Read decently by Pete Cross, this audiobook was short, to the point, and highly informative. Farmer talks about the 2014 epidemic of Ebola that assaulted Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, but the roots of the problems reach far back beyond that into almost ancient history - that of the exploitation of Africa beginning with a conference in 1884 that resulted in some 90% of America being "owned" by European powers by the turn of the twentieth century. Slavery may well have been considered over by then, but in effect it really wasn't. The location of it was merely switched back to Africa instead of remaining visible in Europe and the Americas.
Farmer does an excellent job of digging beneath the scary news headlines of the ravages of various diseases on the African continent, particularly Ebola, the most nightmarish of them all, but he never loses sight of the victims of this horrific outbreak, or of what truly caused it to be so devastating. As the book description says, he rebuts "misleading claims about the origins of Ebola and why it spread so rapidly" and "he traces West Africa’s chronic health failures back to centuries of exploitation and injustice.
Books like this one ought to be required reading (or in this case, listening!), especially in times like these when a world-wide and equally scary pandemic is affecting everyone, everywhere, from all walks of life and socio-econiomic backgrounds. You will never view African epidemics in the same way again. I commend it.
