Africa Books

My 2nd graders are in love with this book. Most of the pictures are drawings...so not too scary for even younger kids. But there is one real picture of a mummy, which is, of course, my kids' favorite page! Take a fascinating topic and well-done pictures with interesting text and you've got yourself a great book!

About 2 years ago, my 2nd graders became fascinated with mummies. This led me to create an impromtu unit and gather several books on the subject. MUMMIES is a great resource in my collection as it takes the reader step by step through the mummification process. To highlight that, there are wonderful illustrations.

Ra Un Nefer Amen (author of the Metu Neter Vol 1 & 2) recommened this book and now I can see why. A stunning discourse on the unity of african life. A must read.

This was a text book for a class I took at Antioch College in about 1972. I was studying African American music, poetry and dance from the avant garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. At that time he was at the college for one year. He assembled a jazz ensemble and taught a "black panther" of jazz philosopy. This book is a highly academic examination comparing and contrasting European and African culture.Chapters include the and the underpinnings of belief and experience that directly leads to the understandings and misunderstanding of black culture in within the white society. Recently, I took on the management of an African American singer songwriter, Gwen Avery, she was thrilled to read and understand the source of her work. During an interview for an African American magazine,"Arise". I mentioned the book and the memory caused me to order it and give it as a gift to the editors. Cecil Taylor is one of the worlds greatest minds and talents, and his gift at understanding the innovative power of the African culture lead me to a deeper understanding and appreciation of this most vibrant light of our century. The intensity of black culture, particulary in America, can be seen in the full light of the philosophy that drives the spearhead of our culture. Any one who was glued to the set during the PBS Jazz series, should read and study this text.

Fidel Castro remains one of the dominant political figures of all time, certainly the most controversial and impactful political leader Latin America produced in the 20th century. The Cuban Revolution was an important moment in the history of the Americas, one can easily see it's influence in later movements such as the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Salvador Allende in Chile and in our own time Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. "Fidel: My Early Years" is a great collection of material where Castro himself discusses his youth from his childhood in Cuba to his student years up to the time right before the revolution. Political and history students must read this volume which gives a clear insight into the vast intellect and powerful speaking skills of Castro. Colombian Nobel-Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez opens the book with a wonderful essay where he describes his long-time friend and his eccentricities, sleepless working hours, voracious reading habits, passions, angers and hopes. Marquez with true eloquence captures a giant of revolutionary movements. Excerpts from major works such as "Fidel & Religion" are featured where Castro discusses his religious upbringing (mostly from his mother) and the poverty and suffering Cuba's campesinos and blacks suffered under U.S. imperialism. He also makes a point of supporting Haiti, which has also been ravaged by colonial abuse. There are fascinating moments such as Castro's discussions of his time in Colombia where he witnessed the political upheaval resulting from the assasination of the reformist Gaitan who Castro (and many others) suspect was assassinated in a plot hatched by Colombia's elites. The beauty of "Fidel My Early Years" is that we get a true human portrait of a man reduced to the level of slogans, cartoons and demonization by the American press, here we get his actual words and ideas. What we see is a man with an amazing capacity for recording facts, figures, thoughts, philosophies and a brilliant sense of calculation and observation and an appreciation for history. Fidel Castro has already left his imprint on Latin American and world history, but for many in the U.S. he remains a distant, threatening figure, here you get a chance at listening to the actual words because listening is a habit we really lack and very much need in the current world state.

This book consists of one lengthy speech that El Commandante favored students with at his alma matter, the University of Havanna law school in 1995, and a few long interviews, including his famous 1985 interview with the Brazilian priest, Frei Betto. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a very good introductory essay, with some personal reflection on his buddy Fidel.

If you are a good right thinking American, you probably consider Fidel Castro an evil dictator, even though most Americans the polls show, favor a lifting of the embargo. Well whether you consider him a monster, a somewhat brutal benign dictator (as I do) or as a holy saint (as Fidel hints he thinks himself at some points in this collection), this book is a fine piece of literature. Fidel is a first rate storyteller, he evokes the images of his life in a simple and clear style and is able to impart to the reader the rather inspiring gusto and confidence with which he went about life in his early years.

Cuba pre-1959 was a very wealthy country and put up some good numbers but most of the wealth was concentrated in the hands of an indiginous elite, significantly tied to American investors. Once the United States grabbed Cuba after 1898, much of the land was handed off cheaply to U.S. investors. Castro describes how his father was an extremely poor Spanish immigrant who arrived in Cuba in the late 1890's as a soldier in the Spanish army that was barbarically trying to repress the Cuban independence movement. His father, Angel, over the years managed by his own enterprize to eventually become a pretty successful landowner out in the sticks of Oriente Province. His mother, a native Cuban, also was extremely poor growing up. His father eventually came to employ a large number of workers in his sugar fields, including some Hatians. He grew up playing with the children of these workers and never was aware of any class distinctions between him and his mates, or so he says. The Haitians, Fidel says, he used socialise with in their mud and thatch dwellings. The workers lived an extremely hard and impoverished life, but these Hatians had the hardest lot of all.

In the 1933 revolution against the dictator Machado, Hatian migrant workers were expelled on the ground that they were taking jobs away from Cubans. Included in this expulsion was the Hatian Consul General at Santiago De Cuba, a mulatto who became Fidel's godfather. As a four, five or six year old Fidel spent some time during the Great Depression in Santiago, as a student in the home of an impoverished teacher and got his first taste of real poverty. The Great Depression years in Cuba made the same period in the U.S. look rather mild by comparison. Many people starved to death. When it set up its neocolonial rule over Cuba in 1902, the U.S. also set up a military contigent called the Rural Guards, which terrorized the peasants. Fidel reminisces how in the elections of 1940, when he was back home, he was assigned the task of visiting the homes of the illiterate workers around Angel's estate and others in the area, explaining to them how to vote for his step-brother as a parliamentary canidate for the Autentico party. The workers on estates ussually voted for whoever their boss told them to vote for. Fidel says he remembers the Rural Gurads terrorizing the peasant voters at the voting booth, making sure that the peasants understood that they had to vote in that election for Bautista and his associates.

He spent his school years in various private Catholic institutions and had a few notable bouts with the authorities after he recieved physical punishment. He remarks that at one point he felt compelled to ask at of curiousity why there were no students of color at these institutions. People of color, of course, in Cuba before 1959, suffered Jim Crow style discrimination. At Jesuit schools in Santiago and Havanna, he, with no false modesty, describes that the priests were deeply impressed with his extraordinary gifts in intellectual fields as well as in sports. Just about everyone of these Jesuits had been a supporter of Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, but nonetheless, he says, he grew close to many of them and deeply admired their austere spirit, their willingness to sacrafice for their students even though they didn't recieve any salary.

His life took a dramatic turn when he entered the University of Havanna Law School in 1945 at the age of 19. In 1944, Ramon Grau San Martin, was elected President. Grau had been a leader in the short lived government of 1933 that tried to enact social democratic measures but was overthrown with U.S. backing by Bautista. Grau and his Autentico party had forgotten their revolutionary roots by this time and devoted the next eight years mainly to murdering their opponents and each other, and embezzling government money at a really astounding level. The Autenticos controlled the administration of the University of Havanna and used gang violence against their opposition. Fidel threw himself into this mess, gradualling setting himself up as the leading student opponent of the Autenticos. He describes one instance, when apparently his struggle with the Autentico gangsters had reached such a point that they were going to kill him if he kept opposing them, he went to the beach and cried. He resolved while he was thus wiping away the tears that he would go back to campus life and face whatever came his way. Actually I think that he probably used the connection of his father-in- law, the United Fruit company lawyer, Rafael Diaz Bilart, to fly to the United States, after there was a bounty on his head by some Autentico gangs for allegedly planning to kill one of their leaders. I'm not sure. Ann Louise Bardach's book "Cuba Confidential" is a really fine book that explores these matters about CAstro's life. Maybe this incident after the killing of the gang leader took place later, I can't remember. Certainly, the people who told such a story to Bardach had a motive to strech the truth.

In any case, Fidel aligned himself with the most progressive forces in Cuban society. He joined the Orthodox party under the leadership of Eddie Chibas, and became the leader of that party's left wing. The Orthodox party wanted to eliminate the extreme corruption that had been an endemic part of Cuban life since 1902 and create a government that respected civil liberties, but it was in favor of keeping the capitalist system. Castro explains that he was really worried about the party because it was being co-opted by big landowners and being dilluted of its principles.

Castro was a leader of the Havanna University organization in solidarity with opponents of the barbaric U.S. backed dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo. He joined a boat expedition in 1947 that aimed to land in the DR and start a guerilla war but the boat was stopped by the Cuban military as it went out to sea and its occupants were arrested but Castro jumped out the boat and swam to safety before they could get their hands on him. This expedition had been originally funded by the most corrupt minister in the Grau government, Julian Aleman, but some of the latter's rivals in the military called off the expedition after a couple of Autentico gangs massacred each other.

Castro's description of his involvement in the mass uprising in Bogota, Colombia after the assasination of Jorge Gaitan in April 1948 is really extraordinary. He is a first rate story teller as I've said. What is probably most remarkable about this section is how Castro explains, with no false modesty, repeatedly that it was his own extraordary courage and selflessnes that got him through that difficult period, as he tried to organize the people. He led a detachment of revoltees and tried to encourage a mutinous police station, to go on the offensive. No doubt the murder of Gaitan played a role in convincing Castro as did the U.S. backed coup in Guatemala in 1954 for Che Cuevara, that one cannot affect social change for the poor without having the oligarchy or the CIA kill you. Castro had been in Bogota as the leader of a Pan Latin American conference which was supposed to serve as a forum for Latin American students to unite to oppose the British occupation of the Falklands, U.S. control of the Panamma Canal and Puerto Rico and other such banal nationalist issues.

The idea that there is anything admirable whatsoever in Fidel Castro is likey incomprehensible to the average American, who rarely hears any notion in the corporate media that U.S. policy and U.S. foreign investors have served as a deciding factor in keeping the masses of Latin America in extreme poverty and misery. Few Americans, except those in Florida in a mostly positive way, have ever heard of Luis Posada Carilles or Orlando Bosch.

This is a fine piece of literature.

This story, set in Tanzania in the 1960's, is about a boy who wants a bicycle to help his mother carry loads of produce to the market. The boy saves up his money to buy the bicycle, occasionally getting the money out of his secret box, putting it into neat piles, and counting it up.

There are a couple of places in the book where the boy is laughed at as he tries to accomplish his goal. The reader feels for the boy as he goes to the market to buy the bike and is laughed at because he doesn't have enough money. The author helps the reader to understand that there may be obstacles that you have to overcome in order to be successful.

A good picture book to use with 3rd and 4th graders to discuss character traits, cause and effect, sequential details, plot. Drawing conclusions- at the very end of the book it shows the boy counting up his money again- students can conclude that he will buy his mother a cart for her load. Themes in the book: patience, perseverance, helping others, determination.

The young boy in this story shows exceptional selflessness and a touching concern for his mother's well-being when his dream is to get a bicycle so that he can help her carry their load of goods to market. Truly a wonderful storyline.

The illustrations are superb; not only do they accurately depict village life, but they are simply beautiful in their own right, and convey the emotion of the text, for example, the look on the father's face as the boy falls off the bicycle.

The familial love in this story is extraordinary, without being the least bit saccharine. A gem.

This book is so beautifully illustrated and written. The story line of saving money for a desired purchase (a red and blue bike), took me back to my own childhood. Readers can feel the child's disappointment over not having enough money. As a wonderful addition, the child wants to save for a bike in order to help his mother carry her heavy loads. This was a truly enjoyable read.

This book tells of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and about attempts to break the code of the hieroglyphs and demotic script. We learn of the various men who tried to break the code and about the successful young man who finally did break the code. The book also tells about who currently owns the Rosetta Stone and the journey and literal fighting that took place over its ownership.

Through this story the reader is introduced to what hieroglyphs are and what demotic script is. Battles are very lightly touched upon, enough to explain why the Egyptians began writing in Greek as well. (The Rosetta stone tells the same story in Hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Greek and was the key to breaking the hieroglyphic code.) The reader is kept in suspense about the meaning and the decoding of the hieroglyphs...as the discoveries are made the code is revealed to us in bits and pieces. For example we start off not knowing if the symbols stand for sounds of a spoken word or for literal translations to objects/animals, etc. In the end the hieroglyphs are spelled out and the reader is given several examples to try to interpret their meaning. Some of the basic writing rules are clearly discussed such as that the writing can go left to right or right to left, and we are to follow the face of the animal shapes to tell us which way to go. Writing can be vertical and the symbols can be backwards or forwards! There are no punctuation marks, sentences or paragraphs, it all runs together.

There are photographs, illustrations, timelines, and maps throughout this book, which add to the experience. This is loaded with text, it is not as skimpy in text or detail as some books that publishers group into this same age category. Yet it is not as loaded or illustration-driven as the DK/Eyewitness books (as a comparison comment, not a complaint).

I especially enjoyed the details about the life of Jean Francios Champollion, the man who broke the code of the hieroglyphs. Taught to read at a young age and homeschooled by his older brother for most of his life, he was devoted to reading and learning foreign languages from an early age. He disliked math and science and chose instead to study languages. His devotion to his passion lead to his decoding the Rosetta Stone and later to fundraising to pay for an expedition to Egypt. He was so passionate about the bringing history of Egypt to others that he persuaded the King of France to acquire many Egyptian artifacts and he became the curator of the Egyptian museum of the Louvre, which still is on display today. This is all told in an interesting way in this book. We can all learn something from Champollion, to follow our interests, teach our children what they are most interested in, and to excel in one area (of study) can lead to great things if the passion is allowed to flourish. This is a great contrast to our American public educational system today, which wants excellence in many areas of study (and covers each lightly) and doesn't allow time or energy to be spend one or two areas of specialized interest.

My only complaint is that I found the questions posed to the children annoying ("what do you think this means..." and such). I don't think children need to be directed to think about something, it happens to each of us as we read. Perhaps we don't all wonder about the same thing at the same paragraph in a book but that is OK. Sometimes the questions asked the child to interpret something but then the true answer is never revealed which is annoying and I feel leaves the reader feeling incompetent and possibly frustrated to have a curiosity sparked but left without the correct answer, wondering if they are correct or not.

This is a great book to tell the story of unlocking the mystery of the Rosetta Stone and an easily understood introduction to hieroglyphics (and the two other languages) used by the Egyptians. This book really brings history to life.

This short (48 pages) book simply and intelligently tells the story of the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs for children. It is illustrated with beautiful artwork and is a worthy gift for an artistic, curious middle-school child.

This is a must read for environmentalist, conservationists and everyone who donates money to the cause of saving endangered species. From Oates own experiences in Africa and Asia, Oates tells us how the myth of sustainable development is failing to protect species and parks. He informs us about that what is needed is a return to protecting nature for its own sake. It is a well written book that weaves personal history with the history of the conservation organizations that are telling us they are "saving life on earth." The reality is they are failing and they must change tactics and soon.

If you are at all interested in conservation, then you have to read this book. John Oates shows how the modern concept of community based conservation that looks so good on paper, in reality has been a dismal failure in West Africa. He provieds several examples from his 30 year long career in West Africa. He shows that you have to be realistic when designing conservation programs, and that many people making conservation decisions are more interested in prestige and money than they are in preserving natural ecosystems. It is sad when you read that the World Wildlife Fund conservation planners are not interested to even go see the areas that they are supposed to protect. The intrinsic value of nature is a hard sell, but finally the utilitarian view of nature seems to always lead to exploitation, and increased pressure on the areas that are supposed to be protected. He also very clearly demonstrates that the idea of using zoos for conservation is a bad one. Zoos are probabally the best way to educate the public about conservation, but are very poor ways to protect species, in fact zoos can even do more harm that good. This book really open your eyes, the situation isn't hopeless, but if conservation projects in Africa are going to work, then it has to be done with a realistic approach and the intrinsic value of nature needs to be on the fore front of the effort.

This is the best guide book to Namibia published in English. I have been living in Namibia for awhile and have all recently published English language guide books to Namibia. My family all agrees that the Bradt guide is by far the most comprehensive and up to date - it has by far more listings, more details about history and attractions, and more travel information than any other guide. It is the only book that gives detailed tips on best roads/routes to take as well. It also has details on where petrol stations are, where good bookstores are, where to shop, etc., and describes lesser known attractions that aren't listed in other books. As of mid 2008, it's prices are also the most accurate for lodging - and putting the prices in Namibian dollars actually is quite helpful as the prices really vary depending on the value of the rand. The book also has some basic descriptions of some of the common Namibian mammals & birds, though we use other books for identifying animals and birds. We also appreciate the authors advice for touring/travellng responsibly. Whenever we plan an excursion in Namibia (and we have travelled extensively), we always use the "green book", as we call it for its green binding - though it looks blue from the front, as our first source. We lent it out for two weeks to a visitor and relied on other common guide books. We ended up taking the wrong route and stayed in a campground that wasn't comfortable based on the information from the other guide books. When we got the green book/Bradt guide back, we looked up the details and saw that the Bradt book would have pointed us on the faster route and would have steered us clear of that particular camping ground. We will be careful lending it out again!

If you have a desire to travel to Namibia, Chris McIntyre's book is the perfect read. Anything and everything about Namibia is included and is superior to any other guide on the subject.

When I first read this book I was suprised at how good it really was.I liked the elements of magic and the magical fruit when it turned into the little boy.The art was great too.

Taking place in a wonderful land where magic is in the air and colorful spirits roam the earth Nandi's Magic Garden is a must read for everyone.

Itis necessary to read this book special to those how are related to the political search or how related to the horn Africa, Also from this book you can know the relation between Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia

i like to order this book and get as fast as you ca

A wonderful book with some great stories about an amazing nature sanctuary. Tom Lithgow weaves a wonderful tale and there are some great photos too.

This book combines current and historical pictures with an engrossing story told by a man who spent most of his life near the area he describes. For those with an interest in the history as well as the wildlife of Africa, this book can't be topped.