Customer Reviews:
 A book, not a pamphlet November 25, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a book, not a pamphlet. You can tell by the price. Apparently, writing a check to CARE is too complicated, so they created this 64 page pam--book, cut Amazon in for some, a publisher in for some, and send maybe a quarter to CARE.
Still, the early pages of the pambophoklet contain jokes and asides, and the later pages contain more, and there are color pictures, which surely means it's a book, not a pamphlet.
If you like CARE, and you're not sure what their mailing address is, can't use Google, or don't have a checkbook anyway, this is the book for you. Fortunately, unlike many books in this price range, this one is very easy to finish, and it's more entertaining than most pamphlets on Africa, which tend to be longer to boot.
 Bill Bryson's African Diary July 19, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book did not have any of the comic timing I have come to expect with Bryson. It read more like a promotional pamphlet for Care Inc. I would not recommend.
 A snippet of Bill Bryson June 3, 2007
The same excellent travel writing from Bill Bryson ... just a bit smaller, and the profits to charity. Worth a read.
Donate $12 to charity and get this book as a thank-you gift May 19, 2007
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
CARE International, a global charity, invited travel writer Bill Bryson to visit Kenya to write about the group's programs there. This book is the result. The total text is about the length of a long magazine article in an outlet such as Vanity Fair or The New Yorker, and there are about a dozen pages of high-quality color pictures.
All the proceeds are donated to CARE. In effect, you're donating $12.00 to charity to read a very positive magazine story about CARE International. Bryson is a talented writer, his accounts are interesting, and CARE is a good organization.
So, overall I felt it was a good deal but the book is not particularly distinguished beyond this. It's not Bryson's best writing, but it's good enough. The most effective bits concern his fear of flying in small planes, as opposed to the people he meets. His discussion of CARE is a straightforward puff piece, but I can live with that.
Too Short April 15, 2007
Bill Bryson's great, I love his books, and this is typical Bill Bryson, but it's too short. I realize it was written strictly as a fundraiser for CARE--okay. Still, I know B.B. could come up with a lot more material than this on an eight-day trip to Africa. I zipped through this book in what seemed like about five minutes. I was hoping for more.
Bill, hon, you could probably have written more than this whole book on the African slums alone, if you'd wanted to. One thing I found interesting is that apparently even the very bad slum he visited, did have public schools for the kids. We have kids adopted from Haiti. Similar slums in Haiti don't have schools--only people who can afford to pay fees can send their kids to school in Haiti. So even this terrible African slum is not as bad as it gets. Maybe Bill should do Haiti next.
I also think it's interesting that (similar to Haiti) you see little girls with their hair beautifully braided, even in the poorest slums (as seen in one of the book's photos).
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