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    The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War
    Unavailable
    The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War
    Unavailable
    The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War
    Ebook546 pages11 hours

    The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

    By Aidan Hartley

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A deeply affecting memoir of a childhood in Africa and the continent's horrendous wars, which Hartley witnessed at first hand as a journalist in the 1990s. Shortlisted for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, this is a masterpiece of autobiographical journalism.

    Aidan Hartley, a foreign correspondent, burned-out from the horror of covering the terrifying micro wars of the 1990s, from Rwanda to Bosnia, seeks solace and solitude in the remote mountains and deserts of southern Arabia and the Yemen, following his father’s death. While there, he finds himself on the trail of the tragic story of an old friend of his father’s, who fell in love and was murdered in southern Arabia fifty years ago. As the terrible events of the past unfold, Hartley finds his own kind of deliverance.

    ‘The Zanzibar Chest’ is a powerful story about a man witnessing and confronting extreme violence and being broken down by it, and of a son trying to come to terms with the death of a father whom he also saw as his best friend. It charts not only a love affair between two people, but also the British love affair with Arabia and the vast emptinesses of the desert, which become a fitting metaphor for the emotional and spiritual condition in which Hartley finds himself.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateMay 26, 2011
    ISBN9780007380268
    Unavailable
    The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War
    Author

    Aidan Hartley

    Aidan Hartley was born in 1965 and raised in East Africa. He read English at Balliol College, Oxford, and later politics at London University. He joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent and has worked in Africa, the Balkans, the Middle East and Russia. In 1996 he began travelling and writing on his own.

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    Reviews for The Zanzibar Chest

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    • 3/5
      This rating suffers because I don't think Hartley necessarily knew what he was onto at first--great stretches of this read like an "imperial family" memoir by one if its most insufferably smug scions, and much ore entertaining swathes like a foreign correspondent's memoir, which is much more interesting and colourful of course although also even more smug (the way he writes about his sexual "exploits" cannot be borne outside of fiction, and then there is also that awful subtitle), and there is a brief concern that he will go all torture porn on you, but no--i think this book was an attempt to write his way through the experiences that haunt and poison you--in Hartley's case, Rwanda, Somalia--until you know there's something fearsome that has emerged from inside you in response and is turning your dreams into fears. The fact that the only thing that makes that better is time, and then only if you give it air, and let it heal "very slowly, from the inside." And to get there he had to write through the other stuff. And while the combination makes for a much more unusual book, the way we get breezy and breezy and then the hard bulletin is not easy to take. But then it can't have been easy for the people who were there either, and certainly it makes me more capable of toughening up and handling my seventeen-hour cashless stint as a ghost in Addis Ababa airport, where it's so cold right now.
    • 4/5
      There is a fair amount of reportage in this book, much of it harrowing although delivered with the nonchalence and detatchment of the war reporter, and yet one detects that the thick skin is more cosmetic, self protective and indeed in due course it falls away. It is Hartley's inate love and empathy with Africa and Africans, and a hard earned camerarderie with the various hacks and rhino skinned media folk he falls in with, which lifts the writing above that of documentary. In the end it is the story of Aidan Hartley.Hartley's fascination with Africa comes from a childhood spent listening to rich stories of his parents and their friends, exotic stories of the late colonial period, of respect and adventure, and moreover of their love of the continent and its people. The trouble for Hartley is that he is attached to those stories ingrained in his physche but his African view is very different and his days are spent in the immediate post colonial era with change and volatility all around. He comes to recognise that change through the stoicism of his parents, and especially his father who is forced to adapt and although he is useful being fluent Swahili and a skilled negotiator with the Africans, his frustrations are there to see and feel and his retisence grows as nostalgia fades. Hartley finds himself sent to England for education and becomes influenced by the swinging sixties and intoxicated with social revolution. DRAFT - to be completed
    • 3/5
      Aidan's life started out not unlike mine (same boarding school in England, overseas parents, Reuters) and then turned in to my friend David's (Reuters, war correspondent, adrenalin junkie, burn-out). So of course I found this book interesting, but I'm not sure I would have been held by it otherwise. The interweaving of memoir and self-discovery through forensic exploration of family history didn't work -- loose threads all over.
    • 4/5
      Hartley, descended from a family venerable old colonialists, occasionally glamorizes colonialism a bit much for my tastes. Still, this is an interesting book by a white man who's never considered himself anything but African. If you're interested in rarely covered areas like the history of Somalia or why newspapers failed to publicize the Rwandan genocide before it was too late, this is a good place to go.