Harmattan

A slim but thoughtful rendering of an exotic locale that recalls The Quiet American.

Stefania Pandolfo, UC Berkeley:
Michael Jackson's fascinating new book travels the geographical, psychological, and political borderland of social life and 'the more' that lies beyond. Harmattan's characters are unforgettable: Ezekiel, surviving the civil war in Sierra Leone and migrating to the North and the halls of the British Library; Tom, an anthropologist's alter, making the reverse journey to the uncanny tranquility of Ezekiel's post-civil-war-ravaged village, Cosmega; the woman who was not undone by the wreckage; a Kuranko shaman finding his power and overcoming his fear; and an ethnographer encountering himself, or herself, as another, on the borderland where being is both lost and found. In the literary tradition of Calvino and Pessoa, Conrad and Tutuola, but also Victor Turner and Lévi-Strauss, Harmattan is a much-needed contribution toward the regeneration of anthropological thinking and writing.

Robert Desjarlais, Sarah Lawrence College:
Harmattan is a remarkable inquiry into the intricate interweave between fact and fantasy, anthropological observation and imaginative fiction. In venturing ever further into the text, the reader is deliriously caught, like the book's narrators, in a multichambered realm of storytelling where life, death, friendship, and the elusiveness of truth are the most critical terms of existence.

Anand Pandian, Johns Hopkins University:
Jackson's prose shows how for anthropology, thinking must take place in the most unlikely of circumstances: in the very midst of life's tumultuous course, through the very expression of its confounding vicissitudes.

Paul Stoller, West Chester University:
A powerfully poetic contribution not just to anthropological knowledge but also to our comprehension of the human condition.