This winter’s travel books offer a roughly even mix of vice and virtue. From prostitution, thievery and violence in Bangkok and Johannesburg to the classical antiquities and literary treasures of the Greek islands and Oxford, they explore both the dark and sunny sides of human nature. Which is more fun? It’s an open question.

Rogers’s tale is reminiscent of Peter Godwin’s “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun,” which described Godwin’s parents’ ruination in the capital, Harare. There are similar riffs on algae-infested swimming pools, break-ins, ­hyperinflated Zim dollars and rampages by thuggish “war veterans.” But Rogers skirts the bigger political picture and instead homes in on the hotel as a microcosm of a collapsed country. His mother starts writing a cookbook called “Recipes for Disaster: Adventures in the Kitchen of a Failed State.” His father rents out the property’s abandoned guest houses to a sleazy entrepreneur who turns them into a brothel. Eventually, the hotel fills with dispossessed white farmers, a whole new source of eye-witness accounts of the country’s devastation.

See the full article from “New York Times”




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