Book Club-Love, Africa

Join us for dinner at Café Colucci/Berkeley and discussion of Love, Africa, by Jeffrey Gettleman. Please RSVP to Jayma at jaymaghana@earthlink.net by the Sunday before if you plan to attend so she can know who and how many to expect.

Discussion Questions:

• What are some of the love stories the author is telling in this book?
• The author is a war correspondent. How does his experience as a journalist affect the way he writes about Africa? How does his experience in war affect how he sees Africa?
• Before he settled into a career in journalism, he tried out careers in portrait photography & humanitarian aid. How did those skills & early experiences affect his perspective?
• His writing for the New York Times on famine & conflict in Somalia & Sudan won him the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2012. What would you say are the differences in his voice & the content of his writing on those 2 countries as a journalist, where he’s an observer, as opposed to a memoirist, where he’s a participant in events.
• You can watch a short Times video featuring the author on Kenya’s effort to standardize payment on matatus (public mini-buses) through Beba cards. What insights does this give you into the author as a person, as a journalist, as a memoirist?
• Shortly after finishing the book, the author moved from the Times’ East Africa bureau to its South East Asia bureau, where covered the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, before it was on most peoples’ radar. You can hear him speak about those experiences on the Times’ podcast The Daily. Which experiences did he write about in Love, Africa that might impact the way he views Myanmar?