In Land of Tears: The Exploration and Exploitation of Equatorial Africa, Yale University Professor Robert Harms deftly and authoritatively recounts the region’s compelling, fascinating, appalling, and tragic history … This is a thoughtful and deeply researched book that makes for gripping, if sometimes uncomfortable, reading. This is history at its best: authoritative, insightful, and engaging … History usually casts a long shadow. The legacy of the roughly 80 years of colonial rule still haunts equatorial Africa. One can only hope that Professor Harms will tell the next part of the story as vividly and effectively as he has told the first.
