Paul Theroux, the well-known author of 12 travel books and 24 novels, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi from 1963 to 1965 and thereafter an instructor at Uganda’s Makerere University for four years.

In 2001, as he approached his 60th birthday, he returned to Africa, the ‘Dark Star’ of the title, but not as one whose experience of Africa is limited to international airports and big-game parks. Instead, he virtually hitchhiked from Egypt to South Africa by any means available, from cattle cars to chicken trucks to canoes, a shortwave radio being his only means of contact with his family in Hawaii.

He visited old haunts and old friends, taking the pulse of the continent, and by the time he completed his journey, he had been “...abused, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheated, bitten, flooded, insulted, exhausted, robbed, lied to, brow-beaten, poisoned, stunk up and starved...” but found that he still loved Africa and Africans.

His ire is reserved for tourists and foreign aid workers whom he roundly castigates for supporting corrupt regimes and discouraging Africans from solving their own problems.

The book is an intelligent, funny, and even sentimental account of an idealist who is trying to make sense of the painful disparity between what Africa is and what he once hoped it might become.