-
Access our Top 20
Books of 2024!
The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya
by Caroline Elkins
Forty years after Kenyan independence from Britain, the words "Mau Mau" still conjure images of crazed savages hacking up hapless white settlers with machetes. The British Colonial Office, struggling to preserve its far-flung empire of dependencies after World War II, spread hysteria about Kenya's Mau Mau independence movement by depicting its supporters among the Kikuyu people as irrational terrorists and monsters. Caroline Elkins, a historian at Harvard University, has done a masterful job setting the record straight in her epic investigation, Imperial Reckoning. After years of research in London and Kenya, including interviews with hundreds of Kenyans, settlers, and former British officials, Elkins has written the first book about the eight-year British war against the Mau Mau.
Pulitzer Prize, 2006
"[This] superbly written and impassioned book deserves the widest possible readership." - PW
"This compelling account of the British colonial government's atrocities can be compared to Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost. Highly recommended" - Library Journal
"Sure to touch off scholarly debate and renew interest in recent, deliberately forgotten history." - Kirkus
Elkins has bravely done justice to history.” —The Nation
“A vivid portrait of daily life behind the wire.” —The Economist
“An important and excruciating record. It will shock even those who think they have assumed the worst about Europe’s era of control in Africa.” —The New York Times Book Review
This information about Imperial Reckoning was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
.png)
A library is thought in cold storage
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
