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This Will Be My Undoing Living at the...
Brief Summary
This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America
From one of the fiercest critics writing today, Morgan Jerkins’ highly-anticipated collection of linked essays interweaves her incisive commentary on pop culture, feminism, black history, misogyny, and racism with her own experiences to confront the very real challenges of being a black woman today—perfect for fans of Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists.
Morgan Jerkins is only in her twenties, but she has already established herself as an insightful, brutally honest writer who isn’t afraid of tackling tough, controversial subjects. In This Will Be My Undoing, she takes on perhaps one of the most provocative contemporary topics: What does it mean to "be”—to live as, to exist as—a black woman today? This is a book about black women, but its necessary reading for all Americans.
Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality.
In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large
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Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo
Yejide and Akin have been married since they met and fell in love at university. Though many expected Akin to take several wives, he and Yejide have always agreed: polygamy is not for them. But four years into their marriage--after consulting fertility doctors and healers, trying strange teas and unlikely cures--Yejide is still not pregnant.
She assumes she still has time--until her family arrives on her doorstep with a young woman they introduce as Akin's second wife. Furious, shocked, and livid with jealousy, Yejide knows the only way to save her marriage is to get pregnant, which, finally, she does, but at a cost far greater than she could have dared to imagine.
An electrifying novel of enormous emotional power, Stay With Measks how much we can sacrifice for the sake of family,
The First Century After Beatrice
Brief Summary
A French entomologist, attending a symposium in Cairo, finds a curious kind of bean being on a market stall. It is claimed the beans, derived from the scarab beetle, have magic powers; specifically the power to guarantee the birth of a male infant - and when the entomologist does some research in to the matter, discovering the incidence of female birth has become increasingly rare, he is left in no doubt that the world has entered into a critical phase of its history.
As this beloved daughter Beatrice approaches maturity, the entomologist and his partner question the validity of gender bias, and attempt to redress the growing imbalance before it reaches irreversible proportions.
But in the poverty and famine of the South, where male children can mean the difference between survival and starvation, the popularity of the scarab beans is already taking devastating effect.
ISBN:9780349105994
Author:Amin Maalouf
Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux
Brief Summary
In Dark Star Safari the wittily observant and endearingly irascible Paul Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train.
In the course of his epic and enlightening journey, he endures danger, delay, and dismaying circumstances. Gauging the state of affairs, he talks to Africans, aid workers, missionaries, and tourists.
What results is an insightful meditation on the history, politics, and beauty of Africa and its people, and "a vivid portrayal of the secret sweetness, the hidden vitality, and the long-patient hope that lies just beneath the surface" (Rocky Mountain News).
In a new postscript, Theroux recounts the dramatic events of a return to Africa to visit Zimbabwe.
ISBN:9780241140482
Author:Paul Theroux
The Age of Magic
Brief Summary
This novel takes us on a journey, a magical, and a literal one. A tightly knit group of filmmakers travel from Paris together to make a documentary. Unknown to themselves they carry a lot of unwanted baggage - fear, anger, jealousy, love.
When they arrive in an idyllic Swiss village ringed by mountains and reflected in a lake, they discover a haunted world that will compel them to confront the demons they have been trying to escape.
A mind-blowingly beautiful book, full of unexpected, poetic and metaphysical revelations.
ISBN:9781784081478
Author:Ben Okri
Africas Third Liberation The New Sear...
Brief Summary
Between 2000 and 2010, six of the ten fastest-growing economies worldwide were African. In this favorable environment, how do we make sure jobs and poverty reduction follow? Now is the time for African countries to consider how economic growth and political liberalization should reinforce each other.
Africa has experienced two liberations: the first from colonial and racist regimes and the second from the autocrats who often followed foreign rule. At the end of the 1970s, just three African countries regularly held multiparty elections; more than 40 do today. Africa’s political evolution points to a third liberation, one from political economies characterized by graft, crony capitalism, rent-seeking, elitism and social inequality.
This liberation will open up the economic space in which business can compete, a necessary condition for expanding employment. The debate is about how Africa can realize its economic potential and avoid the disappointments of the first 50 years of independence. Using examples from Central and South America, South-East and South Asia, and the Middle East, the authors examine what means are best to match political liberalization with growth.
ISBN:9780143528883
Author:Greg Mills and Jeffrey Herbst
Out of Eden
Brief Summary
Book Summary of Out Of Eden: The Peopling Of The World In 1988, "Newsweek" headlined the discovery that everyone alive on the earth can trace their maternal DNA back to one woman who lived in Africa 150,000 years ago.
It was thought that humans populated the world through a series of migratory waves from their African homeland.
This book reveals the revolutionary theory about our origins.
ISBN:9781841198941
Author:Stephen Oppenheimer
The Shackled Continent Africas Past P...
Brief Summary
Africa is the only continent to have grown poorer over the last three decades. Why? The Shackled Continent, Robert Guest's fascinating first book, seeks to diagnose the sickness that continues to hobble Africa's development. Using reportage, first-hand experience and economic insight, Robert Guest takes us to the roots of the problems.
Two fifths of African nations are at war, AIDS has lowered life expectancy to as young as forty years old and investment is almost impossible as houses that could be used as collateral do not formally belong to their owners.
Most shocking of all is the evidence that the billions of dollars of aid, given to Africa has had little perceptible effect on the poor The Shackled Continent offers, sometimes controversially, explanations for this state of affairs. In this magnificent and engaging book, Robert Guest provides an invigorating history and an inspired commentary on the enigma of modern Africa.
ISBN:9780330419727
Author:Robert Guest
Age of Iron
Brief Summary
In Cape Town, South Africa, an old woman is dying of cancer. A classics professor, Mrs. Curren has been opposed to the lies and brutality of apartheid all her life, but has lived insulated from its true horrors.
Now she is suddenly forced to come to terms with the iron-hearted rage that the system has wrought. In an extended letter addressed to her daughter, who has long since fled to America, Mrs. Curren recounts the strange events of her dying days. She witnesses the burning of a nearby black township and discovers the bullet-riddled body of her servant's son.
A teenage black activist hiding in her house is killed by security forces. And through it all, her only companion, the only person to whom she can confess her mounting anger and despair, is a homeless man, an alcoholic, who one day appears on her doorstep. Brilliantly crafted and resonant with metaphor, Age of Iron is "a superbly realized novel whose truths cut to the bone."
ISBN:9780140275650
Author:J.M. Coetzee
The African Origin of Civilization My...
"The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality” (1974) is a book by Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese Egyptologist. It makes the case that both mankind and civilization started with black people. It argues that Ancient Egypt was largely Black African in race and culture during the first 2,000 years of its civilization.
Diop’s model goes like this:
1. Homo sapiens began in Africa and began as black people. It was as black people that they spread over Asia and Europe, taking the place of the Neanderthals.
2. The rise of different races: Over time black people in northern Eurasia became light-skinned and began to look like the people who live there today.
3. Between -3000 and -1500, the region stretching from North Africa through the South West Asia to India became civilized: Egypt, Canaan, Elam, Indus, etc. People were dark-skinned, like they still are today in Ethiopia and southern India. The Bible calls them the sons of Ham. The Greeks saw them as Ethiopians of one sort or other.
4. After -1500 this region has become whiter over time as wave after wave of light-skinned barbarians over thousands of years have come down from the north. In India people were separated into light- and dark-skinned castes. Elsewhere they have mixed more thoroughly.
5. Egyptian civilization spreads north of the Sahara to Western Europe by way of Greece and south of the Sahara to West Africa by way of Nubia.
Africas Agitators Militant Anti-Colon...
Brief Summary
Africa's 'Agitators': Militant Anti-Colonialism in Africa and the West, 1918-1939.
Recounts the opposition to British and French rule practiced by Africans living on the continent and by European anti-colonialists and members of Black Diaspora.
This book covers campaigns waged by an early incarnation of African National Congress and other groups in South Africa who fought against legal and other aspects of white minority rule.
ISBN:9780231700566
Author:Jonathan Derrick
Acts of faith
Brief Summary
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.
ISBN:9780375725975
Author:Philip Caputo
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
Brief Summary
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is a moving, passionate love story set amid the turmoil and terror of Rwanda’s genocide.
All manner of Kigali residents pass their time by the pool of the Mille-Collines hotel: aid workers, Rwandan bourgeoisie, expatriates, UN peacekeepers, prostitutes. Keeping a watchful eye is Bernard Valcourt, a jaded foreign journalist, but his closest attention is devoted to Gentille, a hotel waitress with the slender, elegant build of a Tutsi.
As they slip into an intense, improbable affair, the delicately balanced world around them–already devastated by AIDS–erupts in a Hutu-led genocide against the Tutsi people. Valcourt’s efforts to spirit Gentille to safety end in their separation. It will be months before he learns of his lover’s shocking fate.
ISBN:9781400034345
Author:Gil Courtemanche
A Bit of Difference
Brief Summary
At thirty-nine, Deola Bello, a Nigerian expatriate in London, is dissatisfied with being single and working overseas. Deola works as a financial reviewer for an international charity. When her job takes her back to Nigeria in time for her father’s five-year memorial service, she finds herself turning her scrutiny inward.
In Nigeria, Deola encounters changes in her family and in the urban landscape of her home, and new acquaintances who offer unexpected possibilities.
Deola’s journey is as much about evading others’ expectations to get to the heart of her frustration as it is about exposing the differences between foreign images of Africa and the realities of contemporary Nigerian life.
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ISBN:9781876756994
Author:Sefi Atta
Fighting for Peace in Somalia A Histo...
Brief Summary
Fighting for Peace in Somalia: A History and Analysis of the African Union Mission (AMISOM), 2007-2017
Fighting for Peace in Somalia provides the first comprehensive analysis of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), an operation deployed in 2007 to stabilize the country and defend its fledgling government from one of the world's deadliest militant organizations, Harakat al-Shabaab.
The book's two parts provide a history of the mission from its genesis in an earlier, failed regional initiative in 2005 up to mid-2017, as well as an analysis of the mission's six most important challenges, namely, logistics, security sector reform, civilian protection, strategic communications, stabilization, and developing a successful exit strategy. These issues are all central to the broader debates about how to design effective peace operations in Africa and beyond.
AMISOM was remarkable in several respects: it would become the African Union's (AU) largest peace operation by a considerable margin deploying over 22,000 soldiers; it became the longest running mission under AU command and control, outlasting the nearest contender by over seven years; it also became the AU's most expensive operation, at its peak costing approximately US$1 billion per year; and, sadly, AMISOM became the AU's deadliest mission.
Although often referred to as a peacekeeping operation, AMISOM's troops were given a range of daunting tasks that went well beyond the realm of peacekeeping, including VIP protection, war-fighting, counterinsurgency, stabilization, and state-building as well as supporting electoral processes and facilitating humanitarian assistance.
ISBN:9780198724544
Author:Paul D. Williams
Why Africa is Poor And what Africans ...
Brief Summary
Why Africa is Poor looks at the fragile economic and political situation in Africa and makes the quite controversial argument that the main reason Africa’s people are poor is due to the choices made by their leaders.
Dr Greg Mills draws extensively from his experiences running various presidential-level advisory teams across the continent and examines the policy choices that have stunted African development.
In providing some answers to the conundrum of development, the book focuses on the way the global economy works, Africa’s record and the choices made by its leaders, the role of the outside world and the global aid regime. It assesses whether the odds are in Africa’s favour and identifies the areas where African leadership could make better choices.
ISBN:9780143528098
Author:Greg Mills
The Rise of the BRICS in Africa
Brief Summary
The Rise of the BRICS in Africa: The Geopolitics of South-South Relations
A little over a decade ago Africa was being spoken of as the 'lost' or 'hopeless' continent in the media. Now it has some of the fastest growing economies in the world, in large part because of the impacts of a group of large developing countries - the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).
In this first book to be written about the BRICS as a collective phenomenon, Carmody reveals how the BRICS powers' engagements with Africa, both individually and collectively, are often contradictory, generating new inequalities and potentialities for development.
Crucially, Carmody shows how the geopolitics of the BRICS countries' involvement in Africa is impacted by and impacts upon their international relations more generally, and how the emergence of these economies has begun to alter the very nature of globalization, which is no longer purely a Western-led project.
A path-breaking examination of Africa's changing role in the world.
ISBN:9781780326047
Author:Padraig Carmody
Somalia in Transition Since 2006
Brief Summary
This book picks up where its predecessor, Somalia between Jihad and Restoration, left off, examining international efforts to stabilize war-torn Somalia. It analyzes major political events in Somalia in the years since 2006, examining opportunities for restoration of the country based on the United Nations-backed plan known as the "Roadmap for the End of the Transition," improved security conditions, and international economics and financial support.
The author notes that the time of transition may be over, according to the timetable of the United Nations, but it is clear that the work of transformation is just beginning. In considering whether political and social chaos in Somalia is ending, Shay sees two possible futures. One possibility is the establishment of a reform government that unifies Somali society; another is continued strife that accelerates Somalia’s descent into the endless violence of a failed state.
Shay believes the international approach to Somalia requires a thorough reassessment. He argues it has been limited to two Western priorities—terrorism and piracy—while largely ignoring domestic issues of critical concern to Somalis. As a result, many Somalis have come to view those participating in the international effort as a foreign occupation.
ISBN:9781412853903
Author:Shaul Shay
Joseph Murumbi A legacy of Integrity
Brief Summary
The Murumbi interviews represent one of the few acutely observed, personal accounts of Kenya’s independence-era politics.
As such, they are of value not only to historical researchers of the future but also to individual Kenyans, especially younger Kenyans, who want to know more about how their country came to be.
ISBN:Joseph Murumbi A legacy of Integrity001
Author:Karen Rothmyer
Happiness by Aminatta Forna
London. A fox makes its way across Waterloo Bridge. The distraction causes two pedestrians to collide--Jean, an American studying the habits of urban foxes, and Attila, a Ghanaian psychiatrist there to deliver a keynote speech. From this chance encounter, Aminatta Forna's unerring powers of observation show how in the midst of the rush of a great city lie numerous moments of connection.
Attila has arrived in London with two tasks: to deliver a keynote speech on trauma, as he has done many times before; and to contact the daughter of friends, his "niece" who hasn't called home in a while. Ama has been swept up in an immigration crackdown, and now her young son Tano is missing.
When, by chance, Attila runs into Jean again, she mobilizes the network of rubbish men she uses as volunteer fox spotters. Security guards, hotel doormen, traffic wardens--mainly West African immigrants who work the myriad streets of London--come together to help. As the search for Tano continues, a deepening friendship between Attila and Jean unfolds.
Meanwhile a consulting case causes Attila to question the impact of his own ideas on trauma, the values of the society he finds himself in, and a grief of his own. In this delicate tale of love and loss, of cruelty and kindness, Forna asks us to consider the interconnectedness of lives, our co-existence with one another and all living creatures, and the true nature of happiness.
