Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

In the face of pandemic restrictions, Hern (political science, Syracuse Univ.) revamped her research plans to produce a masterful study of policy successes in Africa across five diverse issue sets: economic development, governance, gender equality, public health, and climate resilience. Applying theories and methods of comparative politics--both most-different and most-similar case study analyses--to countries often overlooked, she explains the relative successes and failures in each policy domain by testing relevant hypotheses. Each substantive chapter follows the same structured approach: examining two cases of relative success and two poor performers to determine which theories provide plausible explanations for their varied outcomes. Hern carefully lays out her research scheme; provides short, straightforward statements of each relevant theory and specific hypotheses to test; and displays an impressive facility for making it eminently understandable. This book is much more than a specialized monograph--it is a model for the application of the comparative method that could well serve as a text in courses on social science methodology. Excellent for college and university libraries and collections supporting African studies and the substantive fields of interest explored herein.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

In 1968, American civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, who had helped push the fight for Black equality in a more radical direction and was self-exiled in West Africa, married South African musician Miriam Makeba, who had been exiled from South Africa for her anti-apartheid politics. Their transnational pairing seemed like the logical apogee of global Pan-African politics: Black Power intersecting with the South African struggle against apartheid to embody global anti-racist movements. For myriad reasons the marriage was a struggle. Carmichael, who soon changed his name to Kwame Ture, increasingly alienated many inside and outside the movement, and Makeba ultimately found herself exiled from both the United States and her native land.

This is a book worth reading. Falola (Univ. of Texas, Austin) is a brilliant African-centered scholar who has many decades of insight into Africa and the African diaspora. Here, he focuses on the depth and breadth of memoirs as they relate to Africans in the diaspora writing about their memories of the African continent. Yet, more than this, the volume comprises the heartfelt stories of how African immigrants interpret the historical terrain from the era of the transatlantic enslavement experience (euphemistically known as the "trade") up to the present experiences of Africans. Falola rightly explicates the complexities concerning the longevity of African migration--from involuntary to voluntary. Memoirs reveal much about the human condition: vicissitudes in how Africans survived while maintaining their humanity. This combination of African memoir and intellectual history makes the book compelling--what could be deemed historical "life lessons" in African diaspora thoughts and experiences. The text remains connected always to an African continent that is both mythical and inspiring because of the numerous interpersonal stories conveyed. The supposedly objective scientific observer may find bias in the ideas and thoughts contained in memoirs, yet they are indispensable in comprehending humanity.Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers.

American Christians and charitable organizations are prone to view the Anglican Church in Rwanda idealistically, as a global model that is spiritually vibrant, theologically conservative, and socially active in promoting reconciliation after the 1994 genocide. Cantrell (Longwood Univ.) challenges that assessment. Arguing that an idealized vision of Rwanda is both mistaken and dangerous, Cantrell recounts a far different and more accurate history of the Province de l'Eglise Anglicane au Rwanda (PEAR) since its earliest days to the present, demonstrating that the Anglican Church has often feigned neutrality while almost always siding with those in power. This dynamic remains in place today as PEAR lends its strong support to the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) of President Paul Kagame, despite the government's anti-democratic and anti-Hutu behavior. Rather than creating a better Rwanda for everyone, the PEAR's policies and practices are raising, rather than lowering, social tensions in the nation in ways that heighten the potential for another cataclysmic explosion of violence. This book is required reading for anyone interested in Rwanda or in church-state relations in Africa more broadly.Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty; professionals.