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

Author: Jason Stearns

Narrator: Mike Chamberlain

Unabridged: 15 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/09/2017

Synopsis

At the heart of Africa is Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal and unstaunchable war in which millions have died. And yet, despite its epic proportions, it has received little sustained media attention.

In this deeply reported book, Jason K. Stearns vividly tells the story of this misunderstood conflict through the experiences of those who engineered and perpetrated it. He depicts village pastors who survived massacres, the child soldier assassin of President Kabila, a female Hutu activist who relives the hunting and methodical extermination of fellow refugees, and key architects of the war that became as great a disaster as—and was a direct consequence of—the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Through their stories, he tries to understand why such mass violence made sense, and why stability has been so elusive.

Through their voices, and an astonishing wealth of knowledge and research, Stearns chronicles the political, social, and moral decay of the Congolese State.

About Jason Stearns

Jason K. Stearns has been working on the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2001. He has worked for Heritiers de la Justice, the United Nations peacekeeping mission, and as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group. In 2008, he led a United Nations investigation on conflict in the east of the country. He is currently managing a research project for the Rift Valley Institute on Congolese armed groups, the Usalama Project.

His articles and opinion pieces have appeared in the Financial Times, the Economist, Africa Confidential, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He blogs at congosiasa.blogspot.com.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Dave on May 09, 2011

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

Goodreads review by Jake on August 25, 2012

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

Goodreads review by Michael on June 03, 2021

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

Goodreads review by Nick on August 10, 2019

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

Goodreads review by Eric on July 02, 2017

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

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