Friday, March 19, 2010

The Dragon's Gift: "Author Hits 'Reset' on Story of China in Africa"

Peter Wood, in Asian Review of Books (March 2, 2010):
This is an important addition to the already considerable literature on China-Africa. Policy makers and journalists should read it, and in particular those who run the foreign desks of leading western newspapers and who seem to be peculiarly willing to sacrifice reality to a good headline.
Peter Bosshard, on Huffington Post (March 17, 2010):
Based on her intimate knowledge of China and Africa, Brautigam is able to shatter many prejudices ... her thoughtful and well researched book ... offers surprising insights and challenges us to take a new look at Africa's development.
Stephen Marks, in Pambazuka, "China in Africa: Realism Conquers Myth," (March 18, 2010):
an account at once scholarly and accessible, combining the puncturing of prevalent myths with a realist approach that does not rely on rosy assumptions [and] ...  documents a number of ‘urban myths’, which her own painstaking research has managed to explode.
Angilee Shah, in Zocalo: Public Square "How Does China Help Africa?" (March 9, 2010):
If the headlines are any indication, it’s time for a proper China scare ... But Deborah Brautigam’s exhaustive account of Chinese aid and investment in the continent is by no means part of this trend. ...  the book is the culmination of some 30 years of research and experience in both places ... As Brautigam moves us beyond assumptions of exploitation and control of natural resources, a more complex story emerges.
One of my favorite comments so far comes from the title of a story published after I spoke at UCLA:  "Author hits 'reset' on story of China in Africa" (January 27, 2010).

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Search chapters.ca find the book cover has a different title. It has "Rouge Donors?" rather than "The Dragon's Gift" before the subtitle of "The Real Story of China in Africa". Are they two different books?

wei

Deborah Brautigam said...

Oooh, that's a long story! Suffice it to say that my first editor at Oxford, now gone, unilaterally gave the book the title Rogue Donor? before it was published, and while I was still off doing fieldwork in Africa. I managed to get the title changed, but it had already gone into some online catalogs before then. Funny, but Sarah Palin's book Going Rogue was published just a few weeks before mine. I'm sure my editor wishes we had kept her original title ...

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