The Benevolent American in the Heart of Darkness

Book excerpt: "The Benevolent American in the Heart of Darkness" is a trilogy of Albert Russos award-winning African novels set in the former Belgian Congo and Rwanda-Urundi. In The Black Ancestor, the reader will find, as in the two other novels, Eclipse over Lake Tanganyika and Mixed Blood or your son Lopold, many poignant and delightful passages, especially in the journeys across the magnificent Kivu province, which today, along with bordering Rwanda and Burundi, has been scarred by fratricidal wars. That Leodine, in the opening novel, happens to be an adolescent, as was Leopold in Mixed Blood, isnt fortuitous, for it is at that vulnerable period of ones life that ones personality takes form. In Albert Russos Africa you will find humankinds infinite diversity and, amid such richness, a quest for the deep self. Eric Tessier. Albert Russo has recreated through a young African boys joys and struggles many of the tensions of modern life, straight and gay, black and white, third world and first ... all of these tensions underlie this story of a biracial child adopted by a benevolent American. Mixed Blood or Your son Leopold is a non-stop, gripping read!" Edmund White.