| Riding in Africa |
Ian WIlliams |
ISBN: 0595373011, Paperback - 15.95 BUY
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| Here are some of my favorite books about Africa |
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| Richard Dawkins |
Ancestor's Tale: A pilgrimage to the dawn of evolution |
ISBN: 061861916X, Paperback - BUY
The Ancestor's Tale takes us from our immediate human ancestors back through what he calls ‘concestors,’ those shared with the apes, monkeys and other mammals and other vertebrates and beyond to the dim and distant microbial beginnings of life some 4 billion years ago. It is a remarkable story which is still very much in the process of being uncovered. And, of course from a scientist of Dawkins stature and reputation we get an insider's knowledge of the most up-to-date science and many of those involved in the research. And, as we have come to expect of Dawkins, it is told with a passionate commitment to scientific veracity and a nose for a good story. Dawkins's knowledge of the vast and wonderful sweep of life's diversity is admirable. Not only does it encompass the most interesting living representatives of so many groups of organisms but also the important and informative fossil ones, many of which have only been found in recent years.
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| Safari Companion |
Richard Estes |
ISBN: 1890132446, Paperback - 19.80 BUY
Anyone who goes on safari will want to make room in his or her suitcase for this treasure. Estes, who is affiliated with Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institute as a research associate, spent over eight years doing fieldwork in Africa and over 17 years leading safaris. His admirable qualifications as an expert on the social ecology of African mammals are reflected in the text, which describes approximately 86 species of African mammals. Introductory chapters give practical advice on how to observe animals, including tips on using binoculars and photographic equipment.
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| King Leopold's Ghost |
Adam Hochschild |
ISBN: 0395759242 , Hardcover - 26.00 BUY
Hochschild's superb, engrossing chronicle focuses on one of the great, horrifying and nearly forgotten crimes of the century: greedy Belgian King Leopold II's rape of the Congo, the vast colony he seized as his private fiefdom in 1885. Until 1909, he used his mercenary army to force slaves into mines and rubber plantations, burn villages, mete out sadistic punishments, including dismemberment, and committ mass murder. The hero of Hochschild's highly personal, even gossipy narrative is Liverpool shipping agent Edmund Morel, who, having stumbled on evidence of Leopold's atrocities, became an investigative journalist and launched an international Congo reform movement with support from Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington and Arthur Conan Doyle. Other pivotal figures include Joseph Conrad, whose disgust with Leopold's "civilizing mission" led to Heart of Darkness; and black American journalist George Washington Williams, who wrote the first systematic indictment of Leopold's colonial regime in 1890. Hochschild (The Unquiet Ghost) documents the machinations of Leopold, who won over President Chester A. Arthur and bribed a U.S. senator to derail Congo protest resolutions. He also draws provocative parallels between Leopold's predatory one-man rule and the strongarm tactics of Mobuto Sese Seko, who ruled the successor state of Zaire. But most of all it is a story of the bestiality of one challenged by the heroism of many in an increasingly democratic world.
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| Cry, The Beloved Country |
Alan Paton |
ISBN: 0743262174, Paperback - BUY
When first published in 1948 in apartheid South Africa, Cry, the Beloved Country raised more than eyebrows as a powerful book about the power of unity and an author's unflinching hope of a future where segregation no longer exists. The book summoned feelings of pride, optimism, and anticipation of a long-desired goal. But Paton's lyrical, poetic prose is not your typical run-of-the-mill anger evoking story about discrimination. The story is a humanizing experience that evokes feelings of sympathy and understanding, not hatred for a system so blatantly wrong.
In Cry, the Beloved Country, readers feel an uncanny connection to three things: the land, an old black rural priest searching in a corrupt city for his son, and an old white rural man confronting the loss of his son. All three aspects of the book are connected by a common thread. And a great thing about the book is that Paton doesn't feel the need to build up to the emotional climax by setting the readers against a well defined antagonist, or even an antagonist at all; on a micro-scale, the story is a moving tribute to man's inherent dignity; on a macro-scale, the themes and plethora of symbols are applied to man's all-too mortal nature
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| Too Late the Phalarope |
Alan Paton |
ISBN: 0684818957 , Paperback - BUY
TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE is set in South Africa, as well as its predecessor, CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY. And like that earlier novel, TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE uses the lives of ordinary people to illustrate the inhuman quality of South African apartheid.
Racial segregation is odious in concept, impossible in application. To prove it, Paton tells us the story of Pieter, a white policeman, who has an affair with a native girl. He is betrayed and reported, and thus brings shame on himself and his family
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| Disgrace |
J. M. Coetzee |
ISBN: 0140296409, Paperback - 11.20 BUY
As a writer, Coetzee is a literary cascade, with a steady output of fiction and criticism (literary and social) over the last two decades. This latest book, his first novel in five years, is a searing evocation of post-apartheid South Africa; it earned him an unprecedented second Booker Prize.
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| Washing of the Spears |
Donald Morris |
ISBN: 0306808668, Paperback - BUY
Though written in 1959 Donald Morris's "Washing of the Spears" is in many ways a prescient work, in that it anticipates the demise of the Anglo-Boer elite and the renaissance of black South Africa. It begins as a celebration of the Zulu conquests of the 18th and 19th century under Shaka Zulu, the "Black Napoleon," and then retells the story of Isandlwana, Rorke's Drift and the other highlights of the Zulu wars. It is immaculately researched and extremely well-crafted. Inevitably, although it attempts to relate the story of the Zulus, the sources are lopsided, meaning that there is more discussion of the British side of the conflict than the Zulu. Thus we learn more of characters like British generalissimo Sir Garnet Wolsely, for instance, than we do of the great Zulu chiefs. But this does not detract from the book's essential excellence. The emotional climax of the book is the slaughter - on the field of battle - of the Prince Imperial, or Napoleon IV as some called him, the son of exiled Emperor Napoleon III, fighting for the British. A tragic loss but in some regards a fitting trophy for the Zulu
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| Green Hills of Africa |
Ernest Hemingway |
ISBN: 068484463X , Paperback - 10.40 BUY
His second major venture into nonfiction (after Death in the Afternoon, 1932), Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife Pauline journeyed in December of 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in -- and fascination with -- big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. In examining the poetic grace of the chase, and the ferocity of the kill, Hemingway also looks inward, seeking to explain the lure of the hunt and the primal undercurrent that comes alive on the plains of Africa. Yet Green Hills of Africa is also an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape, and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man.
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| African Warriors: The Samburu |
Tomasin Magor |
ISBN: 0810919435 , Hardcover - 50.00 BUY
AFRICAN WARRIORS: THE SAMBURU is a beautiful book that will be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about the warrior life of the Samburu, a nomadic tribe in Kenya and kin to the more famous Masaai tribe. I bought this book several years ago, and it has remained one of my favorites. The panoramic view of the Kenyan landscape that this book provides is so encompassing that it makes you feel like you are there.
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