Hartley, Aidan 1965-

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HARTLEY, Aidan 1965-

PERSONAL:

Born 1965, in Kenya; married; wife's name Claire; children: two. Education: Studied English at Balliol College, Oxford, and politics at London University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Laikipia, Kenya. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Grove/Atlantic, 841 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10003. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Journalist. Foreign correspondent for the Reuters news agency, Financial Times, and the London Times. Cofounder, African Environment News Services (AENS; online African-wide environmental news and information service).

WRITINGS:

The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands, Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Author of column for the Spectator.

SIDELIGHTS:

Aidan Hartley is an African-born, British-educated journalist whose first book, The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands, chronicles not only a family history, but also Hartley's fifteen years of experience as a correspondent in flash points from Rwanda to Bosnia. Hartley's family history figures strongly in his tale, and he details some four generations of it, from his great-great grandfather, who defended British settlements in New Zealand and won a Victoria Cross for his efforts to his own father, who was a colonial officer in Africa in the 1920s and went on to help build dams in Arabia.

Hartley's book takes its title from a hand-carved chest that the author discovered upon his father's death. Inside were the diaries of his father's best friend, Peter Davey, whose death half a century earlier was something of a mystery. Hartley, by this time himself burnt out by covering tragedy and mayhem throughout Africa and Europe in the 1990s, followed the trail of this diary to southern Arabia, in a search not only to reveal the enigma of Davey's death but also to come to terms with his own life. The resulting book contains, as Rob Nixon noted in the New York Times Book Review, "three trapped, potential others, each banging on the lid and hollering for air." The three tales are the saga of Hartley's family, the search for Peter Davey, and a memoir of a journalist who has seen too much famine and genocide. For Nixon, the various themes of Hartley's book did not mesh well, or were too large to be contained by the others. "An unresolved imperial nostalgia suffuses The Zanzibar Chest—a yearning not for empire but for the purposeful lives of action that empire allowed men like Hartley's father and Peter Davey to sustain," Nixon commented. However, the same reviewer noted that "no such sentimentality mars the Rwanda and Somalia sections of the book. Skillfully and with deceptive simplicity, they deliver the deepest hauntings." Similarly, Joshua Hammer, writing in Newsweek International, felt that "one of the few shortcomings in Hartley's book is the diversion he makes into the life of Peter Davey.… Hartley would like us to see parallels between his own life and that of the unfortunate Davey, another expatriate." For Hammer the "most vivid part of Hartley's memoir is the meltdown of Somalia in the early 1990s." Hammer went on to observe that "Hartley's narrative is far more than a travelogue from hell, however. It is a cry of moral outrage.… Hartley has fashioned a mesmerizing story of pain and loss." Writing in National Geographic Adventure, Anthony Brandt also commended Hartley's book as "affecting," and observed that the author is "excellent with facts."

More praise for The Zanzibar Chest came from a contributor to the Economist, who called it a "lyrical, passionate memoir," and from Booklist critic Vernon Ford, for whom the work was a "fascinating odyssey." Writing in London's Daily Telegraph, Janine di Giovanni observed that "there is no conventional narrative here; it's more a succession of tense, sad vignettes knitted together as the author remembers them." The result is "moving," the critic concluded. Other critics on both sides of the Atlantic applauded Hartley's work. For a contributor to Publishers Weekly, The Zanzibar Chest is a "mesmerizing chronicle," and a "sweeping, poetic homage to Africa." Anthony Stattin, writing in the London Sunday Times, called it a "muscular, heartbreaking book." And Bart McDowell, reviewing the book in the Washington Times, noted that Hartley's work "must rank with other great journalistic memoirs."