Best West African History

Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. In A Long Way Gone , Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty. “ A breathtaking and unselfpitying account of how a gentle spirit survives a childhood from which all innocence has suddenly been sucked out. “ Deeply moving, even uplifting …Beah's story, with its clear-eyed reporting and literate particularity--whether he's dancing to rap, eating a coconut or running toward the burning village where his family is trapped-- demands to be read .” ― People (Critic's Choice, Four stars). “Beah's memoir, A Long Way Gone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is unforgettable testimony that Africa's children--millions of them dying and orphaned by preventable diseases, hundreds of thousands of them forced into battle--have eyes to see and voices to tell what has happened. How is it possible that 26-year-old Beah, a nonnative English speaker, separated from his family at age 12, taught to maim and to kill at 13, can sound such notes of ­family happiness, of friendship under duress, of quiet horror? “In place of a text that has every right to be a diatribe against Sierra Leone, globalization or even himself, Beah has produced a book of such self-effacing humanity that refugees, political fronts and even death squads resolve themselves back into the faces of mothers, fathers and siblings. We ignore his message at our peril .” ― Sebastian Junger, author of A Death in Belmont and A Perfect Storm. Ishmael Beah describes the unthinkable in calm, unforgettable language ; his memoir is an important testament to the children elsewhere who continue to be conscripted into armies and militias.” ― Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for general Nonfiction. Beah's amazing saga provides a haunting lesson about how gentle folks can be capable of great brutalities as well goodness and courage. “ A Long Way Gone hits you hard in the gut with Sierra Leone's unimaginable brutality and then it touches your soul with unexpected acts of kindness.

Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. In A Long Way Gone , Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty. His monotone works particularly well when he is recounting his dreams, for he cannot distinguish his nightmares from his waking life. But rebel forces destroyed his childhood innocence when they hit his village, driving him to leave his home and travel the arid deserts and jungles of Africa. Told in a conversational, accessible style, this powerful record of war ends as a beacon to all teens experiencing violence around them by showing them that there are other ways to survive than by adding to the chaos.— Matthew L. Moffett, Pohick Regional Library, Burke, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

BEST BOOKS of 2017 SELECTION by * THE WASHINGTON POST * NEW YORK POST * The harrowing, but triumphant story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, leader of the Liberian women’s movement, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first democratically elected female president in African history. " Madame President is more than the life story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who broke political and cultural barriers in becoming the first woman to be elected president of an African nation. “Unspools like a novel, fitting for a life that is nothing short of mythic…It's filled with details that emerge from dogged reporting as well as an intimate understanding of Liberia's complexity and culture, which perhaps could come only from being a native daughter…Cooper's prose, witty, blunt and peppered with the Pidgin English spoken by the peoples of Liberia, immerses the reader in the fabric of that small, West African country… Madame President is a fascinating read to enlighten those who may know little about this woman and the nation she leads, and who will undoubtedly be left wanting to know much more.” --USA Today (3.5 stars). Its heroes are women—not only Sirleaf, the first democratically elected female president of Liberia (and its current president), who earned a Nobel Peace Prize and handled the 2014 Ebola crisis, but the ordinary market women who threw their influence behind her." Recommended for readers who enjoy biographies of world leaders and African history.” --Library Journal “Cooper frankly describes Sirleaf's support for Taylor, her nepotism and other failings as president, while sympathetically laying out what she considers to be Sirleaf's extenuating circumstances. "With compassion, a depth of research and stunning detail, Helene Cooper tells the riveting story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first elected woman head of state on the African continent, who survived war and coup to lead Liberia through the Ebola crisis and who won a Nobel Peace Prize.

From New York Times bestselling author of Destiny of the Republic and The River of Doubt , a thrilling narrative of Winston Churchill's extraordinary and little-known exploits during the Boer War At age twenty-four, Winston Churchill was utterly convinced it was his destiny to become prime minister of England one day, despite the fact he had just lost his first election campaign for Parliament. Churchill arrived in South Africa in 1899, valet and crates of vintage wine in tow, there to cover the brutal colonial war the British were fighting with Boer rebels. "A thrilling account...This book is an awesome nail-biter and top-notch character study rolled into one...Could someone be persuaded to make a movie about this episode of his life? “Millard’s tome is a slam-bang study of Churchill’s wit and wile as he navigates the Boer War like [a] proto-James Bond.” —. USA Today.

Already a classic of war reporting and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden’s brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War. Bowden (Bringing the Heat) has used his journalistic skills to find and interview key participants on both sides of the October 1993 raid into the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia, a raid that quickly became the most intensive close combat Americans have engaged in since the Vietnam War. That's one of the key questions Bowden raises in a gripping account of combat that merits thoughtful reading by anyone concerned with the future course of the country's military strategy and its relationship to foreign policy.

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates reads like an edge-of-your-seat, page-turning thriller. No one captures the danger, intrigue, and drama of the American Revolution and its aftermath like Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger.” —Brad Thor This is the little-known story of how a newly indepen­dent nation was challenged by four Muslim powers and what happened when America’s third president decided to stand up to intimidation. Few today remember these men and other heroes who inspired the Marine Corps hymn: “From the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli, we fight our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea.” Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates recaptures this forgot­ten war that changed American history with a real-life drama of intrigue, bravery, and battle on the high seas. I thoroughly enjoyed this must read that brings to life a critical period in our nation’s history and shows the importance of a navy in our nation’s security.” —KIRK S. LIPPOLD, former commander of the USS Cole; author of Front Burner: Al Qaeda’s Attack on the USS Cole “No one captures the danger, intrigue, and drama of the American Revolution and its aftermath like Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger.” —BRAD THOR, bestselling author of Code of Conduct “A colorful, exciting, and historic account of an overlooked portion of American military history, and a wonderful tribute to the brave sailors and Marines who set a high standard for U.S. maritime operations.” —GENERAL JACK KEANE (Ret. Count on Kilmeade and Yaeger to remind us of it with this swashbuckling adventure.” —MARCUS LUTTRELL, former Navy SEAL; author of Lone Survivor and Service “If you want to understand the deep historic roots of the 9/11 attacks and what it will take to win the war against today’s jihadists, you must read this book.” —DR.

Already a classic of war reporting and now reissued as a Grove Press paperback, Black Hawk Down is Mark Bowden’s brilliant account of the longest sustained firefight involving American troops since the Vietnam War.

As recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, president of the African National Congress, and head of the antiapartheid movement, Nelson Mandela has been one of the world s great moral and political leaders. The famously taciturn South African president reveals much of himself in Long Walk to Freedom.

Though most of us fall somewhere between the catastrophic lows and dizzying highs of Lomong's incredible life, every reader will find in his story the human spark to pursue dreams that might seem unthinkable, even from circumstances that might appear hopeless. "This true story of a Sudanese child refugee who became an Olympic star is powerful proof that God gives hope to the hopeless and shines a light in the darkest places. Lopez Lomong was born in Kimotong, a small village in southern Sudan, in 1985.

Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada , is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting. Writing with a novelist’s command of narrative and a historian’s grasp of fact and motive, Michael B. Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalities—Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin—rose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation. [Oren] has woven a seamless narrative out of a staggering variety of diplomatic and military strands.” —The New York Times. “With a remarkably assured style, Oren elucidates nearly every aspect of the conflict. “[In] Michael Oren’s richly detailed and lucid account, the familiar story is thrilling once again. [Oren’s] narrative is precise but written with great literary flair. This is the most complete history to date of the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel entered and began its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. While no account can be definitive until Arab archives open, Oren, a Princeton-trained senior fellow at Jerusalem's Shalem Center who has served as director of Israel's department of inter-religious affairs and as an adviser to Israel's U.N. delegation, utilizes newly available archival sources and a spectrum of interviews with participants, including many Arabs, to fill gaps and correct misconceptions. Further, Six Days of War is an attack on "post-Zionism": the school of politics and history that casts Israel as the author of policies that intentionally promote the destuction of Palestine as a separate entity and of Palestinians as a people, not least through the occupation that began with the 1967 War. About the nature of Israeli policy since the war, the book says little, but finds that "for all its military conquests, Israel was still incapable of imposing the peace it craved." Many books, e.g., Ahron Bregman's Israel's War: 1947-1993, Tibi Bassam's Conflict and War in the Middle East, 1967-91, and Eric Hammel's Six Days in June, cover a broader period, rely heavily on analysis, or fall short of objectivity.

A Savage War of Peace is the definitive history of the Algerian War, a book that brings that terrible and complicated struggle to life with intelligence, assurance, and unflagging momentum. "First the Pentagon plugged the movie, now President Bush is reading the book... A Savage War of Peace , British historian Alistair Horne's celebrated 1977 account of the [Algerian] war...Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who recommended A Savage War of Peace to Bush, said recently on PBS' Charlie Rose Show that he did not believe 'that the French experience could be applied precisely to the United States. "[T]he read of choice for many U.S. military officers serving in Iraq...[this] universally acclaimed history...should have been mandatory reading for the civilian and military leaders who opted to invade Iraq" — The Washington Times. “There is enough to make this the most complete history of the Algerian war yet written, one which will be indispensable for future historians. A “highly readable, toughly edited history that blends the pace and sweep of a work of fiction with a relentless pursuit of every main actor still alive and willing to talk about the war.”– The Washington Post Book World. “An accomplished historian of earlier French wars has written an admirably impartial, lucid and readable book…as full and objective a history of the Algerian war as we are likely to see for some years.” – The New York Times Book Review.

A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age. The event of a new work by Chinua Achebe is always extraordinary; this one exceeds all expectation.”—Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. In a world where sectarian hatreds augmented by political mediocrity have fractured Syria and threaten to bring Israel and Iran to blows, There Was a Country is a valuable account of how the suffering caused by war is both unnecessary and formative.”— Newsweek.

St. Martin's is proud to present a new series of the greatest classics in the literature of hunting and adventure, chosen from the personal library of writer and big game hunter Peter Hathaway Capstick. As if the lions weren't enough, Patterson had to guard his back against his own increasingly hostile and mutinous workers as he set out to track and kill the man-eaters.

This carefully reserched book is a significant addition to this vital foeld of knowledge.

“This is not a book you read just once, but a tale of terrible beauty to get lost in over and over.”— Newsweek “By turns mischievous and openhearted, earthy and soaring . Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. Her father joined up on the side of the white government in the Rhodesian civil war, and was often away fighting against the powerful black guerilla factions. A worthy heir to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, Alexandra Fuller writes poignantly about a girl becoming a woman and a writer against a backdrop of unrest, not just in her country but in her home. Despite, or maybe even because of, the snakes, the leopards, the malaria and the sheer craziness of its human inhabitants, often violent but pulsing with life, it seems like a fine place to grow up, at least if you are as strong, passionate, sharp and gifted as Alexandra Fuller.” — Chicago Tribune “Owning a great story doesn’t guarantee being able to tell it well. and pinpoint observational acuity.” — Entertainment Weekly “This is a joyously telling memoir that evokes Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club as much as it does Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa .” —New York Daily News “Riveting . Living a crude, rural life, the author and her older sister contended with "itchy bums and worms and bites up their arms from fleas" and losing three siblings. Sheila Shoup, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.