|
Outstanding
|
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]
|
|
Outstanding
|
Publishers Weekly
A profoundly chilling portrait of the inherent racism and violence of "colonial logic."
|
|
Favorable
|
Kirkus Reviews
Sure to touch off scholarly debate and renew interest in recent, deliberately forgotten history.
|
|
Favorable
|
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]
|
|
Favorable
|
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]
|
|
Favorable
|
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.
|
|
Favorable
|
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.
|
|
Favorable
|
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.
|
|
Favorable
|
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.
|
|
Mixed
|
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.
|
|
Mixed
|
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.
|
|
Mixed
|
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.
|
|
Mixed
|
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.
|
|
Mixed
|
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.
|
|
Mixed
|
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.
|
|
Unfavorable
|
The Spectator Robert Oakeshott
Elkins’ numbers are fundamentally implausible. For one thing the ‘loyal Kikuyu’ seem to have been airbrushed out of the calculation.
|
|
Unfavorable
|
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.
|
|
Unfavorable
|
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.
|
