Africa Books

This book is for the person just beginning to read about Ancient Egypt, as well as the more advanced reader. It's scholarly, well-organized, and up-to-date, but this narrative of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, and people who lived in those times, is also vivid and moving. Day-to-day life of those long gone becomes real, for Guillemette Andreu has given the Ancient Egyptians the immortality they yearned for. I haven't seen the book in its original French, but the translation by David Lorton must be excellent, it reads so well.

An extremely well-written thoroughly-explained book, it provides an expressive picture of everyday life of the Ancient Egyptians and the pharaohs of the time. In the first chapter, the history of the dynastic era (2700-1750 B.C.E.) is briefly summarized. Throughout the remainder of the book, the author attempts to recreate the daily lives, labours and religious beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians, with the aid of letters, artifacts, hieroglyphic inscriptions and tomb scenes. Highly recommended for all and particularly for those whose primary interest lies in the Age of the Pyramids.

I LOVE THIS BOOK! It told me so many interesting facts, people, and other things about Egypt. It explained to me how their drawings and writings were made, and how they were formed, and I studied it real carefully: If every book was like this, People would be a million times smarter than real life! If I had to choose my favorite Geography book, THIS WOULD BE THE NUMBER ONE CHOICE!

Egyptian Dynasties,is a very interesting book. It tells a lot about the Egyptians and satisfies your curiosities. It tells you about how the different rulers lived,what they did,and how they affected their subjects lives. Joyce Haynes describes the different dynasties with great detail and gives you the facts. She knows what she's writing about.

An excellent book, well written by an excellent and knowledgeable author. a must for anyone having an interest in Ancient Egypt

Watterson's book provides a fascinating, and very readable, introduction to the ancient land of Egypt. I couldn't put it down! And, our local library can't keep it on the shelves.

Watterson combines the best of the classical authors (Herodotus, Strabo, etc) with the best of current scholarship. She has a unique ability to focus on what is most important and interesting in the long span (5000 years!) of Egyptian history.

This book is very well written, very rich in information, and truly a pleasure to read. It is one of the very best histories that I have ever read. I believe that it will soon become a classic textbook, reference, and popular work. I recommend it without reservation to anyone - high school or college student, scholar, or general reader - who wants an excellent history of Egypt from ancient to modern times.

It is great novel written by Dr. Nmutaka Okongwu. Reading this novel will teach anyone about the lessons in life and especially for those who are living abroad and now coming back to their homeland. It is well written and concise. Read it, and you will learn some valuable lessons.

Nmutaka Okongwu has done a fabulous job describing the different variables that play such a large role in the evolution of the "Ekuke Syndrome". It is truly wonderful how this book shows Afam dealing with the end results of the "Ekuke Syndrome" in the future, while also taking us back in time, through the wonderful story of Aro Ugani that plays out the origins and series of events from which the Syndrome evolved. I definitely recommend this book. It is wonderfully written and flows very well through time (you will see what I mean). I believe many have seen or lived through the ill effects of what has become of societies that looked outward instead of inward. The "Ekuke Syndrome" brings this to light and makes you think. Many will be able to relate some part of their lives to the lessons taught in the book.

I think this book is awesome! You've gotta read it! It impresses me so much, it makes me feel like I'm in Nigeria right now! Find it, buy it, and read it. That's my motto for it! You might find it intresting. It gives you an idea of what fun and enchantment you can have when your speaking the language of Yoruba in a city that can understand you. It gives you an idea of what . . . wait a minute. I'm reveiwing. I'm done here!

I think that this book was fun and I learned many valuable lessons from it that help me with everyday life. I love magic and extraordinary things so I enjoyed this book. I loved the pictures and as a Yoruban living in the USA it made me think of home. Teniola is an excelent writer. I have read many of her other stories about the yoruba culture and so I enjoyed her book alot.

It has always been more than a little embarrassing that scholars of political thought who purport to address "universal" and "timeless" questions of political life have displayed such provincial disregard for political texts, thinkers, and traditions that are located beyond the shores of Western Europe and North America. It is no less embarrassing that so many contemporary representatives of this "tradition" of political thought have either ignored powerful religio-political movements in the "West" and "non-West," or have sought to interpret those movements from within the tired and familiar analytic frameworks that have dominated Anglo-American political science for at least the past half-century. In this impressive and remarkably ambitious book, Roxanne Euben makes considerable headway in correcting both of these parochial tendencies, while also casting considerable light on the nature and significance of Islamic fundamentalist challenges to the commitments of Western rationalism.

As its subtitle indicates, this book explores and analyzes Islamic fundamentalist critics of modern rationalism. What distinguishes Euben's analysis from the torrent of recent work on this topic is the extraordinary breadth of knowledge and sophistication of understanding that she brings to her topic (Euben reads Arabic and has fully absorbed the relevant literatures in social and political theory, comparative politics, and Middle Eastern Studies). This virtually unparalleled scope and depth of knowledge enables her to detect important limitations in prevailing social scientific explanations of fundamentalism and to develop a variety of unique perspectives of her own. Euben, for example, persuasively argues that most social scientific studies employ models of instrumental rationality that exclude from analysis the substantive ideas that animate fundamentalist thought and action. As a result, they tend to view fundamentalist movements as an irrational, "convulsive reflex" prompted by one or another condition (or combination of conditions) of modernity itself: urbanization, commercialization, industrialism, etc. Rather than starting with a set of methodological directives that dictate a conception of the Islamic fundamentalist as an "irrational rational actor," Euben develops what she terms a "dialogic model of interpretation." This model, she argues, "places fundamentalist ideas at the center of understanding yet insists that there is a perspective sufficiently distant from that of the participants to, first, recognize material conditions that constrain and enframe their actions, and , second, critique and evaluate their experience of the world" (p. 25).

Using this model to excellent effect, Euben explores the work of key nineteenth and twentieth century Islamist thinkers such as Jamal al-Din al-Afgani, Muhammad `Abduh, and, particularly, Sayyid Qutb. Writing against stereotyped, "orientalist" images of Islamist thought as consisting of fanatical, incoherent responses to conditions of modernity, Euben carefully charts the ways in which writers like Qutb develop views of Enlightenment rationalism that, far from being unintelligible or pathological, reveal strong resonances with leading "Western" critics of modernity such as Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, Alasdair MacIntyre, Daniel Bell, and Richard John Neuhaus. This, of course, is not to say that Islamic critics of modernity and rationalism articulate views that are identical to those of Western students of politics--if this were truly the case, it would be difficult to imagine what might be gained (apart from shoring up the conviction that non-Western writers have nothing original to say) by engaging them. Rather, Euben argues, writers like Qutb and `Abduh are distinctive participants in a common conversation about "the leaching of meaning from modern life" (p. 155). By simultaneously reconstructing and revealing a conversation about modern rationalism that includes conservatives and participatory democrats, communitarians and critical theorists, postmodernists and (Christian and Islamic) fundamentalists, Euben not only undercuts the thesis that differences between Western and Islamic thought are so dramatic that any real conversation is impossible, but also dissolves the easy opposition (invoked by everyone from Samuel Huntington to prominent neoconservatives in the Bush administration) between Western and non-Western political thought. In short, she does a tremendous service to contemporary debates about Islamist challenges to modern rationalism by showing precisely what is familiar and distinctive about them.

While many readers might be primarily interested in Euben's careful and sophisticated explication of leading Islamist thinkers, her book also constitutes an important contribution to what might broadly be called "methodological" debates about the nature of political theory. Drawing on the growing literature in what is termed "comparative political theory," Euben argues that political theory should again become what it once was, specifically, a truly comparative enterprise. More than any other recent study, this book exhibits the clear advantages of an approach to questions of political thought that engages the full range of political practice and experience. It should therefore be "Exhibit A" in future discussions of the value of comparative political theory.

As noted previously, the events of the past several years have produced an overwhelming number of books that purport to engage either Islamist thought or non-Western perspectives more generally. To be frank, much of this work, written by both distinguished public intellectuals and younger scholars, is embarrassingly bad. Composed quickly and without adequate knowledge of the traditions and experiences (or, importantly, facility in the languages though which those traditions and experiences are transmitted) the authors set out to assess, they are at best unhelpful and at worst dangerously distortive. Euben's book, on the other hand, manifests none of these deficiencies. It is an intellectual tour-de-force, the product of a first-rate mind that has devoted itself to the difficult task of understanding the diverse currents of thought that it engages. If one is interested in a reading a highly sophisticated discussion of Islamic fundamentalist thought, one that stimulates rather than deadens reflection on a host of extraordinarily important issues, there is no better place to start than this book.

For any reader seriously interested in a sophisticated, nuanced, and intensely informative analysis of a political and religious movement and culture that now dominates the world stage, Prof. Roxanne Euben's "Enemy In The Mirror" is a bracing, eye-opening work of depth and power. Euben examines Islamic Fundamentalism on its own terms, and with its own series of definitions and directions, rather than opts for the distinctly "Western" reading that so reflexively and arrogantly permeates so much discussion of this subject. It's the difference between the author who is content to point a finger at her subject and say "they're different!" and an author of Euben's intelligence and caliber, who finds it infinitely more compelling to ask, "WHY are they different?" and then goes about trying to answer the question and , perhaps more importantly, understand the answer. Enriching and essential reading.

This book is a product of a person who does not know what he is saying. Please nobody should weast his time reading this ethiopist ideas.

Excellent presentation. The book focuses more on passing on facts (excelent footnotes and appendix) to the reader than giving analysis of events and their significance from the author's point of view. It definitely sheds a new perspective of the beginning of the Ethio-Eritrean war. There is not much about TPLF, but there's an interesting coverage of rise and fall of ELF and the rise of EPLF. As strange as it may sound, the book also makes you appreciate that the war was carried out as it was. It makes you appreciate the Ethio-Eritrean civil society.

IT IS AN EXCELLENT AND EDUCATIONAL BOOK. WELL ANALYSED AND UNBIASED. IT MUST BE READ BY ALL ETHIOPIANS AND THE US STATE DEPT. OFFICIALS. DO YOU HAVE A PLAN TO HAVE IT PRINTED IN PAPER PACK SO THAT MANY ETHIOPIANS CAN BUY THE BOOK AT A CHEAPER PRICE?

IT IS AN EXCELLENT AND EDUCATIONAL BOOK. WELL ANALYSED AND UNBIASED. IT MUST BE READ BY ALL ETHIOPIANS AND THE US STATE DEPT. OFFICIALS. DO YOU HAVE A PLAN TO HAVE IT PRINTED IN PAPER PACK SO THAT MANY ETHIOPIANS CAN BUY THE BOOK AT A CHEAPER PRICE?

Having taken this book with me to a doctor's office, I was actually disappointed to have to stop reading, when my name was called for the appointment! I expected the book to be interesting, but it was much more than that. The great humor was unexpected! I laughed out loud several times, chuckled and smiled through many of the stories of Leoma's adventures during her years in the Sudan. Dr. Gilley gave a thorough understanding of the difficulties and hardships faced by an expatriate,while providing enilightening insight into Sudanese culture and customs. I highly recommend this book,both for personal reading and for gift-giving. Dixie M

After so much media coverage of the political situation in Sudan and Darfur, it was especially interesting to read this very personal view of the Sudanese culture and people. With a combination of humor and insight, the author takes the reader along with her as she learns how to live and work in a culture so very different from her own. The author obviously loves and respects the Sudanese; and by the end of the book, I had gained an appreciation for the Sudanese as well.

I first purchased this book 14 years ago for my nephew, and I'm back to purchase it for my daughter. It is such a gorgeously written version of the birth of Christ. It's just so lovely and heartfelt. I can't say enough good things about it. It became part of my sister's Christmas tradition with her children, and now it will become part of mine. I'm so glad I found this book again!

I grew up hearing this book (written by my great-grandfather) every christmas morning. It has become a tradition, all of the kids sitting at the feet of our mother as she read the story, her voice flowing over the melody of the words. Often we wouldn't understand a phrase, but she would explain it how her mother had explained it and how the author himself had lovingly explained it to his daughter, my grandmother. Not everyone who has read this book will have the experience I have had in reading it, but all the same, it touches the heart of everyone who has heard it read.