Reading Waiting for Charlie is intimate and intense, plunged into the author's voice and experience, right beside her, right inside her. You'll go to Sierra Leone and you'll go to Senegal. You'll talk to people about Africa, to Africans and non-Africans who are suffering and who are worried, and you won't feel pity--but you'll feel close to them. You'll get what you think is malaria but is actually Lassa virus. You'll think about the nature of cruelty. You'll see the reality of slavery. You'll briefly enjoy a country like Madagascar where "the colors looked brighter, and the rhythm of life felt fluid," a culture of relational sensitivity and nuance, and then you'll understand how easily and quickly all that beauty has disappeared in the last few decades. You'll be dismayed by African and non-African politics and corruption. You'll get married to an African! By his side, you'll get taken off airplanes and grilled by American immigration officers. Waiting for Charlie is angry and sad and wry and inherently hopeful as an act of writing that serves to illumine and reveal. If you are at all interested in Africa, read this book.

Sharman Apt Russell

The best books not only enlarge our understanding of the world, reading them enlarges and even transforms ourselves in relation to that world. Waiting for Charlie is that kind of book. Travel with Susan Zakin to Africa and you'll visit places Westerners rarely see and learn stories we rarely hear--for good reason. These are not easy or comfortable journeys, but they are necessary and eloquent in their courageous pursuit of the truth. Zakin is as fearless and as big-hearted as her prose, and dogged in probing for the causes of the violence and dysfunction afflicting so many parts of this diverse and outrageously beautiful continent.

Susan J. Tweit

This is an excellent read in the tone and style of the best work of the great travel writers, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux and Eric Newby's "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush," only the focus is Africa, which it captures with brilliant insight. The next best thing to actually being there, and reading is considerably safer.

William Thatcher Dowell