The Rebels' Hour Summary and Reviews

The Rebels' Hour
by Lieve Joris

List Price: ~~$24.00~~
Our Price: $1.30
You Save: $22.70 (95%)
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Author: Lieve Joris
Translator: Liz Waters
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-04-10
ISBN: 0802118682
Number of pages: 272
Publisher: Grove Press

Book Reviews of The Rebels' Hour

Book Review: Ever Alert For an Ambush
Summary: 5 Stars

This book is as well-written as it is essential reading for an understanding of chaotic central African belligerence and bloody-minded tribal cunning, happening right now, and for decades past, in the Congo. The book closely follows the career of an in-every-way remarkable soldier the author has named Assani, a cowherd turned rebel, made a general in the Congolese army.
He moves cautiously, ever on the alert for an ambush. The word jungle never appears, but that is where, perforce a rebel's hunted existence, he has been forced to kill. Appointed a general as part of a peace deal, he is flatteringly welcomed back in the capital Kinshasa from the bush by men who five years before would have lynched him. He drives as if still in the bush; he keeps up the same speed and people crossing the street in the city center have to jump back.
The author, seemingly acting on inside information, maps out the intricacy of Assani's life of firefights, retreat, reprisals, new alliances and old, by use of time-shifts that each time serve further to illuminate this elusive bush fighter. From time to time he mulls over his late-night doubts with a woman bar owner in Lubumbashi on one of his cell phones.
I was drawn to this book by the immediacy of the writing. If you open it at any page it will immediately hook you. The writing is tight but chatty, dead sure but wary, sudden, momentarily confessional. I haven't read a better book all year.

Write your own review

More The Rebels' Hour reviews:
1

Central Africa Books

Books > Subjects > History > Africa
Historical Study > Revolutionary
Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > War
World Literature
New & Used Textbooks > Humanities > Literature
History > Africa

Book Subjects

Most talked about in Central Africa Books

Somalia in Word and Image
by Katheryne S. Loughran, John Loughran, John Johnson
Indiana University Press; Published: 1986-01-01; Hardcover; Book

Renamo: Terrorism in Mozambique
by Alex Vines
Indiana University Press; Published: 1991-10; Paperback; Book
Best price: $44.95

Journey of Song: Public Life and Morality in Cameroon (African Expressive Cultures)
by Clare A. Ignatowski
Indiana University Press; Published: 2006-02-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $1.00
Price in other shops: ~~$24.95~~

Africans in Europe: The Culture of Exile and Emigration from Equatorial Guinea to Spain (Studies of World Migrations)
by Michael Ugarte
University of Illinois Press; Published: 2010-01-21; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $56.00
Price in other shops: ~~$60.00~~

Understanding Somalia and Somaliland: Culture, History, Society (Columbia/ Hurst)
by Ioan Lewis
Columbia University Press; Published: 2008-10-07; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $50.00

Societies, Religion, and History: Central-East Tanzanians and the World They Created, c. 200 BCE to 1800 CE (Gutenberg-e)
by Rhonda M. Gonzales
Columbia University Press; Published: 2009-06-23; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $25.00
Price in other shops: ~~$60.00~~

Angola: A Modern Military History, 1961-2002
by Stephen L. Weigert
Palgrave Macmillan; Published: 2011-10-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $53.94
Price in other shops: ~~$85.00~~