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Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful and thoughtful
Review: I love this book; I read it in the original French many years ago and am just coming back to it now in this English translation. I do not know of another book that so richly and respectfully describes a culture very different from our Western Amazon-dot-com based culture. You can tell that the author cares deeply for the characters that he writes about and that he has a great deal of empathy for them and their decisions. Even though you might not have a lot in common with the African characters, you will understand them from the force of their personalities as the author describes them. This is a beautiful book and well worth reading in these times, when it seems that we are afraid of other cultures and their protagonists.
Rating:
Summary: Moving and Precise
Review: This book is a must for anyone interested in African literature, Islamic literature, and the experience of losing culture in the 20th century experience of modernization. This is the story of an African who is separated from his family, religion, and culture as he "moves up" in the world, eventually moving to France for his education. The description of what is lost in this transaction-- from a personal and spiritual point of view-- truly took me into the experience of an "other" seldom understood.
Rating: 
Summary: Philosopher.....
Review: This book is not for the average reader. If you are into abstract thinking or if you are a philosophy major, you may like this book. My view is that Cheikh Hamidou Kane was trying to impress his French audience with the philosophy he read at the University of Paris. There is nothing 'African' about Kane's storytelling. I also found structural deficiencies in the organization of the book.
You would find better Senegalese writers in Mariama Ba ("So Long A Letter") and Sembene Ousmane ("God's Bits of Wood", "Xala").
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