the background and let those most affected talk.This is not a military history, although a few battles are discussed in overview as well as some massacres. The timeline skips around a little, and a map of the Congo and surrounding areas would have been very useful, but overall I found this book to be very enlightening. I often look for books on subjects I know little about and in this case I was rewarded greatly.
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