Rating: 
Summary: Great Stories, Weak Details
Review: Wrong provides an excellent series of anecdotes about Zaire/Congo during Mobutu Sese Seko's rule. Her book reads like a cocktail party conversation, fascinating stories that are great to listen to but don't have a whole lot of depth behind them or statistics to back them up. Even Wrong's discussion of her attempts to find statistics end up as anecodotes about her experiences with the Congolese government, the World Bank, the IMF, and many government agencies. Overall, though, this book is a fascinating first-person account of Mobutu's rule. Highly entertaining!
Rating: 
Summary: Not as great as King Leopold's ghost
Review: Wrong's book was great for giving a glimpse of the last days of Mobuto's Congo.
She was a guarded in discussing U.S. involvement in the days that led up to Mobuto's taking power. Her description of events is shaped by the interviews she conducts and obviously there are many interviews that she simply leaves out.
It seems she was inspired by Adam Hochschild's KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST. She makes strong connections to his book throughout IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MR. KURTZ, but she is more like Hochschild in her use of sarcasm than in her arguments and her presentation of the facts.
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