I Didn't Do It For You

It's not so odd that I picked up Michela Wrong's I Didn't Do It For You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation. What's odd is that I finished it. I'm all about starting books. Not so big on finishing them. But when I picked up Ms. Wrong's (gotta love the name) journalistic account of Eritrea's struggle from independence from Ethiopia, I honestly couldn't stop coming back to it. First off, Eritrea's a country that as of a few years ago, I (a map and geography junkie as a kid) didn't even know existed. Second, Wrong's just a flat-out amazing writer. Her opening descriptions of Eritrea's blast-furnace climate, craggy topography and time-warp Italian architecture hooked me (made me want to visit, truth be told); her accounting of the country's heroic, ascetic, supported-by-nobody secession movement was romantic; and her dissection of the newly independent country's fall into despotic bickering tragic. When I discovered that The Economist named it one of the year's best books, I felt kind of validated. I can't recommend it enough.