Waiting for Charlie: Mercenary Soldiers, Failed States, and the Love That Means More Than Money, Zakin Susan

In 2001, environmental writer Susan Zakin was burned out. Traveling to Madagascar, the worlds fourth-largest island, to see a place where humans had arrived only two thousand years before, the frustration and anger shed experienced in the environmental debates roiling the American West dropped away. Waiting for Charlie traces her journeys over the next decade, exploring places where nature still flourishes in the midst of failed states, meeting a new generation of Africans taking on their continents most pressing causes, and revealing humankinds oldest terrain not as the past, but as a sometimes hopeful, sometimes chilling, vision of the future.