Customer Reviews (3)

Pro-Eritrean Propaganda
Pateman says in his intro that Eritreans almost universally like his book, and it's easy to see why. This is a highly uncritical, almost cartoonish look at the Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict, in which the Eritreans are always brave and enlightened, the Ethiopians cowardly and villainous. Eritrea is "an oasis of peace and energy... a place of hope for all fair-minded men and women." Why, it's practically the Switzerland of east Africa. It's particularly irritating that Pateman chides Western academics for uncritically supporting Ethiopia throughout the conflict, then describes Eritrea in the same propagandistic terms. Pateman is clearly too close to his subject to evaluate it objectively. For a more sophisticated and nuanced look at this topic, check out Robert Kaplan's "Surrender or Starve".

Workmanlike List Of Eritrea Knowledge
For a definitive summary of Eritrean history and social knowledge, you can't ask for much more than this magnum opus from Pateman. Eritrea's 30-year struggle for independence from Ethiopia, finally achieved in 1993, is a remarkable story which deserves much more attention from the outside world, and Pateman is just the sympathetic and personally knowledgeable expert to tell the story. While this book is a treasure trove of all sorts of useful information on all aspects of Eritrea, it is mostly written as a never-ending list with few overall insights or analysis. The early parts of the book show some unprofessional sour grapes toward other writers on the subject, and for some reason Chapter 1 devolves into a useless dissertation on Marxist theories of nationalism which is straight from disconnected professor-land. Most importantly, history has made this book's ongoing usefulness a shaky proposition. The most immense event imaginable for Eritrea - their independence - happened right after this book's first edition, making much of it outdated. This spectacular historical development should have encouraged a significant re-write, or even an entire new book, from this admitted expert authority on the country (though a lack of resources would be forgivable). Thus, Pateman's quick and sketchy epilogue on post-independence developments in this second edition does not do full justice to the remarkable story of Eritrea and its hardworking people. [~doomsdayer520~]

The definitive book on Eritrea
I came new to this subject but became rivetted by Pateman's engaged and engaging style. He writes in an easily, understandable but profound way about one of the most significant struggles for nationhood in the XXcentury. He covers many centuries of history but convinces me that Eritreais indeed a special place. An enduring sense of nationhood developed duringthe liberation struggle a sense which has deepened during the cowardlyEthiopian attacks of the last few months. Pateman has helped me understandwhy the Eritreans have survived andwhy thay may become very importantactors in Africa in the next century. ... Read more

Product Description
Ras Alula was one of the big men or Telek Saw who played aprominent role in the making of modern Ethiopia. He was famous enoughto be lamented by a British historian as, "the greatest leader thatabyssinia has produced since the death of the emperor Theodore in1868." As remembered by the Ethiopians and reflected in theirliterature, "The famous and brave Ras Alula." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

This is unique, interesting and well documented book
I read with great interest Haggai's latest book: "Ras Alula and the Scramble for Africa: A Political Biography: Ethiopia & Eritrea 1875-1897"

As most people agree this is unique, interesting and well documented book. Only I wish, for historical reason, the title was different. For instance Abyssinia rather than "Eritrea & Ethiopia" because these names were given by colonial powers that divided and ruled the country with disastrous consequence that we all know.

He should be applauded for his effort and great interest in Abyssinian unique history.

Deborah Jessie
Paris, France ... Read more

Product Description
Completely updated and revised for this new edition, our unique electronic book on two CD-ROMs has an amazing collection of the finest federal documents and resources about Eritrea, providing encyclopedic coverage of all aspects of the country. This disc set provides a truly fantastic reference source, with over one hundred thousand pages reproduced in Adobe Acrobat format! There is complete coverage of newsworthy material about Eritrea, including Ethiopia and Eritrea, doing business, USAID (over 5000 pages), agriculture, energy, Mickey Leland Initiative, Reconciliation Processes, commercial guides, food aid, and more.This incredible and comprehensive series on the countries of the world contains material from the State Department, Department of Defense, White House, and cabinet agencies including Agriculture, Energy, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.There is complete information about geography, people, government, the economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues.In addition to the nation-specific material, as a bonus we have included reports about every country on the globe, with 271 nations, dependent areas, and other entities identified by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA World Factbook is considered an invaluable "world encyclopedia" reference book.This incredible two CD-ROM set is packed with over 100,000 pages reproduced using Adobe Acrobat PDF software - allowing direct viewing on Windows and Macintosh systems. The Acrobat cataloging technology adds enormous value and uncommon functionality to this impressive collection of government documents and material.Our news and educational discs are privately compiled collections of official public domain U.S. government files and documents - they are not produced by the federal government. They are designed to provide a convenient user-friendly reference work, utilizing the benefits of the Adobe Acrobat format to uniformly present thousands of pages t ... Read more

Product Description
Completely updated and revised for this new edition, our unique electronic book on two CD-ROMs has an amazing collection of the finest federal documents and resources about Eritrea, providing encyclopedic coverage of all aspects of the country. This disc set provides a truly fantastic reference source, with over one hundred thousand pages reproduced in Adobe Acrobat format! There is complete coverage of newsworthy material about Eritrea, including Ethiopia and Eritrea, doing business, USAID (over 5000 pages), agriculture, energy, Mickey Leland Initiative, Reconciliation Processes, commercial guides, food aid, and more.This incredible and comprehensive series on the countries of the world contains material from the State Department, Department of Defense, White House, and cabinet agencies including Agriculture, Energy, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.There is complete information about geography, people, government, the economy, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues.In addition to the nation-specific material, as a bonus we have included reports about every country on the globe, with 271 nations, dependent areas, and other entities identified by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA World Factbook is considered an invaluable "world encyclopedia" reference book.This incredible two CD-ROM set is packed with over 100,000 pages reproduced using Adobe Acrobat PDF software - allowing direct viewing on Windows and Macintosh systems. The Acrobat cataloging technology adds enormous value and uncommon functionality to this impressive collection of government documents and material.Our news and educational discs are privately compiled collections of official public domain U.S. government files and documents - they are not produced by the federal government. They are designed to provide a convenient user-friendly reference work, utilizing the benefits of the Adobe Acrobat format to uniformly present thousands of pages t ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from APS Diplomat Strategic Balance in the Middle East, published by Pam Stein/Input Solutions on April 17, 2000. The length of the article is 569 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: EAST AFRICA - Eritrea.(relations with Israel and Ethiopia)(Brief Article)
Publication: APS Diplomat Strategic Balance in the Middle East (Newsletter)
Date: April 17, 2000
Publisher: Pam Stein/Input Solutions
Volume: 39Issue: 4Page: NA

Article Type: Brief Article

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
The focus of this book is on the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) from its formation in the early 1970s to its victory in 1991, and its transformation from liberation front to ruling party and government of independent Eritrea. ... Read more

Product Description
Eritrea Ecology & Nature Protection Handbook (World Business, Investment and Government Library) ... Read more

Product Description
Robert D. Kaplan is one of our leading international journalists, someone who can explain the most complicated and volatile regions and show why they’re relevant to our world. In Surrender or Starve, Kaplan illuminates the fault lines in the Horn of Africa, which is emerging as a crucial region for America’s ongoing war on terrorism.

Reporting from Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Eritrea, Kaplan examines the factors behind the famine that ravaged the region in the 1980s, exploring the ethnic, religious, and class conflicts that are crucial for understanding the region today. He offers a new foreword and afterword that show how the nations have developed since the famine, and why this region will only grow more important to the United States. Wielding his trademark ability to blend on-the-ground reporting and cogent analysis, Robert D. Kaplan introduces us to a fascinating part of the world, one that it would behoove all of us to know more about. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Atypical for Kaplan
Surrender or Starve is a solid book that deserves reading, especially if you knew nothing of the Ethiopian/Eritrean conflict.When I was young, I distinctly recall images of the famine in Ethiopia, calls to action from within the United States but, like Kaplan emphasizes, the West did not appreciate the true root cause of these problems: ethnic conflict.At the very least, I was ignorant of these factors.Kaplan made me investigate deeper and in doing so, I found a lot of interesting material on the Internet.One mild example of the two countries animosity of one another was found when I was looking for a good Ethiopian or Eritrean restaurant in NYC.I found one, incidentally, and the food is different but good--first time for Ethiopian for me.At any rate, a listing of Eritrean restaurants on an Eritrean-American website showed several but apparently 2-3 were "bought by an Ethiopian" and were blocked out with those words bolded in red.I guess for the time being with the struggle still fresh in everyone's memory (and likely to ignite again), it's not appropriate to patronize your enemy.

more relevant than ever
I have enjoyed reading a half-dozen books by Robert Kaplan, a journalist who writes about foreign affairs for the Atlantic Monthly, and this one was no exception. Although some critics consider Kaplan's analyses as overly pessimistic, most give him high praise for his skill in combining first person travel narrative, history, geo-political analysis, and a street-level view of what is unfolding in the farthest corners of our world. Surrender or Starve was first published in 1988, right after the epic famines that devastated the Horn of Africa from 1984-1987; this new edition includes a new foreword and a postscript on Eritrea (which declared independence from Ethiopia in 1991 after a thirty-year war).

Kaplan is an unapologetically opinionated writer. Most of the media covered the famines that devastated eastern Africa as caused by horrible droughts, which is partly true. But Kaplan insists that Africans, and not only God, were also to blame, because the famines were greatly exacerbated by ethnic conflict and class warfare. In Sudan, the northern Muslim government in Khartoum ignored the plight of Christians in the south. In Ethiopia, the ruthless Marxist regime of Mengistu Hailie Mariam (1977-1991) turned the famine into a weapon of war against the ethnic Oromos, Tigreans and Eritreans. Massive "villagization" or forced collectivizations that displaced five million people were hailed by Mengistu as "famine relief." In 1986, for example, the World Human Rights Guide "gave Ethiopia the lowest rating of any country in the world" (p. 81). Today Ethiopia remains one of the poorest countries in the world. What makes Kaplan such an engaging writer is his stated intention to think and write about Africa in "a bold, unpopular, but more realistic way, judging Africa by the same standards of moral conduct that would apply to any other part of the globe" (p. xii). Characteristic of all his books, Kaplan thus places himself squarely in the tradition of realpolitik as opposed to all forms of political idealism.

The crimes of Mengistu and the Dergue.
This book is almost completely about how the Communist government of Ethiopia misled the West into thinking that a small harvest was the reason for the mass starvation of 1984.Most remember this as the time when the charitable West stepped in with huge donations of grain and musician celebrities formed to perfom Band Aid.It is bad because the main culprit was the dictator Mengistu and his Communist buddies doing forced resettlement, collectivization, and centralized villages.They wanted to win the civil war raging in Ethiopia and install a Marxist government.Millions died, the Hollywood establishment blamed bad weather, and leftists told the West they weren't doing enough.Well the Ethiopian government could have stopped the genocide by stopping its failed policies.

This is an eye awakening book about how the West was deceived by a Marxist Third World government.There is some material in the book about Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen but the main focus is Ethiopia.The fallen Ethiopian government failed the people it governed.

Robert kaplan need more research
The book takes a view of one side approach. I lived in Ethiopia in the 1980's and most of the staff Mr. Kaplan talked about never happened. The historical facts are missing. Emperor Menelik was not the first Amhara king there was Emperor Tewdros form Gojam which is the main Amhara region who united Ethiopia from Red Sea to Showa. Reading the book makes me think that the author had a good close relationship with then gorilla fighters now the people in power in Ethiopia and its former province Eriteria.

The worst book on the Horn of Africa I have ever read
Kaplan's book "Balkan Ghosts" was described by slavist H. Cooper (Slavic Review 52, 1993) as "a dreadful mix of unfounded generalizations, misinformation, outdated sources, personal prejudices and bad writing". The same can be applied to "Surrender or starve". Any specialist could point dozens of minor errors in this book, but lack of scholarship is not the worst. Kaplan is exasperatingly tendentious and partial and his extraordinary simplification and misunderstanding of the conflict in the Horn is outrageous. He overemphasizes the ethnic component, sometimes dangerously approaching racism in his contempt for the Amharas (they are all intrinsically bad). To be sure, the Derg (the communist regime) was evil, but linking a particular culture (the Amharas) with a transient political regime that was imposed against the people's will is absolutely wrong. Besides, anyone minimally informed knows how many Amharas suffered by the resettlement policies of the Derg.
Worst of all, Kaplan embraces the politics he presumedly criticizes: "Surrender or starve" is not the slogan of the former Ethiopian communist regime, it is Kaplan's own motto. According to the author, we should have left 10 million Ethiopians starve in 1984-85, so as to foster a local rebellion against communist rule! To put it bluntly, this book is scholarly defective and morally despicable.

Forget Kaplan. If you really want to be informed about the complex reality of Ethiopia and neighboring countries, take a look at any of the books written by historians Bahru Zewde and Harold G. Marcus or by anthropologist Donald Donham. And if you want to be informed and at the same time enjoy a superb literary experience go for Ryszard Kapuscinski's "The Emperor"!


... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

For anyone who wants the facts, the light, before the heat.
A very methodical and objective look at the roots of one of the most heated, longest, bitter, and sadly unnoticed wars of our time.The author shows the context through scholarly research of documents and statements that proceeded the eruption of the roof of Northeast Africa, now Eritrea and Ethiopia.I believe it is a gem of objective refrence in an often emotionally charged field. ... Read more

Product Description
Eritrea: A ""Spy"" Guide (World ""Spy"" Guide Library) ... Read more