A review by elhiwe
Congo Stories: Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed by Fidel Bafilemba, John Prendergast

2.0

This book was hard to get through. It was a dense text without conveying much meat in the information. I found the writing/framing to be fairly immature. The first half of the book provided a decent overview of the history of conflict in DRC, but the second half was more of a propaganda piece. These two focuses didn't marry well in the text and it was insufficiently engaging to keep my attention the whole way through, even as someone who's worked in mining CSR. The narrative bounced incongruently with, for example stories of individuals in the area that were particularly uninteresting and poorly written. It seemed to be a shame piece that offered little in terms of actual solutions, and never recognized where there were mixed ethics on particular issues.

The photos were beautiful but otherwise I was unimpressed. This would have been better served if compressed into a single article.