• King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, by Adam Hochschild.  If you’re even remotely interested in the Congo, you will doubtlessly have had this book recommended to you.  This is for an excellent reason.  Hochschild is an engaging writer, and draws a detailed picture of the merciless colonial origins of the DRC.
• In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Zaire, by Michaela Wrong.  I’ve only read excerpts of this book, but it struck me as one of the most readable and comprehensive accounts of the means by which Mobutu impoverished his nation.  (A good fictional take on the type of tactics employed by dictators like Mobutu in order to remain in power is Wizard of the Crow, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o.)
• Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns.  Stearns is one of the most knowledgeable people around on the Congo (see his blog for proof of this), and his recent book is thoroughly researched and remarkably clear in its depiction of the complex wars that wracked the DRC from 1996 to 2003.
• From Genocide to Continental War, by Gerard Prunier.  This book covers largely the same territory as Stearns’, but plunges even more unsparingly into the thicket of local politics and important detail.  Buy this if you put down Stearns’ book feeling a bit obsessed with the politics of central Africa and want even more background.
• The Congo wars have received a fair amount of additional literary attention, and I haven’t read all the recent works on the topic yet.  Based on a speech she gave at SAIS recently, I’m looking forward to Severine Autesserre’s The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding very much.  I have not read Rene Lemarchand’s Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa or Filip Reyntjens’ The Great African War: Congo and Regional Geopolitics, 1996 – 2006.  I have read Thomas’ Turner’s The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality, but didn’t find it very analytically useful.

Other recommendations?

• Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom, by Jan Vansina.  A must-read for understanding the political, economic, and social organization of pre-colonial Rwanda, and the deleterious way that colonialism interacted with the extant social identities of “Hutu” and “Tutsi.”
• Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, by Jean Hatzfeld.  Hatzfeld is a French journalist who obtained permission to interview a number of imprisoned genocidaires, and the resulting book offers a detailed analysis of the psychological, political, and economic motivations underlying their participation in the genocide.  (I personally found it all the more insightful for the fact that the genocidaires were from the same district where I worked when I was in Rwanda, giving me at least a marginal familiarity with the geography contained in their narratives.)  I haven’t read Hatzfeld’s other two books, on genocide survivors and life in Rwanda a decade and a half later, but I believe that they are (as Tyler Cowen would say) self-recommending.  Mahmood Mamdani’s When Victims Become Killers is a more scholarly approach to the same subject as Machete Season.
• The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, by Gerard Prunier.  Probably the best serious academic take on the genocide that I’ve yet read.  Prunier is a formidable researcher, and he covers the period from independence up to the late 1990s in considerable detail and from a cogent analytical perspective.  His later research caused him to question this book’s favorable portrayals of Paul Kagame during several internal RPF struggles which took place during the 1990 – 1994 civil war, but I don’t think that detracts from the insight of the vast majority of analysis here.
• I haven’t read this yet, but based on the recommendation and contribution by Jason Stearns, I am going to guess that Remaking Rwanda: State-Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence (Scott Straus & Lars Waldorf, eds.) will be essential reading for understanding Rwanda today.

What else would you recommend?  (Update: see the comments for some additional recommendations!)

1. Development as Freedom, by Amartya Sen, is one of the best books I’ve read on the general concept of “development.”  It addresses a number of common critiques, and creates a strong philosophical framework to support the argument that “development” is still necessary.
2. Portfolios of the Poor is my favorite book of 2009 – an incredibly thoroughly-researched look into what poor people do with their money and how microfinance plays into this.  I don’t remember learning more from a single book, well, probably ever.
3. Understanding Poverty is a great introduction to a huge range of issues in development, from food security to education to microfinance.  It’s written by a group of leading development economists, often from a behavioral perspective, and the thought contained here is both wide-ranging and rigorous.
4. This is a bit quirky compared to the other recommendations, but I very much liked Expectations of Modernity, an ethnography of Zambian copper miners in the ’70s and ’80s.  The description probably sounds boring, but it’s actually a great critique of the idea that people from the developing world who act in “Western” styles are blindly mimicking the West, instead of consciously bringing elements of Western culture into their lives in ways that reflect their own social & economic interests.  It basically lays out a strong case for relativistic understandings of culture, which I find hugely important for any development worker, without framing it with that potentially off-putting phrase.
5. The Bottom Billion has held up better in retrospect than its two better-known contemporaries, The End of Poverty and The White Man’s Burden, at least in my recollection.  In a foreshadowing of my current interests, I liked its focus on research methodology in macroeconomics (i.e. where all that data underlying cross-country regressions comes from), and its quantitative look at the connections between war, governance and poverty.  (Edit: David Roodman points out his own and Easterly‘s critiques of Collier for data mining in Wars, Guns and Votes, and believes that they’re applicable to The Bottom Billion as well.  I’d suggest enjoying the intellectual curiosity of Collier’s research, but taking his statistical results with a grain of salt.)
6. I can’t offer too much on the subject of public health, but I did greatly enjoy The Wisdom of Whores, which is an engaging book about health systems responses to HIV from the ’80s onwards, told by an irreverent epidemiologist with whom I would very much like to have a drink one day.  It’s also a great critical look at where public health data comes from, how it’s used, and to some degree why governments and international organizations choose the health priorities that they do.
7. Making Globalization Work is something I recalled as insightful on the topics of global financial institutions, markets and trade at the time I read it.
8. I’ve been trying to find a good overview of the World Bank that I read for a geography class a few years ago, and while I’m not sure that I’ve identified it, The World Bank: From Reconstruction to Development to Equity looks like it covers similar subject matter. I found tracing the Bank’s historical evolution quite interesting, as it also captures the variety of Western thought on “development” that’s occurred over the past 50 years, and explains quite a lot as well about current bilateral and multilateral aid regimes.

Tell me, dear readers, what else would you recommend for the interested lay reader?