free copy of African Psycho for Africa Reading Challenge readers

David Evans4 Comments

I received this sweet offer in my in-box:

I just wanted to offer folks participating in the challenge a gratis copy of African Psycho, by Alain Mabanckou. I attach some of the reviews…Any blogger participating the challenge can email me for a gratis copy and they do not need to promise to review it, either!

Just email Richard at Richard AT softskull DOT com.

I took a look at some of the reviews and the book looks well-written, intriguing, and – well – not for everybody.  Here is the Amazon page.  I’m pasting a couple of quotes from professional reviews beneath the fold.

Continue reading “free copy of African Psycho for Africa Reading Challenge readers” →

kiribati is like baltimore, just chopped into 32 pieces

David Evans1 Comment

I’m listening to J. Maarten Troost’s memoir The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific (which – incidentally – has nothing to do with anyone’s sex life). I find the book ultimately not nearly as fun as it should be (more on that later), but I enjoyed his characterization of the nation of Kiribati, made friendly to the U.S. audience:

To picture Kiribati, imagine that the continental U.S. were to conveniently disappear leaving only Baltimore and a vast swath of very blue ocean in its place. Now chop up Baltimore into thirty-three pieces, place a neighborhood where Maine used to be, another where California once was, and so on until you have thirty-three pieces of Baltimore dispersed in such a way so as to ensure that 32/33 of Baltimorians will never attend an Orioles game again. Now take away electricity, running water, toilets, television, restaurants, buildings, and airplanes (except for two very old prop planes, tended by people who have no word for “maintenance”). Replace with thatch. Flatten all land into a uniform two feet above sea level. Toy with islands by melting polar ice caps. Add palm trees. Sprinkle with hepatitis A, B, and C. Stir in dengue fever and intestinal parasites. Take away doctors. Isolate and bake at a constant temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The result is the Republic of Kiribati. (p15-16)

two “magical” powers i wished for on my last trip

David Evans1 Comment
My name may be Magic, but I don’t have magic powers.* Yet.

Two that I wished for in the course of my recent Africa trip (which I’ve read about in books):

  • the ability to create a mental map, constantly updated with new places I go, and being able to project it into the air in front of me. On my first trip to Kenya, I took along a travel atlas of the country, and it was a marvelous decision, permitting me to talk to fellow bus passengers about where they were from and capture a clear picture of the country’s landscape. [This talent comes from Chem Centaur of Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, which I read when I was twelve or so.]
  • the ability to record, download, and playback whatever I see. I observe so much in my travels that I would like to be able to transmit to others, and my camera is markedly slower than my eyes. [This talent comes from Lauro Suleiamo Ribeira von Hesse in Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide,** who had a camera in one eye socket and something like a USB port in his other eye for computer downloading.]

* Once on a date, conversation was lagging and so I asked what magic power you’d choose if you could.  She chose flight. I chose healing, which I only afterward realized is totally do-gooder pretentious (like saying that if you had one wish, you’d use it to end world poverty).  No second date.

** Clearly I had a real taste for science fiction and fantasy as a youth (i read xenocide a whole 5 years ago), which I seem to have lost if you trust my experience with Fables of an Extraterrestrial Grandmother as representative.

if you go to see Iron Man…

David Evans4 Comments

…make sure you wait until the end of the credits!  Totally worth it. (It involves an eye patch.)

My wife, my father, and I went on opening night in a tiny theater in a little Virginia town, and the projectionist shut off the film just after the credits began to get the next movie set up. My wife and father charged back to the doorway leading up to the projection room and demanded either a refund or the chance to see the end; after much haranguing (much) the projectionist actually put the reel back on.

Again, totally worth it.

dead teachers and pubic policy

David EvansLeave a comment

This morning I was proofreading some documents for a field survey, and at one point in a training document it says “Now, we will do a demonstration interview. [—] will play the role of enumerator and [—-] will be the dead teacher.”  What?!

No interviewing of dead teachers in this particular survey.  Next week I’ll be pretesting my paranormal baseline, in which we interview dead librarians, so that’s closer. 

This reminds of a paper I co-authored once in which my colleague accidentally wrote about the implications of our findings for pubic policy. I’m not sure what those implications would be, besides washing your hands after going to the bathroom or encouraging male circumcision to reduce the risk of HIV transmission.

For now, I’ll stick with head teachers and public policy.

magic man to magic: “i felt like the ‘magic’ was getting between me and my fans

David Evans6 Comments

As I walk along the Gambian beaches, I am often approached by young men wanting to be my friend.  Usually on those walks, finding new friends isn’t one of my goals.  Everyone has the same conversation starteds: What’s your name?  Where are you from?  Some time ago, I wrote about adopting a stage name: Magic Man from Brigadoon.

Unfortunately, Magic Man created more questions than it answered, so I’ve shifted to Magic.  From Brigadoon.  Yes, that’s somewhere in Europe.

* The line in the title is from rapper P Diddy.

cab fight! cab fight!

David EvansLeave a comment

I’m in the Gambia, and on Wednesday morning I needed to get from my hotel to my office early in the morning. None of the hotel-based cabs were around, so I walked out to the highway and got in a van. (“Vans” here are the same as matatus in Kenya and guaguas in the Dominican Republic, minivans that cram a bunch of people in and drive on a set route: basically an unsafe, unreliable bus.)  After a while I saw a taxi stand and got down.I walked up to the first taxi driver and asked for a price to my office; he quoted a reasonable price, so I moved to get in passenger seat of the taxi.  Suddenly a man jumps in front of me, blocking the door, shouting about how I can’t ride with this taxi driver because the driver owes this guy money for two weeks of work.

My initial response is that this particular dispute is not my concern, so I go around the protestor and get in the back seat of the taxi.  The driver gets in, and then the protestor leaps into the front seat of the taxi, puts his hand over the key in the ignition, and begins shouting and arguing with the driver in a language I don’t understand.

I decided to wait ten seconds for the situation to resolve. I counted slowly to ten in my head, got out of the taxi, went to another taxi 30 feet away, and got to work.

the most dangerous country in the world!

David EvansLeave a comment

A friend asked me if Sierra Leone is the most dangerous country in the world.  Forbes magazine puts out a list of the world’s most dangerous destinations.  And the winners (?) for 2007 were

  • Somalia
  • Iraq
  • Afghanistan
  • Democratic Republic of Congo
  • Cote d’Ivoire
  • Pakistan
  • Burundi
  • Sri Lanka
  • Haiti
  • Chad
  • Lebanon
  • Liberia

Not even in the top 12!  Sierra Leone was very dangerous when it was in the midst of civil war, but that ended in 2002.  Now, I certainly feel safer in Freetown than in Nairobi (perhaps simply due to the fact that I haven’t yet been mugged in Freetown).

Following the footsteps of Sudhir Venkatesh, I managed to infiltrate one of Freetown’s most insidious street gangs a few days ago.  Luckily, I escaped with my life and this photo.