From the Publisher
A passionate debut memoir bears witness to political turmoil… A stark, eye-opening, and sometimes horrifying portrait by a reporter enthralled by the ‘power and magic’ of Africa.” — Kirkus
“[Gettleman’s] beautifully written memoir is about many kinds of love…The path to love is not always straight, but when Gettleman discovers his true passions, he grabs hold and doesn’t let go. Love, Africa offers a key to understanding humankind’s past and future and a key to understanding our hearts.” — Sheryl Sandberg
“Rarely do you read such beautifully rendered honesty: witness the eyes and heart of Jeffrey transform into a remarkable person and writer for our time.” — Ishmael Beah
“Gettleman’s memoir of his life, his love, and the excitement and perils of journalism is a page-turner. The portrait of Africa that emerges is disturbing, tender, and harsh. …. A tremendous read. I couldn’t put it down.” — Abraham Verghese
“Jeffrey Gettleman’s memoir is truly, in all its complicated tragic beauty, a love story made up itself of inextricably intertwined love stories. I was mesmerized.” — Alexandra Fuller
“To feel the fear, sinfulness, and rapture of being a foreign correspondent, read this book! Using self-lacerating truth and high velocity prose, Jeffrey Gettleman has written a compulsively readable new story about what it means to be ‘our man in Africa.’” — Blaine Harden
“Jeffrey Gettleman has true grit. That’s why he was in my book, and why you have to read his.’’ — Angela Duckworth
“…[Gettleman] takes readers... into the most terrifying and beguiling continent in the world.…Gettleman is a rare combination of dogged reporter and very fine writer…I kept catching myself wondering whether it was too late to go back and lead his life rather than my own .” — Sebastian Junger
“[An] exciting, harrowing memoir that aptly displays why [Gettleman’s] a Pulitzer Prize winner and a New York Times bureau chief…. there’s a thrilling immediacy and attention to detail in Gettleman’s writing that puts the reader right beside him…Gettleman’s memoir is an absolute must-read.” — Booklist (starred review)
Abraham Verghese
Gettleman’s memoir of his life, his love, and the excitement and perils of journalism is a page-turner. The portrait of Africa that emerges is disturbing, tender, and harsh. …. A tremendous read. I couldn’t put it down.
Angela Duckworth
Jeffrey Gettleman has true grit. That’s why he was in my book, and why you have to read his.’’
Sebastian Junger
…[Gettleman] takes readers... into the most terrifying and beguiling continent in the world.…Gettleman is a rare combination of dogged reporter and very fine writer…I kept catching myself wondering whether it was too late to go back and lead his life rather than my own .
Sheryl Sandberg
[Gettleman’s] beautifully written memoir is about many kinds of love…The path to love is not always straight, but when Gettleman discovers his true passions, he grabs hold and doesn’t let go. Love, Africa offers a key to understanding humankind’s past and future and a key to understanding our hearts.
Ishmael Beah
Rarely do you read such beautifully rendered honesty: witness the eyes and heart of Jeffrey transform into a remarkable person and writer for our time.
Booklist (starred review)
[An] exciting, harrowing memoir that aptly displays why [Gettleman’s] a Pulitzer Prize winner and a New York Times bureau chief…. there’s a thrilling immediacy and attention to detail in Gettleman’s writing that puts the reader right beside him…Gettleman’s memoir is an absolute must-read.
Alexandra Fuller
Jeffrey Gettleman’s memoir is truly, in all its complicated tragic beauty, a love story made up itself of inextricably intertwined love stories. I was mesmerized.
Blaine Harden
To feel the fear, sinfulness, and rapture of being a foreign correspondent, read this book! Using self-lacerating truth and high velocity prose, Jeffrey Gettleman has written a compulsively readable new story about what it means to be ‘our man in Africa.’
AUGUST 2017 - AudioFile
Charlie Thurston proves up to the task of narrating this memoir by NEW YORK TIMES East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman. This audiobook weaves the stories of Gettleman’s intense career as a foreign correspondent in some of the world’s most dangerous places with the story of his courtship, long-distance romance, and then marriage to his Cornell sweetheart. Thurston’s steady, even understated, narration works. He neatly handles the adrenaline-laced scenes in which the author and his wife, Courtenay, a videographer, are kidnapped, waylaid, or up to their ears in dust, mud, and fear in various war-torn African nations. This is an audiobook that assesses the dangers and importance of a journalist’s calling and is both thoughtfully written and narrated well. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2017-03-15
A passionate debut memoir bears witness to political turmoil.For Pulitzer Prize winner Gettleman, East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, his response to Africa was nothing less than love at first sight. Yearning to return after a summer trip, in 1992, he left Cornell University, where he was an undergraduate, for "a whole glorious year" of exploring. Naïve, enthusiastic, fearless, and woefully unprepared, he counted among his adventures nearly falling off Mount Kilimanjaro, being arrested for climbing without a permit, getting mugged, and twice losing his passport. Nevertheless, he felt sure that East Africa would become part of his life forever. The path to realizing that dream involved an internship in Ethiopia, just emerging from 30 years of civil war. The country was broken: dead animals rotted in the streets, and beggars roamed everywhere. Later, as a journalist, the author documented the atrocities of other wars: in Iraq, where the American invasion had unleashed "horrific and random and multivectored" violence; in Somalia, where America's support of Ethiopia's invasion, overthrowing "a popular, grassroots, and surprisingly effective Islamist administration," led to chaos, "high-seas piracy," terrorism, and ultimately devastating famine. Reporting from a region of 3.3 million square miles, 400 million people, and a dozen "fragile and poorly governed" countries—including the hot spots of Sudan, Uganda, Congo, Kenya, and Burundi—Gettleman focused on human rights abuses and terror resulting from conflicts among warlords, religious and ethnic factions, Western-backed rebels, and opportunistic militias "very good at murder on a shoestring." Caught in those conflicts, he was kidnapped, imprisoned, and beaten. Gettleman is forthright about condemning American policies and U.N. failures, and he underscores his struggles to find language to convey the reality he witnessed. He haggled with his editors, for example, "over hacked versus killed, tribe versus ethnic group," each of which "expressed value judgments or paternalism." Besides his career, the author chronicles his long, sometimes-fraught relationship with the woman he finally married and with whom he settled in Kenya. A stark, eye-opening, and sometimes-horrifying portrait by a reporter enthralled by the "power and magic" of Africa.
