Reviews of books that explain power, history, and the continent — what the argument is, who it serves, and whether the evidence holds.
Read whole in 2026, as war returns to eastern Congo, Conrad’s 1899 novella is less about one man’s madness than about a company that judged atrocity as “unsound method” and sent home a lie. That is its enduring power, and Chinua Achebe’s charge still marks its limits.
Michael Connelly’s new book returns the retired detective to MacLaren Children’s Center and the unsolved death of a boyhood friend. The childhood chapters are the true achievement; once the present-day investigation swells into a federal case, the novel is less sure of its own scale.
Nicolas Niarchos follows battery materials from extraction to geopolitical competition, challenging the idea that clean technology arrives without a social bill. His account is most revealing when the people and infrastructure behind the energy transition disrupt its great-power narrative.
Joe Studwell argues that African prosperity depends on practical choices about farming, manufacturing and finance, not an escape from some unique continental curse. His optimism is useful precisely because it invites scrutiny of the institutions needed to turn policy into durable gains.
Kevin Roose’s The AGI Chronicles takes readers inside the race to build artificial general intelligence, revealing the ambitions, rivalries and fears driving Silicon Valley’s most powerful AI companies—and raising a bigger question about who gets to shape humanity’s technological future.