The Last Train to Zona Verde

The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari
by Paul Theroux

“Happy again, back in the kingdom of light,” writes Paul Theroux as he sets out on a new journey through the continent he knows and loves best. Theroux first came to Africa as a twenty-two-year-old Peace Corps volunteer, and the pull of the vast land never left him. Now he returns, after fifty years on the road, to explore the little-traveled territory of western Africa and to take stock both of the place and of himself.

His odyssey takes him northward from Cape Town, through South Africa and Namibia, then on into Angola, wishing to head farther still until he reaches the end of the line. Journeying alone through the greenest continent, Theroux encounters a world increasingly removed from both the itineraries of tourists and the hopes of postcolonial independence movements. Leaving the Cape Town townships, traversing the Namibian bush, passing the browsing cattle of the great sunbaked heartland of the savanna, Theroux crosses “the Red Line” into a different Africa: “the improvised, slapped-together Africa of tumbled fences and cooking fires, of mud and thatch,” of heat and poverty, and of roadblocks, mobs, and anarchy. After 2,500 arduous miles, he comes to the end of his journey in more ways than one, a decision he chronicles with typically unsparing honesty in a chapter called “What Am I Doing Here?”

Vivid, witty, and beautifully evocative, The Last Train to Zona Verde is a fitting final African adventure from the writer whose gimlet eye and effortless prose have brought the world to generations of readers.

The World Until Yesterday

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?
by Jared Diamond

Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today.

This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us.

Collapse

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is a 2005 book by academic and popular science author Jared M. Diamond, which reviews the causes of historical and pre-historical instances of societal collapse—particularly those involving significant influences from environmental changes, the effects of climate change, hostile neighbors, and trade partners—and considers the responses different societies have had to such threats. While the bulk of the book is concerned with the demise of these historical civilizations, Diamond also argues that humanity collectively faces, on a much larger scale, many of the same issues, with possibly catastrophic near-future consequences to many of the world's populations.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies
by Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 transdisciplinary nonfiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.

The book attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations (including North Africa) have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures, and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes.

The Lower River

The Lower River
by Paul Theroux

With his new novel, Paul Theroux returns to the Africa of Dark Star Safari and his early novels; but The Lower River, the story of an American who goes back to Africa where he was once happy, is in many ways even more remarkable.

Ellis Hock is a man so out of luck that even his family name is a mistake. His Italian grandfather, who set up a tailor's shop in a small town in Massachusetts, once tried to make his name more suitably American by changing it from Falcone to Hawk. But he was misunderstood, and the family had to live with Hock for ever after. The Lower River is all about being misunderstood: madly, wildly and very nearly fatally.

The sad yet bitterly funny opening chapters are a beautifully taut portrait of a man at the end of his tether. After a lifetime on duty behind the counter of Hock's Menswear – which, like its owner, is out of tune with the times – Ellis Hock's life is one day ruined. His wife discovers a cache of love-letters on his phone and decides he is a wild philanderer, when he is really just a serial emailer. Hock's private life has been not erotic but merely electronic, and exists only in the affectionate text messages he has exchanged with kindly wives of his customers over the years.

When his wife divorces him and his daughter claims her share of his money and turns her back on him, Ellis Hock flees Boston for the only place in his life where he once knew who he was: the obscure village of Malabo, in the far south of Malawi.

Malabo, as he remembers it, in what was then Nyasaland before independence, was a desolate place: malarial, appallingly hot, poor, proud, dangerous, superstitious, and infested with snakes. Fresh out of college with a biology degree, Hock went there as a young Peace Corps teacher. He helped to build a school, learnt the Sena language and fell in love with Gala, a local woman.

Like most of Hock's dreams, it did not end well. Gala was engaged to a villager and to lose her virginity would mean that her fiancé would disown her. Yet in Malabo, Hock had been in his element. He doubled his volunteer stint from two years to four, and was renowned in the village as the man who was not afraid of snakes. His reluctant return to the States – because his father was dying – has haunted him ever since.

Theroux's account of a young man's first enchanted experience of Africa, with its evident autobiographical underpinnings, rings exactly right. It is a masterly, moving portrait of how Africa ensnares and enchants and plays merry hell with sentimentalities.

Hock, who remembers so lovingly the country of Nyasaland, is utterly unprepared for what he finds there 40 years on. What he wants is to go back to "a simpler, older world", where he was called, with respect and affection, "the mzungu at Malabo". What he gets is the new Malawi, where a disenchanted official at the American consulate tells him that "everyone wants a ticket out". And where, when he arrives in Malabo, he finds the school, the store and the spirit of the villagers wrecked beyond repair.

Half A Life

Half A Life
by V.S. Naipaul

Willie Somerset Chandran is the son of a Brahmin father and a Dalit mother. His father gave him his middle name as a homage to the English writer Somerset Maugham who had visited the father in the temple where the father was living under a vow of silence. Having come to despise his father, Willie leaves India to go to 1950s London to study. There he leads a life as a poor immigrant and later he writes a book of short stories and manages to publish it.

Willie receives a letter from Ana, a mixed Portuguese and black African girl, who admires his book, and they arrange to meet. They fall in love and Willie follows her to her country (an unnamed Portuguese colony in Africa, presumably Mozambique). Meanwhile Willie's sister Sarojini marries a German and moves to Berlin. The novel ends with Willie having moved to his sister's place in Berlin after his 18 year stay in Africa.

Half a Life is a precursor to Naipaul's 2004 novel Magic Seeds which starts with Willie in Berlin.

The Hunt for Boko Haram

The Hunt for Boko Haram: Investigating the terror tearing Nigeria apart
by Alex Perry

Journalist Alex Perry explores the context to the Chibok kidnappings that inspired the global #bringbackourgirls social media campaign. Perry looks at the flawed foundations of the Nigerian state, the toxic legacy of North-South mistrust and the decades-long power struggles and corruption within Nigeria's ruling classes. He observes that Nigeria's booming oil economy means that the government has no reason to be interested in its electorate; so great is the imbalance between the government's domestic revenues and the taxation revenues on foreign corporations. Perry interviews generals, statesmen and citizens in his quest to find out who Boko Haram really are - global terrorists inspired by Al Qaida as the Nigerian government and others claim? Perry does not think so, his research points to a much more local but no less savage agenda spawned in a perfect storm of poverty, corruption, resentment, suspicion and fundamentalism. He shows how endemic abuses of power have set Nigeria up for such an outcome, and looks at some of the work being done to try to prevent Nigeria from descending into further anarchy or becoming an irrevocably failed state. First hand accounts of and interviews with victims of the violence sweeping Nigeria and some of those working to halt it are the foundation of this attempt to get as close as possible to the truth. Whilst, as one interviewee puts it, in Nigeria all truth is relative.

Cocaine Highway

Cocaine Highway: The lines that link our drug habit to terror
by Alex Perry

In Cocaine Highway, Alex Perry lifts the lid on a problem few are willing to talk about: direct connections between the recreational drug habits of the relatively rich and privileged in Europe, and the Islamists who fund their war against the west by smuggling narcotics.

Across much of Africa, drug trafficking is escalating in size, speed and international scope. East Africa has seen a sharp increase in the smuggling of heroin en route from Asia to Europe. Nigeria has become a world centre for the production of methamphetamine. Cocaine in transit from South America is corrupting countries and governments, and fuelling instability across the continent. With so many African governments relying on foreign assistance and military support, expedience and simple short-sightedness mean that many western governments inadvertently find themselves ending up as de facto partners to drug traffickers.

Perry navigates this dangerous territory by interviewing smugglers and anti-trafficking agents to reveal sophisticated enterprises that are, in the ungoverned spaces of West Africa, left largely undisturbed. He concludes that foreign interventions in Africa which wilfully ignore the cocaine trade risk not only helping create the conditions that inspire Islamic militancy, but funding it too.

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad


While transporting ivory along the Congo River, Charles Marlow hears whispers about the enigmatic Mr. Kurtz, who has apparently become ill while stationed upriver. Arriving at the Inner Station, Marlow confronts the nature of Kurtz’s mysterious illness, his ties to the local native tribes, and his slow decline into madness.

A Bend in the River

A Bend in the River
by V.S. Naipaul

A Bend in the River is the story of Salim, an Indian born and raised on the east coast of Africa. He buys a shop in a river town in the interior,  in the aftermath of a post-colonial rebellion. The novel tells the story of Salim’s slow rise and fall in business, alongside the story of the town’s slow rise and fall. The town’s fortunes, along with those of Salim and the rest of the characters in the town, slowly scrape toward prosperity after the rebellion. A president’s interest creates a boon, and then paranoia and rebellion and destruction. Fortunes rise and fall, again and again.

Salim offers a fascinating perspective. I’ve read books voiced by Africans about Africa, and books voiced by Westerners about Africa, but Salim is an Indian writing about Africa—the citizen of one colony living in another colony, and writing about post-colonial life. Author Naipaul shared this perspective, being of Indian descent but born and raised in Trinidad. Throughout the book, Salim remains an outsider, an observer to the conflicts and customs of Africa. The other characters that he befriends are also outsiders—his house-servant Metty, a boy-turned-man without a tribe named Ferdinand, fellow Indian merchants Mahesh and Shoba, childhood friend from a wealthier background Indar, and Brits Raymond and Yvette. All of them live in this African world without being of it. They appreciate it in different ways, and their own fortunes are tied up in this town at the bend in the river, or in the political powers at work.

Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East

Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East
Edited by Edmund Burke, III

Until the 1993 first edition of this book, one thing had been missing in Middle Eastern history—depiction of the lives of ordinary Middle Eastern men and women, peasants, villagers, pastoralists, and urbanites. Now updated and revised, the second edition has added six new portraits of individuals set in the contemporary period. It features twenty-four brief biographies drawn from throughout the Middle East—from Morocco to Afghanistan—in which the reader is provided with vantage points from which to understand modern Middle Eastern history "from the bottom up." Spanning the past 160-plus years and reflecting important transformations, these stories challenge elite-centered accounts of what has occurred in the Middle East and illuminate the previously hidden corners of a largely unrecorded world.

The essays, divided chronologically, provide a comprehensive framework for those unfamiliar with Middle Eastern social history. "Pre-Colonial Lives" covers the period from 1850 until World War I, "Colonial Lives" chronicles the beginning of European rule, and "Contemporary Lives" relates the massive changes of the postwar era. Through them, we see how specific ecologies, ways of life, ethnic, class and gender situations can shape individual human action.

The Modern Middle East: A Reader

The Modern Middle East: A Reader
Edited by Albert Habib Hourani, Philip Shukry Khoury, Mary Christina Wilson

This valuable collection of essays brings leading Middle Eastern scholars together in one volume and provides an unparalleled view of the modern Middle East. Covering two centuries of change, from 1789 to the present, the selection is carefully designed for students and is the only available text of its kind. It will also appeal to anyone with a general interest in the Middle East.
The book is divided into four sections: Reforming Elites and Changing Relations with Europe, 1789-1918; Transformations in Society and Economy, 1789-1918; The Construction of Nationalist Ideologies and Politics up to the 1950s; and The Middle East since the Second World War.


Includes Roger Owen's case study that argues that much of what happened in Egypt in the 19th century is well accounted for in the theories of Marx, Hobson, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Baran. But there are three areas where the theories do not provide and adequate framework: the role of the metropolitan states in relation to their capitalists, the nature of the Egyptian state and the changes in the Egyptian social structure with imperial penetration produced.

Here Is Your War

Here Is Your Warby Ernie Pyle

A wonderful and enduring tribute to American troops in the Second World War, Here Is Your War is Ernie Pyle’s story of the soldiers’ first campaign against the enemy in North Africa. With unequaled humanity and insight, Pyle tells how people from a cross-section of America—ranches, inner cities, small mountain farms, and college towns—learned to fight a war. The Allied campaign and ultimate victory in North Africa was built on blood, brave deeds, sacrifice and needless loss, exotic vistas, endurance, homesickness, and an unmistakable American sense of humor. It’s all here—the suspenseful landing at Oran; the risks taken daily by fighter and bomber pilots; grim, unrelenting combat in the desert and mountains of Tunisia; a ferocious tank battle that ended in defeat for the inexperienced Americans; and the final victory at Tunis. Pyle’s keen observations relate the full story of ordinary G.I.s caught up in extraordinary times.

Black Folk Here and There, Vol. 2

Black Folk Here and There : An Essay in History and Anthropology, Volume II
by St. Clair Drake

To the Jews of pre-Christian Palestine, Black people were sometimes friends and sometimes enemies, but never objects of racially based derision or contempt. The ancient Greeks categorized people not as Black or white, but as ''civilized'' or ''uncivilized.'' In the Muslim world, many slaves were Blacks, but so were many soldiers, several prominent rulers, and an occasional saint. Armed with such facts gathered during a lifetime of research, St. Clair Drake in his final work, Black Folk Here and There, submits to the test of history a wide range of theories that attempt to explain what happens when Black people and white people interact and why color prejudice may arise.
In this volume, Drake challenges theories claiming that negative attitudes toward blackness and Black people, which emerged from centuries of racial slavery, have always prevailed. Drake finds telling evidence of color prejudice and equally telling evidence of its absence or irrelevance.

Black Folk Here and There, Vol. 1

Black Folk Here and There: An Essay in History and Anthropology, Vol. 1
by St. Clair Drake

Professor Drake's Black Folk Here and There is essential reading for anyone concerned with the history and legacy of slavery and race in the contemporary world. This book provides the best review of the specialized literature on race and slavery, making available a great deal of knowledge heretofore confined to university libraries. St. Clair Drake was one of the deans of Black Studies as well as American Sociology, and he applied that rare background to an analysis and evaluation of modern theories of race and racism. His main targets are the theory of black inferiority and the theory of universal black contemptability. Did every civilization develop racism against "blacks"? In order to challenge that idea presented by some psychologists and historians, including the prize winning Professor Carl Degler, Drake reviews the history of Egypt, Ethiopia, Europe and Christianity in the Middle Ages, slavery and Islam, and the rise of the Atlantic Slave Trade. And he finds that there was no universal contempt for blacks. The evaluation of blacks throughout the ages, depended on their status in various civilizations. The high point of black social and cultural status was in ancient Egypt and Ethiopia as well as during the Middle Ages as revealed in such folklore as Prester John and the Black Madonna. However, with the emergence of the Atlantic slave trade as the modern world took shape, Black Africans took on a distinct ly degraded social and cultural status that was spread by modern communications throughout the world. In terms of encyclopedic knowledge on this subject and hard hitting analysis, Drake's study is unrivaled! As a professor of history, I use it as the best introduction to the global problems of race and racism left behind by modern slavery and the Atlantic slave trade. No one knew this subject or wrote with the scope as did Professor Drake.

Africa's Discovery of Europe

Africa's Discovery of Europe 1450-1850

by David Northrup

Brilliantly written and thoroughly engaging, this groundbreaking book examines the full range of African-European encounters from an unfamiliar African perspective rather than from the customary European one. Africa's Discovery of Europe, 1450-1850, concludes with an expanded epilogue that extends the themes of African-European commercial and cultural interaction to the present day. By featuring vivid life stories of individual Africans and drawing upon their many recorded sentiments, David Northrup presents African perspectives that persuasively challenge stereotypes about African-European relations as they unfolded in Africa, Europe, and the Atlantic world between 1450 and 1850.

Acclaimed by students in classroom settings ranging from secondary schools to graduate colloquia, the text features thematically organized chapters that explore first impressions, religion and politics, commerce and culture, imported goods and technology, the Middle Passage, and Africans in Europe. In addition, Northrup offers a thoughtful examination of Africans' relations—intellectual, commercial, cultural, and sexual—with Europeans, tracing how the patterns of behavior that emerged from these encounters shaped pre-colonial Africa. The book concludes with an examination of the roles of race, class, and culture in early modern times, pointing out which themes in Africa's continuing discovery of Europe after 1850 were similar to earlier patterns, and why other themes were different.

The World

The World: A History: Combined Volume
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

The World gives students the whole story. It is a new kind of history text – not just a collection of facts and figures. World renowned historian, world respected scholar, successful author of more than 25 books translated into 22 languages, and exceptional writer, author Felipe Fernández-Armesto offers a truly holistic narrative of the world, from human beginnings to the present. All aspects of the text – from the exceptionally clear narrative that always places the story in time, to the unparalleled map program, to the focused pedagogical features – support the story. Because of the author’s breadth of vision, students will come away with a deep understanding of the fundamental interrelationships – among peoples and their environments – that make up the world’s story.

Developing a project like The World required the input of and counsel of hundreds of individuals. David Ringrose, respected World Historian from the University of California–San Diego, served as The World’s editorial consultant, and provided extensive teaching tips in the Instructor’s Guide to Teaching the World. Nearly 100 reviewers critiqued the manuscript, from the first edition to the final draft. Instructor focus groups were held throughout the country during the publication process.

Migrations and Cultures

Migrations and Cultures: A World View

by Thomas Sowell

Migrations and Cultures goes beyond the political view of immigration and presents the whole phenomena of migration and immigration and the major role it plays in the general advancement of the human race.

Most commentators look at the issue of immigration from the viewpoint of immediate politics. In doing so, they focus on only a piece of the issue and lose touch with the larger picture. Now Thomas Sowell offers a sweeping historical and global look at a large number of migrations over a long period of time. Migrations and Cultures shows the persistence of cultural traits, in particular racial and ethnic groups, and the role these groups’ relocations play in redistributing skills, knowledge, and other forms of “human capital.” answers the question: What are the effects of disseminating the patterns of the particular set of skills, attitudes, and lifestyles each ethnic group has carried forth—both for the immigrants and for the host countries, in social as well as economic terms?

Thomas Sowell has taught economics at a number of colleges and universities, including Cornell, University of California Los Angeles, and Amherst. He has published both scholarly and popular articles and books on economics, and is currently a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume I

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume I

by Edward Gibbon

British parliamentarian and soldier Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) conceived of his plan for Decline and Fall while "musing amid the ruins of the Capitol" on a visit to Rome. For the next 10 years he worked away at his great history, which traces the decadence of the late empire from the time of the Antonines and the rise of Western Christianity. "The confusion of the times, and the scarcity of authentic memorials, pose equal difficulties to the historian, who attempts to preserve a clear and unbroken thread of narration," he writes. Despite these obstacles, Decline and Fall remains a model of historical exposition, and required reading for students of European history.

Gibbon’s masterpiece, which narrates the history of the Roman Empire from the second century a.d. to its collapse in the west in the fifth century and in the east in the fifteenth century, is widely considered the greatest work of history ever written. This first volume covers the last two hundred years of the Roman Empire leading up to its collapse.

Mugabe

Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe's Future

by Martin Meredith

Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe in 1980 after a long civil war in Rhodesia. The white minority government had become an international outcast in refusing to give in to the inevitability of black majority rule. Finally the defiant white prime minister Ian Smith was forced to step down and Mugabe was elected president. Initially he promised reconciliation between white and blacks, encouraged Zimbabwe's economic and social development, and was admired throughout the world as one of the leaders of the emerging nations and as a model for a transition from colonial leadership. But as Martin Meredith shows in this history of Mugabe's rule, Mugabe from the beginning was sacrificing his purported ideals--and Zimbabwe's potential--to the goal of extending and cementing his autocratic leadership. Over time, Mugabe has become ever more dictatorial, and seemingly less and less interested in the welfare of his people, treating Zimbabwe's wealth and resources as spoils of war for his inner circle. In recent years he has unleashed a reign of terror and corruption in his country. Like the Congo, Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Liberia, Zimbabwe has been on a steady slide to disaster. Now for the first time the whole story is told in detail by an expert. It is a riveting and tragic political story, a morality tale, and an essential text for understanding today's Africa.