I read this well after the situation had started in Ethiopia and Somalia. It was good information after the fact, but I had read several other good accounts by the time I read this. ( )

Not Kaplan's best, but definitely enlightening.

http://www.kbuxton.com/weblog/2007/07... ( )

Kaplan addresses the famines of the Horn of Africa with subtlety but his argument beats us over the head again and again with the fact that regimes of the region don't care about the people we're starving, and American aid just supports these governments. Still, he doesn't provide that compelling case for doing nothing. The book does illuminate, though, why Sudan's government doesn't do anything about Darfur, and doesn't really care about America's protests.The 2003 edition of this book does nothing to update it except to include a now also-outdated look at Eritrea after independence. ( )

Robert D. Kaplan travels to a little-known corner of the globe to document the little-known but brutal conflict between Ethiopia and separationist Eritrea. Kaplan makes the conflict and the famines deliberately created by the Ethiopian government easy to understand. Unfortunately, the objectivity (and enjoyability) of the book is marred by Kaplan's own editorializing about the need for the U.S. to become involved in the war as a method of fighting Communism. ( )

The politics of relief efforts in theh Hor of Africa. ( )