Reviews for African History+culture

The average rating for African History+culture based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-04-06 00:00:00 Chris Ford THE PLEASURE OF OK BOOKS Sometimes the book you have, the book that's not Definitive, or The Best on the subject, or Perfect, the book that is merely OK, is the right book. One of the consequences of the internet is the idea that we can always get The Best thing, and so we go without, trying to get it, instead of taking the OK bird in our hand. We reject the out-of-date, the imperfect in whatever sense, almost out of a sense of moral duty. And I think the publishers of the world no longer want the OK book either. They want the punchy and the pop, the friendly and accessible, when it comes to nonfiction, assuming they're not in the business of publishing the Important or Definitive for a captive audience of academics. The heyday of the OK book, it seems to me, was in that midcentury postwar middlebrow moment, when GI Bill grey-flannel-suit suburban husbands dutifully read intellectual-ish magazines to Get the Facts on foreign affairs and the worldwide struggle against Communism; and publishers like Penguin put out stolid, zero percent pop, OK books like this one on subjects they thought the educated man ought to know. The pleasures of the OK book are enhanced by its apparatus and its phyiscal form; this book is a particularly nice example, especially my copy, which I found on the sidewalk during the COVID quarantine, deaccessioned from the Oakland Unified School District Library, having belonged to Skyline High and to Lowell Junior High over its long career in school. In addition to the due date card envelope (which unfortunately obscures the titles of the Penguin African Library, of which this was the second volume) and stamps and Dewey Decimal number on the spine, there is nice graphic design, a pleasingly academic bibliography, and delightful maps in almost every chapter, where every place mentioned in the text will be found labeled, very helpful for a reader like me whose sense of African geography is not strong. This is one of those things OK books do so well that neither Important Academic books nor "The Surprising History of Calcium: How One Mineral Changed the World" type pop books do, these well-calculated helps for the reader. I feel like I'm sounding condescending, but I don't mean to be. There is an optimism and a nobility about this kind of book, made by and for people who thought regular, average people, who bought pocket paperbacks, both could and wanted to understand the world, its history and science and philosophy and so on, without needing silly clickbait titles and a third grade reading level. Of course it's not an Important Academic book -- it's 10,000 years in 250 pages -- but it's certainly not junk or silly, and according to my friend who is a distinguished professor of African history, the two authors were giants of the field. That they would write a book like this is a testament to the book market of 1965 having a space for scholars to reach the average reader, and at least some readers who wanted to be reached. One of the things that is good about reading old books, whether OK or not, is that it's easier to read them with a critical eye. Two European white guys, we know, must have their biases; both the archeology of Subsaharan Africa and the theoretical position of postcolonialism were barely begun when they wrote it. When a book is old, we always double-check before we decide we've really learned something, which should probably always be true, but let's face it, generally isn't. Our two authors do, as they approach their own contemporary time, start to lose their Olympian objectivity, which is somewhat surprising and not unwelcome -- their understatedness in general makes their condemnation of the apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia more striking, and their optimistic ending, emphasizing the community of the African nations, unexpectly touching. It is a nice relief, coming at the end of second half which is mostly super-depressing. These days the OK book lives on, to my knowledge, particularly in the Very Short Introduction series, but it is sad that they are indeed so very short, and without the nice design and maps and so on of a book like this. Still, I'm glad they exist. The world needs them, as much as we need Important books. If I had insisted on waiting for the perfect history, instead of the one I happened to have to hand, well, I'd still be waiting.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-02-27 00:00:00 Hunter Brown Well-written, concise, informative I read the 1966 (second)edition of this volume and was not aware of updates until checking Amazon. Despite much political and demographic change in Africa over the last 30-odd years, and despite the availability of much more research and the advent of DNA-based studies, not even heard of in 1966, I found Oliver and Fage's work a pleasure to read. Their chapters are intelligently organized, the flow of ideas and trends unblemished by superfluous detail or tedious asides. The entire continent is covered, North Africa as well as Sub-Saharan, though personally, I felt a little more could have been said about Madagascar. As a reader without a professional stake in African history, I found this book just the thing. It raised many issues that I had not thought of, told me about many patterns and issues of which I had known nothing, and did so in clear, concise language which kept my interest throughout. I strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in African history.