Engrossing history of a city with the enduring power to fascinate.
Timbuktu has generated myths that persist into the 21st century.
Like Xanadu and El Dorado, Timbuktu, in Mali, has long been a subject of legend and fantasy, a glistening city of incalculable riches. Reports circulated in medieval Europe, for example, that “giant gold-digging ants…harvested the precious metal from African riverbeds.” In a compelling work of history and historiography, journalist English (The Snow Tourist: A Search for the World's Purest, Deepest Snowfall, 2009), former head of international news for the Guardian, chronicles the journeys of early explorers who contributed to those legends. Drawing on extensive interviews in Mali, the U.S., Europe, and South Africa, the author questions the recent, much-publicized accounts of Timbuktu’s vast libraries, their contents and quantity, and survival from alleged jihadi threats. Timbuktu’s riches resulted from its favored location, downstream from the Niger River delta. For centuries, it was “the crossroads of the river trade and the caravan routes, the meeting place, in the old dictum, ‘of all who travel by camel or canoe.’ ” Crossing the Sahara to get there, however, was often perilous for Europeans. Many succumbed to malaria, dehydration, or starvation; others were attacked by Tuareg tribes or Muslim armies. One enterprising French explorer spent three years learning Arabic, studying Islamic texts, and practicing Muslim customs before he embarked, disguised in Arab costume, in 1827. English describes in vivid detail the journeys of intrepid explorers such as Mungo Park, Joseph Banks, and Heinrich Barth, whose exploits have been recounted in other fine books about Timbuktu. Where English breaks ground is by rigorously questioning the contemporary myth of Timbuktu as an intellectual hotbed, with libraries containing hundreds of thousands of important historical manuscripts, allegedly rescued by brave librarians from jihadis who wanted to destroy them. He echoes the skepticism of many academics who believe the documents’ historical value “was as over-revved as the numbers,” citing Henry Louis Gates, in particular, as inflating the manuscripts’ significance. English’s sources, moreover, dispute the claim of any jihadi threat.
Engrossing history of a city with the enduring power to fascinate.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59463-428-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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