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brebdob's review against another edition
Found the audiobook narrator extremely monotonous. I think the book itself is also quite a bit drier than I had hoped
lukescalone's review against another edition
4.0
This is a great set of short chapters on Africa between ~700 and ~1500. It lacks cohesion, but part of me thinks that is the point--there was no single "Africa," so it's best to see the continent through different lenses. The text is very heavy on Saharan Africa, strong on sub-Saharan Africa, and generally weaker on Mediterranean Africa.
erraticeldandil's review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
3.75
On the whole and what kept me reading was that this a book about a period of history that is rarely explored, partially because - as the author mentioned - the is a lack of more traditional historical sources like writings about the era. The book at least seemed well researched and provided very clear source lists with "annotations".
I did have a couple of qualms with some of things about the book in general though.
First, because of the limited "concrete" (from a Western sense) historical information available, at times the author finds it narratively neccesary to imagine the past. At some of these times author examines his biases and makes them clear. At others, he doesn't and it is hard to distinguish what is reasonable historical conjecture and what is speculation filtered through a euro/white/male centric point of view.
Next, the author often uses the terms "Black" and "White". However, at no point in the book does he define what these terms meant and implied within the time period discussed. The modern usage and meaning of these words is socially and historically constructed and I think that not examining the potential meanings of these words over time or the tacit assumption that these words had the same meaning as they do now in the time period discussed is limiting.
Finally, and this I cannot point to in any passage but was something I just got the sense of, at many points it felt like the author was more interested in the archeology of the objects he studied for the sake of the archeology and not because he wanted to truly understand or appreciate the people or the cultures they came from. Of course this is not a prerequisite to a history book at all, but I found something was lost in this very objective and detached point of view.
I did have a couple of qualms with some of things about the book in general though.
First, because of the limited "concrete" (from a Western sense) historical information available, at times the author finds it narratively neccesary to imagine the past. At some of these times author examines his biases and makes them clear. At others, he doesn't and it is hard to distinguish what is reasonable historical conjecture and what is speculation filtered through a euro/white/male centric point of view.
Next, the author often uses the terms "Black" and "White". However, at no point in the book does he define what these terms meant and implied within the time period discussed. The modern usage and meaning of these words is socially and historically constructed and I think that not examining the potential meanings of these words over time or the tacit assumption that these words had the same meaning as they do now in the time period discussed is limiting.
Finally, and this I cannot point to in any passage but was something I just got the sense of, at many points it felt like the author was more interested in the archeology of the objects he studied for the sake of the archeology and not because he wanted to truly understand or appreciate the people or the cultures they came from. Of course this is not a prerequisite to a history book at all, but I found something was lost in this very objective and detached point of view.