An award-winning journalist reveals a little-known and shameful episode in American history, when an African man was used as a human zoo exhibit—a shocking story of racial prejudice, science, and tragedy in the early years of the twentieth century in the tradition of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Devil in the White City, and Medical Apartheid.In 1904, …
The Last Resort: A Memoir of Mischief and Mayhem on a Family Farm in Africa
Thrilling, heartbreaking, and, at times, absurdly funny, The Last Resort is a remarkable true story about one family in a country under siege and a testament to the love, perseverance, and resilience of the human spirit. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Douglas Rogers is the son of white farmers living through that country’s long and tense transition from …
In 1957, Ryszard Kapuscinski arrived in Africa to witness the beginning of the end of colonial rule as the first African correspondent of Poland’s state newspaper. From the early days of independence in Ghana to the ongoing ethnic genocide in Rwanda, Kapuscinski has crisscrossed vast distances pursuing the swift, and often violent, events that followed liberation. Kapuscinski …
China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year at • The Economist • The Guardian • Foreign AffairsChinese immigrants of the recent past and unfolding twenty-first century are in search of the African dream. So explains indefatigable traveler Howard W. French, prize-winning investigative journalist and former New York Times bureau chief in Africa and China, in the …
Give a Man a Fish: Reflections on the New Politics of Distribution (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures)
In Give a Man a Fish James Ferguson examines the rise of social welfare programs in southern Africa, in which states make cash payments to their low income citizens. More than thirty percent of South Africa’s population receive such payments, even as pundits elsewhere proclaim the neoliberal death of the welfare state. These programs’ successes at reducing poverty …
African Temples of the Anunnaki: The Lost Technologies of the Gold Mines of Enki
Archaeological proof of the advanced civilization on the southern tip of Africa that preceded Sumer and Egypt by 200,000 years • Includes more than 250 original full-color photographs of South Africa’s circular stone ruins, ancient roads, prehistoric mines, large pyramids, and the first Sphinx • Reveals how these 200,000-year-old sites perfectly match Sumerian descriptions of the …
Sahel: The End of the Road (Series in Contemporary Photography)
In 1984 Sebastião Salgado began what would be a fifteen-month project of photographing the drought-stricken Sahel region of Africa in the countries of Chad, Ethiopia, Mali, and Sudan, where approximately one million people died from extreme malnutrition and related causes. Working with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders, Salgado documented the enormous suffering and the great dignity of …
They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan
Christopher Award WinnerLos Angeles Times BestsellerWashington Post Top 100 Books of the Year SelectionA stunning literary survival story of three young Sudanese boys, two brothers and a cousinhailed by the Los Angeles Times as a moving, beautifully written account, by turns warm and tender.”Between 1987 and 1989, Alepho, Benjamin, and Benson, like tens of thousands of young boys, …
In this widely praised history of an infamous institution, award-winning scholar Marcus Rediker shines a light into the darkest corners of the British and American slave ships of the eighteenth century. Drawing on thirty years of research in maritime archives, court records, diaries, and firsthand accounts, The Slave Ship is riveting and sobering in its revelations, reconstructing in …
The stretch of the longest river in the world that nurtured the world’s first great civilization has drawn and impressed visitors since ancient times. The Greeks were fascinated by the mysterious annual flood of the Nile that brought both water and nourishing silt to the lands along its banks, while nineteenth-century travelers were amazed by the magnificent tombs …