Showing titles in Africa

Serially betrayed by the people who promised to care for him, Asad lived his childhood at a sceptical remove from the adult world, his relation to others wary and tactical. By the time he had reached the cusp of adulthood, Asad had honed an array of wily talents. At the age of 17, in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, he made good as a street hustler. He also courted the famously beautiful Foosiya and, to the astonishment of his peers, married her.

Two tales of a city: the historical race to reach one of the world's most mythologized places and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al-Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.

Shared Ancestry: A Genetic Roadmap for Peace in Ethiopia is a powerful exploration of our interconnectedness, unraveling the genetic threads that tie together the people of Ethiopia. This illuminating work uses the lens of genetics to challenge entrenched beliefs, debunk ethnic stereotypes, and advocate for a more unified national identity.

The Reverend Joseph Julius Jackson was an African American preacher who published The History of the Black Man in 1921, a book which covers the history of the African people from Ethiopia and Egypt. Rev. Jackson believed that a lack of historical knowledge by the Afro American community about their past and origins has undermined their pride, and that a better knowledge of the contribution of the black man to civilization would ameliorate the situation.

South Africa, 1987. Apartheid. When Leon, a white 19-year-old prison guard working on death row, commits an inexplicable act of violence, killing seven black men in a hail of bullets, the outcome of the trial - and the court's sentence - seems a foregone conclusion. Hotshot lawyer John Weber reluctantly takes on the seemingly unwinnable case. A passionate opponent of the death penalty, John discovers that young Leon worked on death row in the nation's most notorious prison, under traumatic conditions....

The story of the world's second-largest continent is as intricate as it is vast. Starting with prehistory and the fossils left behind in Ethiopia by the earliest humans, this book captures a narrative that traverses great ancient civilizations, from the Kingdom of Aksum to the empires of West Africa and sultanates of the East, and explores history-defining events such as the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the liberation of Nelson Mandela.

The Emergency Bouzouki Player is the true story of a teenage conscript railroaded into the South African army for two years of national service at the height of the Apartheid War. The cruelty, the absurdity, and the mindlessness of life in the South African army are candidly described in this firsthand account by an unwilling and resentful conscript who, to escape the infamous Diskobolos Infantry Training Camp and its murderous instructors, claimed he could play the bouzouki in a subterfuge that was to have unforeseen, comical, and sometimes life-threatening consequences.

Africa supplies the majority of the world's diamonds, yet consumers generally know little about the origins and history of these precious stones beyond sensationalized media accounts of so-called blood diamonds.

The powerful and timely story of Peter Hain's political life fighting South African apartheid and modern-day corruption. Peter Hain has had a dramatic 50-year political career, in Britain and his native South Africa. This is the story of that extraordinary journey, from Pretoria to the House of Lords. Hain vividly describes his anti-apartheid parents’ arrest and harassment in the early 1960s, the hanging of a close white family friend, and enforced London exile in 1966.

As a five-year-old, George Alagiah emigrated with his family to Ghana, the first African country to gain independence from the British Empire. A Passage to Africa is Alagiah's shattering catalogue of atrocities crafted into a portrait of Africa that is infused with hope, insight and outrage. In vivid and evocative prose and with a fine eye for detail, Alagiah's viewpoint is spiked with the freshness of the young George on his arrival in Ghana, the wonder with which he recounts his first impressions of Africa and the affection with which he dresses his stories of his early life.

Based on a true story, Exile Child conveys the pain, heartache and inner strength of Sarah Bartmann (the Hottentot Venus) in a way that will leave you feeling both angry at the less glorious side of history and also humbled by a sense of wonder at how anyone could tolerate a life of slavery without losing that most precious of human needs...hope.

Hannibal Barca, one of Carthage’s most influential generals, lived a couple hundred years before Christ, and has led many Roman troops to victory to conquer the surrounding nations. Famous were his battles with elephants he employed during tactical moves of cavalry and infantry armies alike. His resistance against the Roman powers in the Punic Wars have been praised and lamented worldwide.

International human rights activist Lisa Shannon spent many afternoons at the kitchen table having tea with her friend Francisca Thelin, who often spoke of her childhood in Congo. Thelin would conjure vivid images of lush flower gardens, fish the size of small children, and of children running barefoot through her family's coffee plantation, gorging themselves on fruit from the robust and plentiful mango trees.

Charles R. King utilizes his academic education in physics and classical history to apply an original quantitative and empirical face to the study of the greatest conflict in antiquity, the Punic Wars. Accessible to both the professional historian and the buff, this analysis enables the reader to approach one of the most critical and overlooked characters of the Punic Wars from a new and different outlook. Charles R. King's specific area of interest has always been the Roman Republic period and the Punic Wars which have fascinated him since childhood. This work not only utilizes his ...

Many terms were bestowed upon the mysterious Fritz Duquesne throughout his colorful life, but perhaps the most fitting ever attributed to him was: "the most dangerous prisoner to have ever lived." But before this Boer warrior-turned-spy reached the heights of infamy that awarded him such acclaim, Fritz Joubert Duquesne lived a life of adventure that many people wouldn’t experience in a hundred lifetimes. From a young age, Fritz harboured a burning resentment toward the British army, stemming from the brutal treatment suffered by his family during the Anglo-Boer wars.

The founder of Ethiopia (or Abyssinia) and the founder of the Imperial dynasty are held to be Menelik I, son of Solomon, King of Israel, and of Makeda, the Queen of Sheba. According to legend, the brother Kings Ella Abrecha and Ella Asbeha, together with their mother, were converted to Christianity by the Coptic monk Frumentius of Alexandria in 330 AD. Their successor, King Kaleb, considerably expanded the kingdom to include parts of South Arabia.

Once too poor to afford the rat poison with which he planned to take his own life, Robert's legacy tells an astonishing true story of resilience and hope. His work was made famous in the Disney movie Queen of Katwe, a biographical drama about a 13-year-old girl who became a Uganda National Chess Champion under Robert's mentorship. Now, listeners will get a firsthand account of how it all started, and the life of the man behind Phiona Mutesi's world-renowned accomplishments.

Nelson Mandela is known the world over. The essential story of his remarkable life is not. Peter Hain chronicles a life and legacy of courage, sacrifice, values, and leadership in an insightful and accessible biography. Everyone should know Mandela's extraordinary story. Now they can.

Philip Gourevitch's unforgettable modern classic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families opened our eyes to the 1994 genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi minority: Close to a million people were murdered by their neighbors in one hundred days. Now Gourevitch brings us an astonishingly vivid and intimate exploration of how killers and survivors live together again in the same communities, grappling with seemingly impossible burdens of memory and forgetting, denial and confession, vengefulness and forgiveness.

The Barefoot Woman is the story of the author’s mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence encroaching upon them in pre-genocide Rwanda. Recording her memories of their life together in spare, wrenching prose, Mukasonga preserves her mother’s voice in a haunting work of art.