Kossoye is a book about fifty years of change in a rural African village, with detailed information about how local innovators, government policies and global realities shaped the lives of its inhabitants. It is quite possibly the only decades-long study of an African village in existence. While the book has real flaws, its unusual strengths might not exist without them. A dated literature review, some repetition and poor editing (typically, the ethnic group of the Beta Israel are introduced on p. 140 despite having been discussed many times before under a series of other names) would perhaps have been avoided if the book had been published by presses with more rigorous peer review and editorial processes. And yet, would others have also stripped away the anecdotes, asides and idiosyncrasies that make this book a unique document of what has happened in one village in Africa since its inception in 1945?

The authors are Americans who moved to Ethiopia in the late 1950s. Dennis Carlson served at the new public health college in the northern town of Gondar as physician, professor, and sometime dean. Andrew Carlson is his son, growing up in Ethiopia and eventually becoming a professor of history. They both became deeply involved in the life of a village about 25 kilometres north of Gondar called Kossoye: regularly sponsoring development projects, conducting health studies, forming deep friendships, and interviewing local figures from 1963 through to the present. The statistics they present for five generations of Kossoyeans are extraordinary: documenting changes in local earnings, taxes, literacy, ethnicity, the cost of foodstuffs, school enrollment, military conscription, types of jobs, livestock per household, family size, nutritional status, and population, to give just a few examples. Their data prove what many have suspected, that rural African peoples are more malnourished now than they were fifty years ago (pp. 165–9) – and that development policies have been effective in erasing income gaps, but often only by making everyone equally poor (p. 201).

While the data alone would have made the book useful, it is the stories about individual villagers that make this book remarkable. In the age of the reign of the quantitative, who else is going to tell the story of Shashitu Zewdie, the first woman in the village, and perhaps Africa, to ask for and receive an intrauterine contraceptive device (pp. 174–5)? Or of a local innovator named Taye Wubineh who not only founded Kossoye but started eucalyptus farming in the area and demanded that the village start a school, both of which had dramatic long-term effects on the village's fortunes? Or of the woman who stopped speaking for two years after the government destroyed her family's stone house because it was better than the houses around it and thus did not fit the government's socialist aims (p. 120)? Further, which other authors are going to be so committed to the place that they will actually take the time to reassure the reader that training that took place in the schoolhouse did not interrupt the children's education, as their classes met outdoors that day (p. 96)? This book is not driven by disciplinary or career concerns, but the authors' genuine desire to give witness to a people who lived on the margins of the nation and the edges of history and yet defied both.

The book is essential reading for anyone interested in African rural development and the history of health, agriculture and development policies in Ethiopia. But it is also important as a model for how rural histories might be written – with deep empathy for the African individuals who drive change and submit to it.