Dancing in the Glory of Monsters
The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

If you want to understand the tragedy that is the Congo, put aside the mythology and read Dancing In The Glory of Monsters. Jason Stearns has untangled the snarling mess that is the history of this sad nation. As someone who's researched and written about the Congo myself (Heart of Diamonds: A Novel......more

This book has been called the "best" current nonfiction about the violence in the DRC - which I think says far more about the dearth of good books on the subject than on this one's merits. While the book is a useful primer on the facts and political history of the violence in the DRC, I frankly disag......more

In the hundred years of bloodshed that was the 20th century, the Congo War is a tragedy that has mostly been ignored by the West, and forgotten by history. Something like five million people died, placing the Congo War as the the 6th largest mass killing in the 20th century, the deadliest event sinc......more

People remember Somalia because of the dead soldiers and Rwanda because the size and brutality of the massacre. But the Congo massacres, many times more lethal than either, largely escaped notice in the Western world, perhaps because of the complexity, perhaps because of the conflicts were labelled......more

Mass violence does not just affect the families of the dead. It tears at the fabric of society and lodges in the minds of the witnesses and perpetrators alike. A decade after the violence, it seemed the villagers were still living in its aftershocks. They had all fled after the massacre; no one want......more