Rating: 
Summary: Brutally Real and Honest - Highly Reccomended
Review: This book really made me think and feel the history of east Africa. I have been to the areas where much of this book takes place and while my time there gave me a great deal of context that made this book more real, I can't help but think that this would have been a very important book to read while traveling there. The older colonial history documented and told by the decendent of the colonizers gives context for the more recent atrocities and provides a vantage point from which you can better understand how these events were brought on by the past. This book can help the western foreigner understand or get a better perspective on Africa beyond the savannah. I think it will be important for me to find a book written from a black african perspective next though. Hartley is brutally frank about what he sees and what he feels at the time he sees these things. Some of his attitudes at the time are hard for me to comprehend, but he does us all a service by being honest with us and with himself about his responses to the horrific scenes that he witnesses. I can imagine sleep is not that easy when you have those kind of scenes waking you up. A truely insightful book that is both facinating and stomache wrentching. The world is better off due to people willing and able to share their demons rather than keeping them for themselves. I hope we can all learn from, and make better our world based on what Hartley and the victims he describes went through. I am sceptical, but humanity does seem full of surprises. If you liked this book, read "King Leopold's Ghost". Another facinating tale, but about the history of the Congo.
Rating:
Summary: Brutally Real and Honest - Highly Reccomended
Review: This book really made me think and feel the history of east Africa. I have been to the areas where much of this book takes place and while my time there gave me a great deal of context that made this book more real, I can't help but think that this would have been a very important book to read while traveling there. The older colonial history documented and told by the decendent of the colonizers gives context for the more recent atrocities and provides a vantage point from which you can better understand how these events were brought on by the past. This book can help the western foreigner understand or get a better perspective on Africa beyond the savannah. I think it will be important for me to find a book written from a black african perspective next though. Hartley is brutally frank about what he sees and what he feels at the time he sees these things. Some of his attitudes at the time are hard for me to comprehend, but he does us all a service by being honest with us and with himself about his responses to the horrific scenes that he witnesses. I can imagine sleep is not that easy when you have those kind of scenes waking you up. A truely insightful book that is both facinating and stomache wrentching. The world is better off due to people willing and able to share their demons rather than keeping them for themselves. I hope we can all learn from, and make better our world based on what Hartley and the victims he describes went through. I am sceptical, but humanity does seem full of surprises. If you liked this book, read "King Leopold's Ghost". Another facinating tale, but about the history of the Congo.
Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: This is a great book that spans the past and present, the beautiful and horrifying, as well as the tender and violent. Never condescending or boastful, Hartley managed to keep my interest throughout his book. Check out also his Wild Life column for The Spectator.
Rating:
Summary: Tough and Tender
Review: This is a truly amazing and moving book. It is rare indeed to find such a writing talent in the same person as such an intrepid adventure hound. I won't summarize the book, as other reviewers here have done so well enough.
At first I was taken aback by Hartley's matter-of-fact renditions of horrific war scenes. By the end of the book it becomes apparent that he has seen so much of an unbelievably hellish nature that it is more amazing that he survived emotionally enough to tell the story at all. Many of the graphic stories here of the wars and violence in Africa and the Balkans are not for the squeamish, so be forewarned. On the other hand Hartley's stories of his family's history in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula are extremely tender.
On the book jacket, a reviewer describes Hartley as a "Hieronymous Bosch reincarnated as a frontline correspondent". To me he seems more like a Dante who has visited both Paradise and Inferno and has produced an astonishing and breathtaking narrative. Not only that, his writing is nothing short of eloquent.
The suggestion by some other reviewers that there are only a dozen pages about the "Zanzibar chest" itself is misleading. The chest contained the diaries of Hartley's father's friend Peter Davey. One of the major threads in the book is Hartley's retracing Davey's life and travels. Hartley tells many stories about Davey and his father's relationship with him, which occupy at least 60 pages of the book. However this is only one thread of many.
This book is also helpful in understanding some of the historical context for the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi, as well as events in Somalia (leading to the "Black Hawk Down" incident).
By random coindence, I read this just after reading Chris Hedges' "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning". I found the latter to be a tremendous help in understanding the mentality of someone like Aidan Hartley, who was so clearly addicted to putting himself in harm's way to get the story and so clearly at a loss when he wasn't able to.
Rating:
Summary: Incredibly Honest
Review: This is my top pick for the year 2003. Mr Hartley's narratives are raw, brutally honest and memorable. He reveals an Africa ravaged by horrific wars but redeemed by the love the writer has for his homeland. Hartley's graphic descriptions of war, genocide and waste are shocking in their truth and unforgetable. He is unafraid to reveal himself, and by being so, gives us a masterpiece of a naked Africa.
Rating:
Summary: Into Africa
Review: This memoir describes episodes of the author's personal experience as a journalist covering African news of the 1990's. With a gift for physical description and fascinating small details, Mr. Hartley does not avert his gaze from the worst of human atrocity, nor from the foibles and contradictions of his own character.
While in many ways this is a story of loss; smaller stories of hope are interwoven. While the author mourns his friends who were killed in action, he also claims a new life as husband and father, as citizen bearing white skin in black Africa, as a human writing to save the life of this fragile, shared planet.
Rating: 
Summary: Well-written and fascinating, but...
Review: Very well done, and the best of its genre ("I was there as a journalist, and here is the inside scoop and how I REALLY felt about it..."). But:
1. A bit too much navel-gazing by the author, which is unresolved. Am I a journalist doing good for the world, or just a third-world country death junkie? This is a tension reported by many journos, but at the very least it should be resolved.
2. Unresolved attitude toward military (especially American). Hates them for shooting and any military virtues, but when the shooting is aimed at the author he wants MedEvac and hospital care from the soldiers RIGHT NOW, like a whiny six-year-old. Another unresolved conflict.
Those things being said, this is still a terrific read. The historical bits about Mr. Davey are better than the author's personal reminiscences, but both are excellent. I have never been much interested in Africa where the contemporary part of this book is set, but was fascinated by the author's accounts of life there.
My credentials for writing this review: (1) Also born overseas to English/American parents, similar to the author's background,(2) Columbia Journalism School, '66, and experience as a reporter (though not a foreign correspondent), (3) US Army service in Vietnam in 1966-69 and civilian charity work in Cambodia in 1995-2000, with lots of opportunity to observe journos at work in those environments.
Rating: 
Summary: No zanzibar chest within the covers of this book.
Review: What a mess. There are about three books within the covers of this book. Each might have been successful on their own, but the disjointed combination of the three just doesn't work. If you make it past the first part of the book in which author Hartely engages in shameless name dropping (movie stars, deposed rulers, military heroes etc.) you will find yourself swinging from the stories of a war correspondent to the vague and unsatifying ramblings of a son grieving the loss of a distant father. The actual story of the zanzibar chest covers some dozen pages, scattered randomly throughout the text. The stories of Hartley as war correspondent are the most interesting but even here Hartley has problems. Most of the time he claims the position of a neutral journalist but this is hard to swallow when he tells stories of crashing through protective barricades to scale the Great Pyramids and vandalize a world heritage site by carving his name into it, and joins in the revelry of a victorious rebel group by driving a tank into the royal palace and looting it. At a later point in the book Hartley talks about the desparation of innocents caught in war and poverty, then enthusiastically dives into bed with sex trade workers. Hartley could have written a beautiful book based on all he witnessed on the front lines of the greatest armed conflicts of the past two decades. He didn't.
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