Interesting book

This was a truly insightful piece of work!
Very enjoyable and well worth a listen!

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Prevail

Like most, I am well aware of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s but didn't know many of the details. From historical archives and the commentaries of those involved, this book provides a captivating read of events before, during and after the invasion.

This book covers the Ethiopian insurrection, the Italian atrocities, including the use of chemical warfare and how the rest of the world ignored these war crimes. How Ethiopia was treated by the British afterwards and the country's feat in the decades up to current times is outlined in some detail.

I would recommend this book.

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Often biased and not shy about it's opinions.

I'm around 8 hours in at the moment, and I do hope it pulls itself together. The invasion of Ethiopia by Italy was a terrible event, leading to tremendous suffering, and it needs to be told. The problem with this book, however, is that it falls over itself to airbrush away all problems with Ethiopia at the time, creating a wildly one sided narrative. Ethiopia was an aggressive dictatorship which carried out slavery on a massive scale. In the years before and after this book, Ethiopia would invade it's neighbours, carrying out genocide and mass mutilation.

In this book these details are airbrushed away. When British officials oppose Ethiopia joining the league of nations due to its aggression and reliance on a huge slave population, the book dismisses them as racists who just don't like Ethiopia because of the black population. When an American woman comments that the Ethiopian dictator needs to be removed from power and Ethiopian slavery abolished, she is described as "ditzy and self absorbed". In the world of this book, Ethiopia is a pure nation which has done no wrong, and only racists ever opposed it.

The Italian invasion of Ethiopia was horrific and should not have happened, but this book does not give a good understanding of what the actual situation was. It wastes pages which could have been used to discuss these issues on the lives of American and British journalists, following yet another non-Ethiopian's story. As of yet, not a single Italian's story has been mentioned in the book, further compounding its skewed narrative.

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The tedious, overwrought, prolix narrative is ruined by a dreadful reading.

I gave up three hours in, having learned almost nothing about Ethiopia, Italy or the politics of the time but a great deal about the author's anachronistic views.

Tedious and opinionated with frequent long and pointless expeditions into American race politics it may be that the ostensible subject might be addressed somewhere around hour twelve?

Perhaps there is an interesting, useful history hidden somewhere in this book, maybe a tenth the size of the actual work. Perhaps not, mind you.

Bad as the writing is, it is nothing, nothing at all compared to the dreadfulness of the reading. The lector appears to be channeling Liberace after twenty banana liqueurs and in particular treats us to the very, very worst pretend British accents I have ever heard in any circumstances. Someone called Moose-olini is bad, English aristocrats who don't attend Eaten have been to Hair-row while Londoners are all Cackneys (actually, that is true) - you get the flavour. Unbearably bad. Pah!

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1 person found this helpful