I do not understand the world. This was a book that took you inside of all of the things that the people went through.
First Kill Your Family provides an up close and personal look at the war that has been raging within Ugandan borders for well over 20 years. Peter Eichstaedt examines this war from every aspect he can find, including marching into the jungle with Machar and others to find Kony and talk peace.
This was one of the most disappointing books I've read about the Acholi people and the war in Northern Uganda, and I've read many. I actually read this on the plane to Kampala, and could not even bring myself to finish it.
I would have to agree with Pistol Pete, the story itself was very good, the reporting, not so much. I like to read up an the perils faced in other parts of the world, Africa, in particular.
I just returned from a very full two week trip working north of Kampala. I met with social workers, doctors, pastors, villagers, etc...
In "First Kill Your Family," journalist Peter Eichstaedt explores why Uganda has been immersed in a twenty year war and what is keeping the country from finding a workable resolution. He begins with firsthand accounts of the child soldiers and "brides," that is youths who were kidnapped and forced into the Lord's Resistance Army.
This is a short, quick-reading book on the long-running Ugandan civil war by a journalist who seems a relative stranger to African issues. He gives a brief overview of this long-overlooked situation and devotes chapters to such other African phenomena as the widespread belief in witchcraft and the child-soldier phenomenon.
As the author states, this is a brutal conflict in the heart of Africa. Most Westerners have probably not heard of this conflict, and few people travel to Uganda to actually be threatened by it.
Peter Eichstaedt has ventured into a living nightmare when he took up the challenge to write First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army. Uganda has been in a state of chaos for more than twenty years, since the time the Lord's Resistance Army has waged a guerrilla war in the northern part of the country.
This topic is important, misunderstood and too little known. Your average American can more easily find out where Lindsey Lohan ate lunch yesterday than find information regarding the various ongoing atrocities in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.
What kind of a world is this? The child whose story is told in these pages is a human monster, a conscience-less killer who smashed in his own parents' skulls.
Having been so impressed with Ishmael Beah's book, "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," I picked up this book hoping to get a better understanding of some of the atrocities occurring throughout South Africa. I wasn't all together certain where this particular book, which follows the LRA's control over Uganda, was headed.
While much attention has been given to the situations in Darfur and Rwanda, the 20-year-long war in Uganda has gone on unacknowledged. In 'First Kill Your Family', journalist Peter Eichstaedt's goal was to bring to light the suffering of the people living in war-torn Northern Uganda.
Full disclosure: I wasn't able to get through this book. A compelling title to a book that's too disjointed to be particularly compelling.
For two decades, a bizarre guerrilla movement called the "Lord's Resistance Army" - part Christian-animist cult, part ethnic uprising, part simple banditry - has plagued northern Uganda and the adjoining areas of Sudan and the Congo. Its chieftain, Joseph Kony, is a former witch doctor who claims to be "fighting for the Ten Commandments".
