QUICK DELIVERY
Swift dispatch
The Lower River
Brief Summary
Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business.
When his wife leaves him, taking the family home, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to Malawi on the remote Lower River, where he can be happy again. Arriving at the dusty village, he finds it transformed: the school he built is a ruin, the church and clinic are gone, and poverty and apathy have set in among the people.
They remember him — the White Man with no fear of snakes — and welcome him. But is his new life, his journey back, an escape or a trap? Interweaving memory and desire, hope and despair, salvation and damnation, this is a hypnotic, compelling, and brilliant return to a terrain no one has ever written better about than Theroux.
ISBN:9780241957745
Author:Paul Theroux
Beneath the Lions Gaze by Maaza Mengiste
An epic tale of a father and two sons, of betrayals and loyalties, of a family unraveling in the wake of Ethiopia’s revolution.
This memorable, heartbreaking story opens in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, 1974, on the eve of a revolution. Yonas kneels in his mother’s prayer room, pleading to his god for an end to the violence that has wracked his family and country.
His father, Hailu, a prominent doctor, has been ordered to report to jail after helping a victim of state-sanctioned torture to die. And Dawit, Hailu’s youngest son, has joined an underground resistance movement—a choice that will lead to more upheaval and bloodshed across a ravaged Ethiopia.
Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction. It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic, and indelibly tragic, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.
The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah
Brief Summary
Memory is an albino woman languishing in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she has been convicted of murder. As part of her appeal, her lawyer insists that she write down what happened as she remembers it.
As her story unfolds, Memory reveals that she has been tried and convicted for the murder of Lloyd Hendricks, her adopted father. But who was Lloyd Hendricks? Why does Memory feel no remorse for his death? And did everything happen exactly as she remembers?
In The Book of Memory, Petina Gappah has created a uniquely slippery narrator: forthright, acerbically funny, and with a complicated relationship to the truth. Moving between the townships of the poor and the suburbs of the rich, and between the past and the present, Gappah weaves a compelling tale of love, obsession, the relentlessness of fate, and the treachery of memory.
The Fever Tree by Jennifer McVeigh
Brief Summary
Having drawn comparisons to Gone with the Wind and Out of Africa, The Fever Tree is a page-turner of the very first order. In London she was caged by society.
In South Africa, she is dangerously free.
Frances Irvine, left destitute in the wake of her father’s sudden death, has been forced to abandon her life of wealth and privilege in London and immigrate to the Southern Cape of Africa. 1880 South Africa is a country torn apart by greed. In this remote and inhospitable land she becomes entangled with two very different men—one driven by ambition, the other by his ideals. Only when the rumor of a smallpox epidemic takes her into the dark heart of the diamond mines does she see her path to happiness.
But this is a ruthless world of avarice and exploitation, where the spoils of the rich come at a terrible human cost and powerful men will go to any lengths to keep the mines in operation. Removed from civilization and disillusioned by her isolation, Frances must choose between passion and integrity, a decision that has devastating consequences.
The Fever Tree is a compelling portrait of colonial South Africa, its raw beauty and deprivation alive in equal measure. But above all it is a love story about how—just when we need it most—fear can blind us to the truth.
Children of the Revolution
Brief Summary
Seventeen years after fleeing the revolutionary Ethiopia that claimed his father's life, Stepha Stephanos is a man still caught between two existences: the one he left behind, aged nineteen, and the new life he has forged in Washington D.C. Sepha spends his days in a sort of limbo: quietly running his grocery store into the ground, revisiting the Russian classics, and toasting the old days with his friends Kenneth and Joseph, themselves emigrants from Africa.
But when a white woman named Judith moves next door with her only daughter, Naomi, Sepha's life seems on the verge of change...
ISBN:9780099502739
Author:Dinaw Mengestu
Nairobi A Night Guide
Brief Summary
Nairobi: A Night Guide through the City-in-the-Sun
Nairobi is fascinating. It is a vibrant, eccentric and extreme city made up of different and contradictory worlds. Nairobi is also an elusive city; difficult to comprehend and fully penetrate. What a better guide can there be than Tony Mochama, the notorious and popular chronicler of Nairobi’s urban life?
Haunted by his doppelganger the Night Runner—a naked, mad and mythical being who, in popular rural Kenyan imagination, runs from house to house casting spells - Mochama will carry you along on his journeys through Nairobi. His is a declaration of love for the ‘city in the sun’, after the sun has gone down.
"How can I describe how it is to Night Run; to step of the precipice of dusk and into the dark? Or how, in the dim lights of a club, the eyes of strangers always look mysterious, giving people a depth, a danger even, of which they are devoid of by day?"
"
ISBN:2030301004792
Author:Tony Mochama
Explorers of the Nile
Brief Summary
Explorers of the Nile: The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure
Nothing obsessed explorers of the mid-nineteenth century more than the quest to discover the source of the White Nile. It was the planet's most elusive secret, the prize coveted above all others. Between 1856 and 1876, six larger-than-life men and one extraordinary woman accepted the challenge.
Showing extreme courage and resilience, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, James Augustus Grant, Samuel Baker, Florence von Sass, David Livingstone, and Henry Morton Stanley risked their lives and reputations in the fierce competition. Award-winning author Tim Jeal deploys fascinating new research to provide a vivid tableau of the unmapped "Dark Continent," its jungle deprivations, and the courage—as well as malicious tactics—of the explorers.
On multiple forays launched into east and central Africa, the travelers passed through almost impenetrable terrain and suffered the ravages of flesh-eating ulcers, paralysis, malaria, deep spear wounds, and even death. They discovered Lakes Tanganyika and Victoria and became the first white people to encounter the kingdoms of Buganda and Bunyoro. Jeal weaves the story with authentic new detail and examines the tragic unintended legacy of the Nile search that still casts a long shadow over the people of Uganda and Sudan.
ISBN:9780300187397
Author:Tim Jeal
The Carnivorous City
Brief Summary
Rabato Sabato aka Soni Dike is a Lagos big boy; a criminal turned grandee, with a beautiful wife, a seaside mansion and a questionable fortune. Then one day he disappears and his car is found in a ditch, music blaring from the speakers. Soni's older brother, Abel Dike, a teacher, arrives in Lagos to look for his missing brother.
Abel is rapidly sucked into the unforgiving Lagos maelstrom where he has to navigate encounters with a motley cast of common criminals, deal with policemen intent on getting a piece of the pie, and contend with his growing attraction to his brother's wife.
Carnivorous City is a story about love, family and just desserts but it is above all a tale about Lagos and the people who make the city by the lagoon what it is.
ISBN:9781911115243
Author:Toni Kan
A Primates Memoir by Robert M. Sapolsky
A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life among the Baboons.
In the tradition of Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, Robert Sapolsky, a foremost science writer and recipient of a MacArthur Genius Grant, tells the mesmerizing story of his twenty-one years in remote Kenya with a troop of Savannah baboons.
"I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead, I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla,” writes Robert Sapolsky in this witty and riveting chronicle of a scientist’s coming-of-age in remote Africa.
An exhilarating account of Sapolsky & and twenty-one-year study of a troop of rambunctious baboons in Kenya, A Primate’s Memoir interweaves serious scientific observations with wry commentary about the challenges and pleasures of living in the wilds of the Serengeti — for man and beast alike.
Over two decades, Sapolsky survives culinary atrocities, gunpoint encounters, and a surreal kidnapping, while witnessing the encroachment of the tourist mentality on the farthest vestiges of unspoiled Africa. As he conducts unprecedented physiological research on wild primates, he becomes ever more enamored of his subjects — unique and compelling characters in their own right — and he returns to them summer after summer, until tragedy finally prevents him.
By turns hilarious and poignant, A Primate’s Memoir is a magnum opus from one of our foremost science writers.
Quest for Liberty by Gikonyo Kiano
When the history of Kenya is told, a number of people feature prominently. One such person is Dr Julius Gikonyo Kiano, a politician who put Kenya before self. Dr Kiano was the first Kenyan to earn a doctorate degree, and the first African to teach at the Royal Technical College, now University of Nairobi.
His story enumerates Kenya's struggle for independence and the role played by various nationalists in this noble cause.
Quest for Liberty represents the acme of Dr Kiano's life as a politician. He was among those who negotiated for a new constitution at Lancaster House Conference just before Independence. As a dedicated minister in both Kenyatta and Moi cabinets, he implemented various notable programmes such as the Africanisation initiative that set the country on the path to economic independence.
The famous airlifts to America that saw hundreds of young Kenyans enrol in universities in the US was his brainchild together with the late Tom Mboya.
Tick Bite Fever
Brief Summary
Tick Bite Fever is the unconventional memoir of a very unconventional childhood. In the early Seventies, Dave Bennun's family transplanted themselves from Swindon to the wilds of Kenya. His father, who was a doctor, had lived in Africa before (but had felt it expedient to leave when the South African government realized he was carting explosives around in the boot of his car for the ANC).
But for Dave, Kenya was be musingly new. It would be his home for the next 16 years. In Kenya, the childhood memoir takes on a surreal tone. On the way home from school, closed because a pair of lions are padding around the playground, Dave is mugged by baboons.
Meet Dave's favorite pet Achilles, the almost indestructible dog! Find out about 'Nairobi snow' - and the national radio station that only has three records. And read about Dave and his Dad spending happy Sunday afternoons being chased by a herd of elephants. Enchantingly funny, Tick Bite Fever is a tale of the fading innocence of childhood that is miles ahead of the competition.
ISBN:9780091886899
Author:David Bennun
The Sad Artist and Other Fairytales
Brief Summary
In Ndiritu Wahome's first published book, he charms, tantalizes and engages his readers with a collection of fairytales for all ages. From a story-telling weaver bird to a chief's son who finds the real value of life, Wahome leads his readers on a captivating journey that deifies time and reality yet remains relevant.
Wahome says his "objective was to create fantasy stories, which were infused with realism in the hope of letting young children know that even though life is full of hardships, they can overcome and achieve anything they so deemed." But peel back another layer, and The Sad Artist and Other Fairytales has a strong message that reveals "bad leadership, appalling politics, sloth and corruption" that Wahome says is too often found in contemporary African governments. "The Sad Artist is magical realism at its best.
Wahome's fairytales are in the tradition of Salmon Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Ben Okri," says publisher Catherine Rayburn-Trobaugh. "Ndiritu captures the innocence of the world through a child's eyes to make strong statements about the modern condition." Although the fairytales are set in a mystical version Wahome's native Kenya, they transcend Africa for a global perspective on the realities of life in the 21st century at the crossroads of old and new.
Although Wahome's fairytales can sometimes be cautionary, he never loses hope for both humanity and its future. His world is one that "The wicked, who seem to live the good life, in the end, suffer in their demise. The good, even though exposed to a life of poverty, wretchedness, and solitude, end up living happily ever after."
ISBN:9780692236628
Author:Ndiritu Wahome
One Life too Many by Yusuf Dawood
Brief Summary
Sydney Walker, young and carefree, came to Kenya in search of adventure, fell in love with the country and decided to make it his home.
This is the story of the joys and sorrows of a man who worked hard and loved even harder. A magnificent account of expatriate life, set in the awe- inspiring beauty of Kenya, it confirms Yusuf K. Dawood as one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
Haven Under The Hill A Kenya Vignette
Brief Summary
This book was first published privately in 2001, has 127 pages, 82 beautiful colour pictures, 40 B/W photos, but no maps. MONTY BROWN (17.7.1929-15.2.2012) arrived in NYERI, Kenya in 1930 and has lived there between Mt Kenya and the Aberdare range.
This is heart of Kikuyu country and the place where early settlers lived. This book is about them and the Aberdare Country Club and its sattelite lodge - THE ARK. The Club faces east towards MT KENYA (Kima-Ja-Kegnia or Kirinyaga or Ol Dionyo-Keri or Kirimara). On 3.12.1849, Krapf was first European to see Mt Kenia. On 18.12.1902, Nyeri was settled near Nyeri Hill (Na-ayier in Maasai means 'the cook'- in old Africa - a woman's job). Aberdare Country Club is perched on 'Ol Dionyo Larash'. White settlers came to farm coffee and livestock on these hills.
By 1920, as Kenya Colony was formed, more white settlers came to Nyeri (6,000ft). Mt Kenya was once the highest mountain in Africa, before erosion wore away the crater walls. In 1935, Mickey and Dot Lyons bought the 'STEEP' site on the footslope of Ol Dionyo Larash. Vir Singh- a sikh, contractor from Nyeri was used. In 1937, William D Campbell built Monte Carlo Ranch House, 2 miles from the Steep. Both houses facing Mt Kenya with Aberdare Forests behind them. Then in 1967, it was thought to convert 'Steep' to a lodge and build another lodge 'The Ark' in the Aberdare Forests. Bill Woodley, Warden at Mt Kenya/Aberdares helped. Kartar Singh of Nyeri got the contract for the Ark in 1969, opening it on 1.12.1969.
'Steep' name was then changed to 'The Aberdare Country Club'. In 1980, the capacity of the Ark was increased from 60 to 123 passengers. The Club was also expanded with a golf course and 19 extra cottages. The Ark stands at the edge of YATHABARA glade with a large waterhole and salt lick surrounded by the Aberdare forests. Me and my wife visited these lodges in September 2001. First you go to the Club, leave most of your luggage, have lunch and by 2.30pm, you are taken in buses 17 miles to the Ark. After entering the Aberdare National Park, you are 4 miles from the Ark. Animals are seen straight away. No mosquitoes here. Ark, is 3 story building, your room is small with shower and toilet. There were many viewing areas to see all kinds of animals. In the middle of the night, a buzzer rang in our room, there were rhinoes at the waterhole. Next morning, after breakfast, we were back at the Club to collect the rest of our luggage. WONDERFUL.
"
ISBN:2030311000421
Author:Monty. Brown
From Goatherd to Governor
Brief Summary
From Goatherd to Governor. The Autobiography of Edwin Mtei
From Goatherd to Governor is Edwin Mtei's autobiography. It is a story of the journey a few Africans of his generation made, from humble beginnings to heights of success and power. Mr. Mtei was the first Governor of the Bank of Tanzania and the architect of Central Banking in Tanzania, Secretary General of the East African Community and Minister of Finance in Nyerere's Government.
Born in 1932 in Marangu, Moshi, he was brought up in a grass-thatched conical hut by his mother, a single parent; he attended 'bush' school at Ngaruma Lutheran Parish Church, and herded goats after lessons finished; he attended Old Moshi Middle and Tabora Secondary schools and went on to Makerere University College in 1953. He graduated from there with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science, History and Geography in 1957. In his own words he states: "I have felt it worthwhile starting right at the beginning of my life.
In this way, I aim to give some idea as to what it was like growing up in my birthplace, Marangu, in the tribal and colonial environment of Tanganyika in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. I touch on some of the traditions and beliefs of those days and on some colonial laws that impacted on our lives and surroundings." But as he himself states: "The most interesting part of my story is that relating to the events when I held senior positions in Nyerere's Government, and in the public service generally." That includes his falling out with Mwalimu Nyerere over IMF and its policies, and his resignation from his post as Minister of Finance. For the first time he tells his side of that story.
In 1992 Mr. Mtei threw himself deep into the waters of multiparty politics. He founded Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo (CHADEMA) - the Party for Democracy and Development - and worked tirelessly to see it grow and emerge as an important party in the opposition, despite his own failure to win the parliamentary seat for Arusha Urban in the 1995 election. Even at 77 Mr. Mtei does not mince his words.
He says what he believes and says it with courage and conviction. This is history, spanning well over half a century, written by someone who was involved in and who observed closely the key events of his time. He is retired and works on his farm, Ogaden Estate, but still manages to ruffle feathers whenever he is asked to comment on the economy and politics of Tanzania and East Africa.
ISBN:9789987080304
Author:Edwin Mtei
The White Mans Burden
Brief Summary
The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.
A professor of economics pens an informed and excoriating attack on the tragic waste, futility, and hubris of the West's efforts to improve the lot of the so-called developing world, and provides constructive suggestions on how to move forward. From one of the world as best-known development economists an excoriating attack on the tragic hubris of the West as efforts to improve the lot of the so-called developing world in his previous book, "The Elusive Quest for Growth,"
William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired by his then-employer, the World Bank. "The White Man’s Burden" is his widely anticipated counterpuncher brilliant and blistering indictment of the West as economic policies for the world as poor.
Sometimes angry, sometimes irreverent, but always clear-eyed and rigorous, Easterly argues that we in the West need to face our own history of ineptitude and draw the proper conclusions, especially at a time when the question of our ability to transplant Western institutions has become one of the most pressing issues we face.
"
ISBN:9780143038825
Author:William Easterly
Trailblazer: Breaking Through in Keny...
As a child during the Mau Mau Emergency, Peter Kuguru personally witnessed scenes of horrific brutality. He and his family experienced great hardship and upheaval as the British colonial regime acted ruthlessly to crush the freedom movement.
As Peter made his way slowly through school at this terrible time, he must have despaired about his future prospects in life. But the euphoria of Independence and the promise it held, coupled with the values of hard work and education insistently drilled into him by his father, encouraged him to dream big.
From a young schoolboy paparazzo snapping pictures of his schoolmates for a few cents, to the courageous and far-sighted industrialist who dared to tackle Coca Cola head-on, Peter Kuguru has travelled a trailblazing journey. At the same time he has never forsaken a fundamental, heartfelt personal commitment to improving the welfare of the people of Mathira.
It was this dedication that led him to follow his father, a powerful oak of a man, into politics. Now, in this book, for the first time, a candidate in a Kenyan Parliamentary Election discloses the tricks, deceit and skullduggery that tragically characterize campaigns at the grassroots.
These corrupt, dirty, evil and underhand maneuvers have transformed our electoral process into a mere travesty of democracy, destroying the credibility of many politicians in the eyes of the trusting wananchi. This fascinating and revealing book has much to teach our budding industrialists, while leaving our political class with a great deal both to be ashamed of and to change radically and immediately.
No Time to Lose
Brief summary
No Time to Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly Viruses
When Peter Piot was in medical school, a professor warned, "There’s no future in infectious diseases. They’ve all been solved.” Fortunately, Piot ignored him, and the result has been an exceptional, adventure-filled career. In the 1970s, as a young man, Piot was sent to Central Africa as part of a team tasked with identifying a grisly new virus.
Crossing into the quarantine zone on the most dangerous missions, he studied local customs to determine how this disease—the Ebola virus—was spreading. Later, Piot found himself in the field again when another mysterious epidemic broke out: AIDS.
He traveled throughout Africa, leading the first international AIDS initiatives there. Then, as founder and director of UNAIDS, he negotiated policies with leaders from Fidel Castro to Thabo Mbeki and helped turn the tide of the epidemic. Candid and engrossing, No Time to Lose captures the urgency and excitement of being on the front lines in the fight against today’s deadliest diseases.
ISBN:9780393063165
Author:Peter Piot
The Whispering Trees by Abubakar Adam...
Brief summary
The Whispering Trees, award winning writer Abubakar Adam Ibrahim's debut collection of short stories, employs nuance, subtle drama and deadpan humor to capture colorful Nigerian lives.
There's Kyakkayawa, who sparks forbidden thoughts in her fathers and has a bit of angels and witches in her; there's the mysterious butterfly girl who just might be an incarnation of Ohikwo's long dead mother; there's also a flummoxed white woman caught between two Nigerian brothers and an unfolding scandal, and, of course, the two medicine men of Mazade who battle against their egos, an epidemic and an enigmatic witch.
ISBN:9789789237258
Author:Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
The Beautiful Struggle
Brief summary
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood
An exceptional father-son story about the reality that tests us, the myths that sustain us, and the love that saves us.
Paul Coates was an enigmatic god to his sons: a Vietnam vet who rolled with the Black Panthers, an old-school disciplinarian and new-age believer in free love, an autodidact who launched a publishing company in his basement dedicated to telling the true history of African civilization. Most of all, he was a wily tactician whose mission was to carry his sons across the shoals of inner-city adolescence and through the collapsing civilization of Baltimore in the Age of Crack, and into the safe arms of Howard University, where he worked so his children could attend for free.
Among his brood of seven, his main challenges were Ta-Nehisi, spacey and sensitive and almost comically miscalibrated for his environment, and Big Bill, charismatic and all-too-ready for the challenges of the streets.
The Beautiful Struggle follows their divergent paths through this turbulent period, and their father's steadfast efforts assisted by mothers, teachers, and a body of myths, histories, and rituals conjured from the past to meet the needs of a troubled present to keep them whole in a world that seemed bent on their destruction. With a remarkable ability to reimagine both the lost world of his father’s generation and the terrors and wonders of his own youth, Coates offers readers a small and beautiful epic about boys trying to become men in black America and beyond.
ISBN:9780385520362
Author:Ta-Nehisi Coates
