An eye-opening history of the intellectual life of West Africa, written with passion and erudition.
Empires of the mind.
This revelatory history by Jeppie, a historian at the University of Cape Town, explores the literate culture of the African city of Timbuktu. A center of empire during the darkest of the European dark ages, Timbuktu attracted learned scholars from all over West Africa and the Arabic-speaking world. From the 12th through 16th centuries, books were being made by hand—written in the Arabic script (though often in local languages as well as Arabic), drawing on Koranic learning, and rich with natural observation and political advice. We meet the 16th-century political philosopher Ahmad Baba, the scion of a respected West African family and the writer of advisory manuals that rival Machiavelli’s The Prince. His advice resonates with anyone who seeks power and preference: “Beware of the Sultan, because he becomes angry like a young boy but attacks like a lion.” And this: “The most wretched of all people in relation to the ruler and those closest to him, just as the things closest to the fire will burn the quickest.” Readers also learn of the Europeans who sought wealth and came back not with gold but with the gleanings of an intellectual elite. Reading this book makes us realize that in Timbuktu, as throughout precolonial Africa, communities of learning, devotion, and teaching lived as fully as those anywhere in Europe. As much as Christianity informed the universities of Oxford or Bologna, so Islam shaped the ways of reading and writing in Timbuktu. One manuscript from the 19th century has this at its top: “Written for a student in a state of mental confusion.” Reading this book, we all become new students, at the start confused about the legacy of Africa but, by the end, enlightened with the knowledge that we need to seek new lands of learning.
An eye-opening history of the intellectual life of West Africa, written with passion and erudition.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9780691273853
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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