| The Last King of Scotland | 
 enlarge | Author: Giles Foden
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
Buy New: £7.99
New (14) Used (50) Collectible (3) from £0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 93307
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0571195644
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780571195640
ASIN: 0571195644
Publication Date: January 28, 1999
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 1-5 of 18 | | NEXT » |
Scary and Macabre - a must read February 28, 2008
A slow start perhaps, but for me that worked well. We were not straight into the thick of the Amin regime but Foder works on the charcater development of the Dr and how he becomes entwined with the Amin Regime. This for me worked well; it gave an insight into the mind and make up of the Dr and how this perhaps left him still involved with Amin right up until his downfall.
The brutality of the dictator was well scripted and is proof again that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutly.
It loses a star for me only in at times I was struggling to understand why the Dr stayed to the end when he had seen so much and heard so many brutal stories, but perhaps this was in the make up of the man and just fear for himself. He was perhaps a coward.
A worthy read.
 not a patch on the amazing screen version. April 10, 2007
0 out of 10 found this review helpful
i watched the movie before the Oscar glory as i judged its trailer to be promising enough. and god it was , a lot more than that.
therefore, i safely bought the book on a good price to boost, but from the beginning i could sense that the affection and attraction i once felt for the character on screen wasn't happening with the original writing. what a shame. the book simply was too detailed when it came to description of africa which i don't care for, and dr carrighan is just not that enthrilling a chap. the relationship he seemed to have really had with Idi was more intense/stronger in the movie, which was what made it a lot more compealling.
i forced my self to read til the end, just in case...... well, you know what i am going to say....
 Fantastic book, I was gripped from the first page March 16, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this book so much I've just gone out and bought all Giles Foden's other books which I plan to read in the coming weeks. Last King of Scotland had a bit of everything in it - history, suspense, horror, romance, comedy and was an extremely well written book. I read it in one night refusing to go to sleep until I got to the end and it was totally worth losing sleep over. Foden sets the scene really well, you can hear, taste and smell Uganda on every page, wonderful stuff! I want more though, why did the book have to end?!
 FILM November 4, 2005
7 out of 60 found this review helpful
For anyone who is interested: I was in Uganda July 05 and a British film crew were making a film of this book near Jinja.
Conrad meets Boyd Uptown for a Showdown December 17, 2002
19 out of 22 found this review helpful
Idi Amin's bizarre and brutal eight years of dictatorship in Uganda are the setting for this assured debut. The narrator is Nicholas Garrigan, a young Scottish doctor who arrives in Uganda for a contract job at the same time as Amin's 1971 coup. The book is his recollection of his two years in a small town clinic and six years as Amin's personal doctor in Kampala. His story continues the Conradian tradition of the European man who comes to Africa and becomes transformed through his contact with evil. Amin is Garrigan's Kurtz, and while the doctor and other expats generally turn a blind eye to the truckloads of political prisoners being taken to the countryside to be executed, eventually Garrigan is dragged face to face with Amin's horror.Of course this isn't pure Conrad, rather it's cut with a bit of William Boyd, another Englishman writer who's written compelling fiction about modern Africa and the legacy of colonial rule. For the horror here isn't that Garrigan begins to understand Amin (after all who could really hope to understand a man of Amin's awesome eccentricity), but begins to like him in an odd way. And it's not that the doctor is a weak character, he's actually remarkably average, and thus very much like ourselves. The reader is unable to to find solace in making easy smug judgments about Garrigan's gradual moral slide as he sucked more and more into Amin's confidence and makes small compromises with himself. Amin is a great character in his own right, lurching from buffoonery to gluttony to sly cunning to sheer incomprehensibility at the drop of a hat. Of course Fodden had a lot to work with, as many of Amin's deeds and speeches are classic examples of truth really being stranger than fiction. Speaking oh which, Fodden went to great lengths in researching this novel, interviewing a wide range of people who witnessed Amin's reign. Alas, the Saudi government wouldn't grant him permission to interview Amin, who is still alive and living on a Saudi pension in Jeddah. Garrigan is loosely modeled on Bob Astles, a British WW2 veteran who somehow became Amin's closest advisor. Altogether a very good read, regrettably Fodden's next two books apparently don't live up to this one.
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