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Imperial Reckoning
The Untold Story Of Britain's Gulag In Kenya
by Caroline Elkins

5.4 based on 18 reviews read critic reviews how did we calculate this? based on 17 votes read user comments rate this book

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BOOKS:

• Histories Of The Hanged by David Anderson

• Official Publisher Site

The Harvard professor devoted a decade of her life researching this look at the system of brutal prison camps set up by the British colonial government during its war against the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya in the 1950s--camps in which thousands of Kenyans perished.

Henry Holt and Company, 496 pages
01/11/2005
$27.50

ISBN: 0805076530

Nonfiction
History

NOTES:
Published under the title "Britain's Gulag" in the UK. Winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...

Los Angeles Times Stanley Meisler

Writing with white heat, [Elkins] details the unsavory story of summary executions, rapes, sodomy with bottles, castration, flogging with chains and rhino whips, attacks by dogs, humiliation by nakedness and a host of torture techniques including electric shock, near drowning and sleep deprivation. The detail is sometimes numbing but always vital. [16 Jan 2005, p.R5]

Publishers Weekly

A profoundly chilling portrait of the inherent racism and violence of "colonial logic."

Kirkus Reviews

Sure to touch off scholarly debate and renew interest in recent, deliberately forgotten history.

Library Journal Edward McCormack

This compelling account of the British colonial government's atrocities can be compared to Adam Hochschild's "King Leopold's Ghost." [1 Jan 2005, p.127]

Booklist Gilbert Taylor

Filling a previously blank page in history, Elkins' pioneering study is a crucial recording of Kenyan history in particular, and that of African decolonization in general. [15 Nov 2004, p.548]

The New Yorker

With the moral fervor (and, occasionally, the overreachings) of a prosecutor, Elkins provides potent evidence of how a society warped by racism can descend into an almost casual inhumanity.

Washington Post Mahmood Mamdani

Though at times it reads as an indictment, Imperial Reckoning offers much more than just outrage, including the rare chance to hear the voices of victims of the counterinsurgency.

London Review Of Books Bernard Porter

It is the scale of the British atrocities in Kenya that is the most startling revelation of these books.

The Nation Daphne Eviatar

But it is the conditions of that imprisonment that reveal the depths to which the British sank to maintain the illusion of their great empire, and which would ultimately prove its undoing. Elkins has bravely done justice to that history.

The Independent Stephen Howe

Although she says much about Mau Mau detainees' staunchness for their beliefs, there is disappointingly little explanation of what these were; of what motivated Mau Mau.

The Economist

Ms Elkins's willingness to use flimsy evidence to make the case for settler wrongdoing may have led her, in this instance, to suspend her usual rigorous judgment.

Daily Telegraph Max Hastings

It is Elkins, however, who is an assistant history professor at Harvard. But her anger causes her to eschew intellectual rigour in favour of a good deal of somewhat inelegantly written ranting. No cliché is left unturned.

The New York Times Book Review Daniel Bergner

An important and excruciating record; it will shock even those who think they have assumed the worst about Europe's era of control in Africa... Yet for all its power, Imperial Reckoning is not as compelling as it should be. With so much evidence of atrocity, Elkins often forgoes complexity and careful analysis.

New York Review Of Books Neal Ascherson

Oral history is famously unreliable, but the landscape of brutality revealed in her interviews is in all too many cases corroborated by witnesses without mutual contact. And Imperial Reckoning shows how powerfully, at last, the African voice has entered African historiography.

San Francisco Chronicle Austin Merrill

Anderson and Elkins are academics, and in places their books feel overstudied. Their research and meticulous attention to detail are remarkable, but at times their narrative threads fray, and we are left with page after page of gory details and data.

The Spectator Robert Oakeshott

Elkins’ numbers are fundamentally implausible. For one thing the ‘loyal Kikuyu’ seem to have been airbrushed out of the calculation.

Daily Telegraph Nicholas Best

[Elkins] says the Kikuyu were often better farmers than the British and claims that 1.5 million, "nearly the entire Kikuyu population", were detained by the colonial authorities. These claims are ludicrous. She can also produce information that supports her case, yet somehow misses information that does not.

The Guardian Richard Dowden

Where [David] Anderson gets inside the minds and passions of both sides and, best of all, inside the agony of those simply caught up in the horror and forced to make appalling choices, Elkins remains rigidly one dimensional in her understanding.

The average user rating for this book is 5.4 (out of 10) based on 17 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.

John O gave it a3:
The reviews of Elkins' book which point to the great many flaws of evidence and analysis are very convincing. This isn't about whether the British Empire was something worth defending. This is a matter of accuracy. Is this a book which deserves the praise it has received as a piece of scholarship, a work which will endure? The answer is no. What is especially disheartening is what Elkins' career success says about the way American universities operate these days. Condiser this - a badly flawed piece of scholarship can be produced in one of the greatest history departments in the world. That's bad enough - what's worse is that the same department then turns around and hires her, then gives her tenure. What's the moral? It's not about merit anymore its about pedigree. And apparently if you're in the Ivys, it's okay to hire your own less than stellar students. There's a name for that: academic inbreeding. An unfortunate precedent for the state of higher education in this country.

david k gave it a9:
Well written. Being a kenyan,I cant believe the success with which this history has been hidden from us and the rest of the world. A must read.

peyi a gave it a10:
Passionate but scrupulously researched writing. Elkins combines multiple research methodologies in uncovering a history that was deliberately consigned to the margins of global memory by a colonial and post colonial machinery. critics will find her crititique of the fantasies of empire disconcerting but it is indeed welcome by all rigorous scholars seeking evidence that illuminates the reality of settler colonialism. Her tenacity, rigor and passion are truly outstanding and refreshing.

Goodev M gave it a7:
Despite British atrocities, rarely does one come across a well organised and diciplined terrorist organization such as Mau Mau bring the might of their Colonial masters to their knees. Credit of course goes to patriots such as Dedan Kimathi who gave his life for the cause, as well as Jomo Kenyatta who remained steadfast. Not unlike Nelson Mandela, Kenyatta had the true spirit of forgiveness, an abject lesson to current Israeli-Palestininian conflict.

DM T gave it a9:
Excellent research. Not always elegantly written (which is why it gets 9 instead of 10) but certainly shows academic seal for detail. The people who do not want to know what it uncovers should stay away. It can be a hard read in places and will no doubt upset many citizens of the UK.

roger s gave it a2:
This book is so inaccurate as to be worthless.

Hank V gave it a10:
Excellent book that exposes British atrocities at its worst.

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