... provocative new book...

- Martin Woollacott, THE GUARDIAN

...for those interested in international affairs, but lacking detailed knowledge of Africa, if you read only one book about Africa this year it should be this one. Two distinguished scholars of Africa have written a short, lucid and astringent corrective to the lazy complacency of much conventional wisdom about the plight of the continent. Indeed, if all the litany of disaster is true, it is astonishing that anything works in Africa at all. And yet it does.

- Gwyn Prins, INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

...Despite its iconoclastic tenor, however, the book's value is paradoxically as a good summary of the present orthodoxy in the study of African politics

- Jan Kees Van Donge, COMMONWEALTH & COMPARATIVE POLITICS