The Africans
by David Lamb
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During the four years he spent in black Africa as the bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, David Lamb traveled through almost every country south of the Sahara, logging more than 300,000 miles. He talked to presidents and guerrilla leaders, university professors and witch doctors. He bounced from wars to coups oceans apart, catching midnight flights to little-known countries where supposedly decent people were doing unspeakable things to one another. In the tradition of John Gunther's show more Inside Africa, The Africans is an extraordinary combination of analysis and adventure. Part travelogue, part contemporary history, it is a portrait of a continent that sometimes seems hell-bent on destroying itself, and of people who are as courageous as they are long-suffering. show lessTags
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3617. The Africans, with a new Preface and Epilogue, by David Lamb (read 17 Aug 2002) The author was a journalist in Africa from 1976 to 1980, but the book is not too journalistic but attempts a broader view and succeeds quite well. He is quite pessimistic, though he accounts some successes in African nationdom. This was a good book though old. A more current book on the same subject is Out of Africa: A Black Man Confronts Africa, by Keith B. Richberg, which I read July 8, 1998.
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David Sherman Lamb was born in Boston, Massachusetts on March 5, 1940. He began his journalism career at 14, when he wrote a weekly column for The Milwaukee Journal about the Braves leaving Boston for Milwaukee from the perspective of a teenager. He graduated from the School of Journalism at the University of Maine in 1962. He worked for The show more Okinawa Morning Star and United Press International before joining The Los Angeles Times. He left the paper in 2004 after 34 years. His first book, The Africans, was published in 1983. His other books included The Arabs, Stolen Season: A Journey Through America and Baseball's Minor Leagues, Over the Hills: A Midlife Escape Across America by Bicycle, and Vietnam, Now: A Reporter Returns. He also worked on the PBS documentary Vietnam Passage: Journeys from War to Peace in 2002. He died from lymphoma and esophageal cancer on June 5, 2016 at the age of 76. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- The Africans
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