The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands in Around the World in 80 Books

Oct 11, 2015 Jim rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: biography, true_adventure, memoir, africa, military-non-fiction, travel

I found this book to be absolutely riveting. Hartley has actually related two tales here, one detailing his quest to shed some light on the circumstances surrounding the death of his father's friend Peter Davey; the other tale relates Hartley's own story from his education abroad to his misadventures as a foreign/war correspondent for the Reuters news agency.

As a journalist, he was dispatched to the world's hotspots: Croatia, Somalia, and Rwanda being foremost in my memory. He broke bread and r I found this book to be absolutely riveting. Hartley has actually related two tales here, one detailing his quest to shed some light on the circumstances surrounding the death of his father's friend Peter Davey; the other tale relates Hartley's own story from his education abroad to his misadventures as a foreign/war correspondent for the Reuters news agency.

As a journalist, he was dispatched to the world's hotspots: Croatia, Somalia, and Rwanda being foremost in my memory. He broke bread and rubbed shoulders with murderers and generals, nurses and nuns. He has witnessed inhumanity on such a grand scale that it's a wonder that he can even string sentences together today. He has attended far too many funerals for a man his age.

Hartley is African, born in Kenya and residing there to this day, so he can write about events on that continent with a legitimacy that a foreigner might lack. While he may be judgemental, he is compassionately so. He hides nothing from the reader, and relates his own faults and failings as readily as he points out flaws in others. He spares no detail, so the squeamish may be turned off by this book.

The reader will learn some things about journalism and the news networks, or perhaps have their worst suspicions confirmed: what is reported as fact is often untrue or twisted by the network in order to draw viewers or readers. One miracle child pulled from a pile of quicklimed bodies in a mass grave in Rwanda expired that very night, but was reported alive afterward in order to generate interest and retain an audience. When one of a famous actresses' photographers stepped on the arm of a malnourished child, it was kept out of the news as bad publicity.

The book has some flaws, a bit of sloppiness perhaps. The Canadian Royal Air Force he refers to on page 372 does not exist: it's the Royal Canadian Air Force. The way Hartley wrote it makes a proud military unit seem like a subsidiary of the Royal Air Force. And I would love to know what a "short-muzzle" Enfield rifle is (p.416). Presumably he refers to the old SMLE...the "M" stands for magazine, not muzzle!

There are some photos scattered throughout the book, but regrettably none of them are captioned so I was never sure of who or what was in the photo. But while they are a minor annoyance, the flaws do not significantly detract from what is a great book written by a man who was eyewitness to some of the most horrific events in history. ...more

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