Go Tell the Crocodiles: Chasing Prosperity in Mozambique - Hardcover

Rowan Moore Gerety is a journalist based in Miami. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the Miami Herald, Slate, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and he has produced radio stories for NPR and PRI. He studied anthropology at Columbia University and was a Fulbright fellow in Mozambique. This is his first book.

Praise for Go Tell the Crocodiles:
[A] vivid and thought-provoking book. . . . Moore Gerety unpacks the complexities of Mozambican society through nine chapter-length sketches of individuals and communities.”
Booklist

[Go Tell the Crocodiles] reads very much like a multipart serial for a magazine, amply enlightening the reader about various aspects of Mozambique life.”
Publishers Weekly

Gerety effectively illustrates Mozambique's complexities and how people navigate difficult circumstances. As the author shows, chasing prosperity is rather different from catching prosperity.”
Kirkus Reviews

With a cast of characters vast enough for an epic, Moore Gerety’s Mozambique emerges facet by facet like a rough-hewn jewel, reflecting back at us the struggles of Africa and of all countries wrestling with a brutal past and the false promises of modernity.”
Delphine Schrank, author of The Rebel of Rangoon

Overflows with fantastically close reporting, cool and subtle judgments, and characters that absolutely leap to life. Rowan Moore Gerety gets next to all sorts of Mozambicans—street vendors, poor farmers, a people smuggler, the hapless leader of the political opposition—and then takes us deep into lives that illuminate the dark, pitiless dynamics of profound underdevelopment.”
William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days and staff writer for the New Yorker

For Mozambique, a country which has suffered as much as any in Africa, this book is the real story. It is full of grit, despair, vivid detail, colorful characters and the unexpected resourcefulness of people who’ve managed to create jobs, music and more when every conceivable force seems arrayed against them.”
Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains

Rowan Moore Gerety has given us a wry and beautifully written account of Mozambique today, a country that has managed the troubling feat of failing its people while showing signs of stunning economic growth. It’s about Mozambique—and it’s about the world we all live in.”
Amy Wilentz, author of The Rainy Season