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Monday Books has recently re-published three of Theodore Dalrymple’s earliest works as eBooks. In the first, Monrovia Mon Amour: A Visit to Liberia, Dalrymple explores Liberia’s history. He visited the country in 1991, during a lull in the civil war, which enabled him to see for himself the aftermath of the violence. He found a ransacked city – almost every building was in ruins, burnt-out cars littered the streets and even doors and window frames had been removed for firewood. It leads the author to question the fragility of civilization.

Zanzibar to Timbuktu is an account of Dalrymple’s experiences in Tanzania where he came "to the grimmest possible conclusion about Africa's future". In search of some cause for hope he set out to travel home across the continent by train, bus, lorry, boat and canoe. With his usual clarity he catalogues the oppression, corruption, ignorance and poverty he finds. In the end it is in his good humoured and pragmatic travelling companions that he finds hope for the future. He concludes that the only quality that sustains Africans in the face of poverty and hopelessness is their innate cheerfulness.

In Fool or Physician, Dalrymple writes about his early career as a doctor – giving his fans some insight into his past. It details his reluctant entry into medical school (‘I specialised in doing and knowing the least necessary to pass the examinations’), his earliest ventures in medicine in a small midlands town and his subsequent work overseas when, bored almost to tears by life in the NHS, he travels first to the then-Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa and later to the Gilbert Islands, a pacific paradise brimming with drunken expatriates, eccentrics and lunatics.

As ever, doctoring was the key to a door, on the other side of which was a different, more interesting life.