#africa #folklore #sun #flies #animals #mythology #pride #vanity #children

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Michigan

Why the Sun Was Late

Mark Jenkins

Good dust jacket, clean and tight hardcover with no highlighting, a journey down the Niger in Africa First edition 1997

A Journey Down the Niger

Travel writer Mark Jenkins, three friends, and an African guide set out to attempt the first descent of the Niger River to the legendary city of Timbuktu. Along the way, they are attacked by killer bees, hippos, and crocodiles, find a group of blind men in the bush, and dance with a hundred naked women among other incredible adventures. A daring and dangerous real-life mix of the dramatic and the absurd. 20 color photos.

A Journey down the Niger

8bf4d2fc-2822-4d0c-ba0b-9852ba355d84-1

#paperback #nonfiction #biography #queens #cleopatra #autobiography #history #africa 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

New Jersey

A Life

Her palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first and poisoned the second; incest and assassination were family specialties. She had children by Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, two of the most prominent Romans of the day. With Antony she would attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled both their ends. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Her supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order.

Cleopatra

43b9cad8-0557-447f-ab3e-394b63f80309-1

Alexandra Fuller

New York Times Notable Book
Entertainment Weekly #1 Nonfiction Book of the Year
Finalist, Guardian First Book Prize

Maryland

An African Childhood

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight

d159ed34-e896-444f-bd2a-52e74c2a023b-1

William Kamkwamba

Bryan Mealer

Massachusetts

Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope

William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, a country where magic ruled and modern science was mystery. It was also a land withered by drought and hunger. But William had read about windmills, and he dreamed of building one that would bring to his small village a set of luxuries that only 2 percent of Malawians could enjoy: electricity and running water. His neighbors called him misala—crazy—but William refused to let go of his dreams. With a small pile of once-forgotten science textbooks; some scrap metal, tractor parts, and bicycle halves; and an armory of curiosity and determination, he embarked on a daring plan to forge an unlikely contraption and small miracle that would change the lives around him. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a remarkable true story about human inventiveness and its power to overcome crippling adversity. It will inspire anyone who doubts the power of one individual's ability to change his community and better the lives of those around him.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

943734bc-d92d-48d7-86d9-0e60b9192c6c-1

Jason Stearns

Very light shelf wear on jacket. Subtle. Virtually no blemishes. Jacket is in great shape and pages have zero mileage. Crisp and clean. No dog ears or scribbles. Please see photos for reference.

Ohio

The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

A "tremendous," "intrepid" history of the devastating war in the heart of Africa's Congo, with first-hand accounts of the continent's worst conflict in modern times.

At the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal war in which millions have died. In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, renowned political activist and researcher Jason K. Stearns has written a compelling and deeply-reported narrative of how Congo became a failed state that collapsed into a war of retaliatory massacres. Stearns brilliantly describes the key perpetrators, many of whom he met personally, and highlights the nature of the political system that brought these people to power, as well as the moral decisions with which the war confronted them. Now updated with a new introduction, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters tells the full story of Africa's Great War.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters

05ef3cc4-8eda-41f4-aca3-e2b7619c012d-1

Texas

Run While the Sun is Hot 

#paperback #phillipcaputo #historicalfiction #fiction #war #politics #africa #cultural

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Washington

Philip Caputo’s tragic and epically ambitious new novel is set in Sudan, where war is a permanent condition. Into this desolate theater come aid workers, missionaries, and mercenaries of conscience whose courage and idealism sometimes coexist with treacherous moral blindness. There’s the entrepreneurial American pilot who goes from flying food and medicine to smuggling arms, the Kenyan aid worker who can’t help seeing the tawdry underside of his enterprise, and the evangelical Christian who comes to Sudan to redeem slaves and falls in love with a charismatic rebel commander.

As their fates intersect and our understanding of their characters deepens, it becomes apparent that Acts of Faith is one of those rare novels that combine high moral seriousness with irresistible narrative wizardry. nbsp;nbsp;

Acts of Faith

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This book is a clean copy with a good spine and binding. The contents and Graphics are in good condition. There is minimal wear inside. There is slight wear on the hardback cover. Will ship within hours after your order is received. Thanks for stopping by and please stay safe.

Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

Reader's Digest Illustrated history of South Africa the real story

7b437aa2-4a62-45c0-a8e3-ee93213d8fec-0

Ayobami Adebayo

Bought used. Some nicks on the spine but overall in great condition!

Virginia

A Novel

Stay with Me

a5d5ea99-6454-4cfb-9caf-8074220352b7

Caryl Phillips

Book is an excellent reading condition. However, somebody cut a part of the dust jacket off. First, American addition. 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Liverpool, England; Accra, Ghana; Charleston, South Carolina. These were the points of the triangle forming the major route of the transatlantic slave trade. And these are the cities that acclaimed author Caryl Phillips explores--physically, historically, psychologically--in this wide-ranging meditation on the legacy of slavery and the impact of the African diaspora on the life of a place and its people. In a brilliantly layered narrative, Phillips combines his own observations with the stories of figures from the past. The experiences of an African trader in nineteenth-century Liverpool are contrasted with Phillips's experience of the city, where, as a Carib-bean black, he is scorned by the city's "native" blacks. His interactions with American Pan-Africanists coming "home" to Ghana (and with those Ghanaians for whom leaving seems the best hope) are paired with the account of a British-trained African minister in eighteenth-century Accra who turned a blind eye to the slave trade flourishing around him. The story of a white judge who disrupted "the natural order" in Charleston by integrating the Democratic primary in 1947 is set against Phillips's search for remnants of the "pest houses" where slaves were "seasoned" be-fore being sold. Phillips weaves these narrative threads together with acute insight and a novelist's grasp of time, place and character. The result is a provocative and unexpected book, at once historically illuminating and profoundly affecting. From the Hardcover edition.

The Atlantic Sound (First American Edition)

a92e6e39-31f0-43c9-abc0-3490acedcfc8-0

#africa #bushmen #san #kalahari #vanderpost

California

An account of the author's grueling, but ultimately successful, journey in 1957, through Africa's remote, primitive Kalahari Desert, in search of the legendary Bushmen, the hunters who pray to the great hunters in the sky.


The Lost World of the Kalahari

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#hardcover #fiction #africanamericanwomen #romance #reesesbookclub #family #contemporary #ghana #africa #feminism


A REESE WITHERSPOON x HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB PICK A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A Time Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020 One of BuzzFeed's "29 Books We Couldn’t Put Down This Year" A Must-Read Novel: The New York Times Book Review * BuzzFeed * Marie Claire * Parade * Travel + Leisure * Ms. Magazine * Bustle * The Millions * Book Riot * Christian Science Monitor * HelloGiggles “[A] mesmerizing debut novel.” —The New York Times Book Review “A story that kept me tied to the page, told in masterful, seamless prose.” —BuzzFeed “I love this book so much I turned the pages so fast . . . It’s all about the search for independence and being true to yourself and who you really are.” —Reese Witherspoon Afi Tekple is a young seamstress in Ghana. She is smart; she is pretty; and she has been convinced by her mother to marry a man she does not know. Afi knows who he is, of course—Elikem is a wealthy businessman whose mother has chosen Afi in the hopes that she will distract him from his relationship with a woman his family claims is inappropriate. But Afi is not prepared for the shift her life takes when she is moved from her small hometown of Ho to live in Accra, Ghana’s gleaming capital, a place of wealth and sophistication where she has days of nothing to do but cook meals for a man who may or may not show up to eat them. She has agreed to this marriage in order to give her mother the financial security she desperately needs, and so she must see it through. Or maybe not? His Only Wife is a witty, smart, and moving debut novel about a brave young woman traversing the minefield of modern life with its taboos and injustices, living in a world of men who want their wives to be beautiful, to be good cooks and mothers, to be women who respect their husbands and grant them forbearance. And in Afi, Peace Medie has created a delightfully spunky and relatable heroine who just may break all the rules.

His Only Wife

e917bc8a-3f43-41d4-af04-abb21eed0a0e-1

'As Powerful a Condemnation of Imperialism as Has Ever Been Written'

Although Polish by birth, Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) is regarded as one of the greatest writers in English, and Heart of Darkness, first published in 1902, is considered by many his "most famous, finest, and most enigmatic story." -- Encyclopaedia Britannica. The tale concerns the journey of the narrator (Marlow) up the Congo River on behalf of a Belgian trading company. Far upriver, he encounters the mysterious Kurtz, an ivory trader who exercises an almost godlike sway over the inhabitants of the region. Both repelled and fascinated by the man, Marlow is brought face to face with the corruption and despair that Conrad saw at the heart of human existence.
In its combination of narrative and symbolic power, masterly character study and acute psychological penetration, Heart of Darkness ranks as a landmark of modern fiction. It is a book no serious student of literature can afford to miss.

Heart of Darkness

e940afdb-ceb7-4809-9c83-d8ec02481117-1

Philip Gourevitch

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Stories from Rwanda

Examines the horrors of genocide in Rwanda, where 800,000 people of an ethnic minority were exterminated in one hundred days

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

2e9a3016-ac50-4f66-949c-aec396751008-1

Overland from Cairo to Capetown

The author recounts his odyssey down the length of Africa, from Cairo to South Africa, describing the bad food, many delays, discomforts, and dangers of his trip, along with the people and places of the real Africa.

Dark Star Safari

5082503d-a6ef-443b-8640-7a2e8e47163c-1

Part of the Cross-cultural Memoir series, Fault Lines describes the life of Meena Alexander as she travels from India to Africa to The U.K. And finally coming to live in the United States.  A beautiful story of a woman who embraces all of the people and cultures that have shaped her.

Minnesota

A memoir 

Fault Lines

From #1 New York Times bestselling author James Rollins, the latest riveting, deeply imaginative thriller in the Sigma Force series, told with his trademark blend of cutting-edge science, historical mystery, and pulse-pounding action. It begins in Africa . . . A United Nations relief team in a small village in the Congo makes an alarming discovery. An unknown force is leveling the evolutionary playing field. Men, women, and children have been reduced to a dull, catatonic state. The environment surrounding them--plants and animals--has grown more cunning and predatory, evolving at an exponential pace. The insidious phenomenon is spreading from a cursed site in the jungle -- known to locals as the Kingdom of Bones --and sweeping across Africa, threatening the rest of the world. What has made the biosphere run amok? Is it a natural event? Or more terrifyingly, did someone engineer it? Commander Gray Pierce and Sigma Force are prepared for the extraordinary and have kept the world safe, vigilance for which they have paid a tragic personal price. Yet, even these brilliant and seasoned scientific warriors do not understand what is behind this frightening development--or know how to stop it. As they race to find answers, the members of Sigma quickly realize they have become the prey. To head off global catastrophe, Sigma Force must risk their lives to uncover the shattering secret at the heart of the African continent--a truth that will illuminate who we are as a species and where we may be headed . . . sooner than we know. Mother Nature--red in tooth and claw--is turning against humankind, propelling the entire world into the Kingdom of Bones.

Kingdom of Bones

249304d0-d14b-41e7-acf8-44231cbbd2f7-1

Barbara Kingsolver

Definitely a favorite author and this is one of her best. I can’t imagine ever not having a copy of this in our home library. 
Deckled edges. 
The book is really in great shape. A former owner wrote their name inside the front cover (see photo) but otherwise no writing, dog ears or tears to the text. Outside page edges are clean. Spine is intact. Cover looks good - a little worn at top and bottom of spine. Dust jacket shows light to moderate shelf wear. 

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the self-centered, teenaged Rachel; shrewd adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility. Dancing between the dark comedy of human failings and the breathtaking possibilities of human hope, The Poisonwood Bible possesses all that has distinguished Barbara Kingsolver's previous work, and extends this beloved writer's vision to an entirely new level. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, this ambitious novel establishes Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers.

The Poisonwood Bible

b6f687e1-ec7a-4cef-a81f-67c792eee6b8-1

Phoebe Morgan

Georgia

In the vein of Lucy Foley and Ruth Ware, a deliciously wicked and atmospheric thriller about a group of old friends who plan to reconnect on an African safari vacation, but soon learn that their wild pasts have finally caught up with them.

"A wonderfully atmospheric thriller of secrets, lies and betrayals . . . a heart-stopping rollercoaster of a read." --B.A. Paris, author of Behind Closed Doors

FOUR FRIENDS. A LUXURY RETREAT. IT'S GOING TO BE MURDER.

It's been years since Grace, Felicity, Alice, and Hannah were together. The "Wild Girls," as they were once called, are no longer so wild. Alice is a teacher. Hannah has a new baby. Grace is a homebody. Only Felicity seems to have retained her former spark.

Then Felicity invites them all on the weekend of a lifetime--a birthday bash in Botswana. It will be a chance to have fun and rekindle their once bomb-proof friendship... and finally put that one horrible night, all those years ago, behind them for good.

But soon after arriving at the luxury safari lodge, a feeling of unease settles over them. There's no sign of the party that was promised. There's no phone signal. They are on their own... and things start to go very, very wrong. 

A fresh approach to the classic locked-room mystery, The Wild Girls is sure to appeal to fans of Ruth Ware and Lucy Foley. 

The Wild Girls

775f7b94-cdd3-4b22-8ad4-2a3b9660271e-1

#hardcover #nile #nonfiction #adventure #history #Africa #biography #travel #historical #nature 

Genius, Courage, and Betrayal in the Search for the Source of the Nile

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The harrowing story of one of the great feats of exploration of all time and its complicated legacy--from the New York Times bestselling author of The River of Doubt and Destiny of the Republic

For millennia the location of the Nile River's headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was  a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe - and extend their colonial empires.
 
Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke were sent by the Royal Geographical Society to claim the prize for England. Burton spoke twenty-nine languages, and was a decorated soldier. He was also mercurial, subtle, and an iconoclastic atheist. Speke was a young aristocrat and Army officer determined to make his mark, passionate about hunting, Burton's opposite in temperament and beliefs.
 
From the start the two men clashed. They would endure tremendous hardships, illness, and constant setbacks. Two years in, deep in the African interior, Burton became too sick to press on, but Speke did, and claimed he found the source in a great lake that he christened Lake Victoria. When they returned to England, Speke rushed to take credit, disparaging Burton. Burton disputed his claim, and Speke launched another expedition to Africa to prove it. The two became venomous enemies, with the public siding with the more charismatic Burton, to Speke's great envy. The day before they were to publicly debate,Speke shot himself.
 
Yet there was a third man on both expeditions, his name obscured by imperial annals, whose exploits were even more extraordinary. This was Sidi Mubarak Bombay, who was enslaved and shipped from his home village in East Africa to India. When the man who purchased him died, he made his way into the local Sultan's army, and eventually traveled back to Africa, where he used his resourcefulness, linguistic prowess and raw courage to forge a living as a guide. Without Bombay and men like him, who led, carried, and protected the expedition, neither Englishman would have come close to the headwaters of the Nile, or perhaps even survived.
 
In River of the Gods Candice Millard has written another peerless story of courage and adventure, set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers.

River of the Gods

0619766b-2a75-4a31-abc7-d0331d13b95d-1

Francesca Marciano

Florida

A Novel of Africa

A mesmerizing novel of love and nostalgia set in the vast spaces of contemporary East Africa. Romantic, often resonantly ironic, moving and wise, Rules of the Wild transports us to a landscape of unsurpassed beauty even as it gives us a sharp-eyed portrait of a closely knit tribe of cultural outsiders: the expatriates living in Kenya today. Challenged by race, by class, and by a longing for home, here are "safari boys" and samaritans, reporters bent on their own fame, travelers who care deeply about elephants but not at all about the people of Africa. They all know each other. They meet at dinner parties, they sleep with each other, they argue about politics and the best way to negotiate their existence in a place where they don't really belong. At the center is Esmé, a beautiful young woman of dazzling ironies and introspections, who tells us her story in a voice both passionate and self-deprecating. Against a paradoxical backdrop of limitless physical freedom and escalating civil unrest, Esmé struggles to make sense of her own place in Africa and of her feelings for the two men there whom she loves--Adam, a second-generation Kenyan who is the first to show her the wonders of her adopted land, and Hunter, a British journalist sickened by its horrors. Rules of the Wild evokes the worlds of Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, and Ernest Hemingway. It explores unforgettably our infinite desire for a perfect elsewhere, for love and a place to call home. It is an astonishing literary debut.

Rules of the Wild

400ac03f-641a-4cda-8497-242d29963053-1

Martin Ganda

Caitlin Alifirenka

Liz Welch

How One Letter Changed Two Lives

The true story of an all-American girl and a boy from Zimbabwe and the letter that changed both of their lives forever. It started as an assignment. Everyone in Caitlin's class wrote to an unknown student somewhere in a distant place. Martin was lucky to even receive a pen-pal letter. There were only ten letters, and fifty kids in his class. But he was the top student, so he got the first one. That letter was the beginning of a correspondence that spanned six years and changed two lives. In this compelling dual memoir, Caitlin and Martin recount how they became best friends --and better people--through their long-distance exchange. Their story will inspire you to look beyond your own life and wonder about the world at large and your place in it.

I Will Always Write Back

76eb26c3-49f2-4715-8af3-e7c6ee7ee77d-1

Stephen Lewis

In 2000, the United Nations laid out a series of eight goals meant to guide humankind in the new century. Called the Millennium Development Goals, these targets are to be met by 2015 and are to lay the foundation for a prosperous future. In Race Against Time, Stephen Lewis advances real solutions to help societies across the globe achieve the Millennium Goals. Through lucid, pragmatic explanations, he shows how dreams such as universal primary education, a successful war against the AIDS pandemic, and environmental sustainability, are within the grasp of humanity. For anyone interested in forging a better world in the third millennium, Race Against Time is powerful testimony.

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Benjamin Elkin