Author: Giles Foden Year: 1998 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Historical fiction, Award winners, War/Military, Politics Culture: Africa
Purchase/reserch links:
ISBNs: 9780375703317 0375703314 0375403604 |
|
From the publisher (source: The Internet Book List): Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is called to the scene of a bizarre accident: Idi Amin, careening down a dirt road in his red Maserati, has run over a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, in his obsession for all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. And so begins a fateful dalliance with the central African leader whose Emperor Jones-style autocracy would transform into a reign of terror.
In The Last King of Scotland Foden's Amin is as ridiculous as he is abhorrent: a grown man who must be burped like an infant, a self-proclaimed cannibalist who, at the end of his 8 years in power, would be responsible for 300,000 deaths. And as Garrigan awakens to his patient's baroque barbarism--and his own complicity in it--we enter a venturesome meditation on conscience, charisma, and the slow corruption of the human heart.
Similar books:
|