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A review by buermann
History of Africa by Kevin Shillington
4.0
As a concise survey of the broad sweep of history on Earth's second largest continent and the birthplace of humanity that has to cover everything from Homo heidelbergensis to the Arab spring I don't know if you could ask for much more. I appreciate how Shillington has continued to update the text from the literature and annotated where he's had to revise it for a sense of how the historiography has changed since the first edition in 1989.
There were times when I felt it could have benefited from more maps showing who was neighboring whom at given times, as it's pretty easy to lose that comparative context as sections bound across vast expanses of time and then back up as they switch regional focus. The color schemes of the maps were also a little confusing, with topographical features in some being demarcated in the same (frequently hard to distinguish, due to a strangely limited palette) shades as political and cultural ones.
Most of all I'm deeply disappointed at the link rot in an edition that was just published last year, as all the external links to the publisher website for "further discussions" go to some new publishing conglomerate's home page. It feels unfair to dock a star for a business decision, but all Bloomsbury has done is subtract value from its acquisition.
There were times when I felt it could have benefited from more maps showing who was neighboring whom at given times, as it's pretty easy to lose that comparative context as sections bound across vast expanses of time and then back up as they switch regional focus. The color schemes of the maps were also a little confusing, with topographical features in some being demarcated in the same (frequently hard to distinguish, due to a strangely limited palette) shades as political and cultural ones.
Most of all I'm deeply disappointed at the link rot in an edition that was just published last year, as all the external links to the publisher website for "further discussions" go to some new publishing conglomerate's home page. It feels unfair to dock a star for a business decision, but all Bloomsbury has done is subtract value from its acquisition.