Nomad: 2one Woman's Journey Into the Heart of Africa

Part personal story, part reporter's adventure, this melodramatically titled book meanders but offers some incisive glimpses of Africa. Fitzgerald, a white British newspaper correspondent who lived in Kenya for 22 years, devotes the first third of the book to an account of her expulsion from that country by the corrupt regime of President Daniel Arap Moi and to memories of her beloved adopted home. She returned to Africa as a roving correspondent for the (London) Sunday Times. Her chronicle includes vivid descriptions of a 1990 visit to Ethiopia, where children, forced by war to sleep during the day, don't know how to play, and the disintegration of war-wracked Liberia, for which she suggests the United States bears much responsibility. However, Fitzgerald's blow-by-blow narrative contains many extraneous details and, despite her claim to be a ``white African,'' she sometimes makes hyperbolic generalizations about the vast continent. Photos. (June)