Books about Timbuktu from Amazon.com

Kira Salak is a young woman with a history of seeking impossible challenges She grew up relishing the exploits of the great Scottish explorer Mungo Park and set herself the daunting goal of retracing his fatal journey down West Africa's Niger river for 600 miles to Timbuktu. In so doing she became the first person to travel alone from Mali's Old Segou to "the golden city of the Middle Ages," and, legend has it, the doorway to the end of the world. In the face of the hardships she knew were to come, it is amazing that she could have been so sanguine about her journey's beginning: "I have the peace and silence of the wide river, the sun on me, a breeze licking my toes, the current as negligible as a faint breath. Timbuktu seems distant and unimaginable." Enduring tropical storms, hippos, rapids, the unrelenting heat of the Sahara desert and the mercurial moods of this notorious river, she traveled solo through one of the most desolate regions in Africa where little had changed since Mungo Park was taken captive by Moors in 1797. Dependent on locals for food and shelter, each night she came ashore to stay in remote mud-hut villages on the banks of the Niger, meeting Dogan sorceresses and tribes who alternately revered and reviled her- so remarkable was the sight of an unaccompanied white woman paddling all the way to Timbuktu. Indeed, on one harrowing stretch she barely escaped harm from men who chased her in wooden canoes, but she finally arrived, weak with dysentery, but triumphant, at her destination. There, she fulfilled her ultimate goal by buying the freedom of two Bella slaves with gold. This unputdownable story is also a meditation on self-mastery by a young adventuress without equal, whose writing is as thrilling as her life..
Price: $5.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This carefully reserched book is a significant addition to this vital foeld of knowledge It sets forth, in fascinating detail, the history, from earliset recorded times, of the black races of the Middle East and Africa..
Price: $9.08 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In Timbuktu Paul Auster tackles homelessness in America using a dog as his point-of-view character Strange as the premise seems, it's been done before, in John Berger's King, and it actually works. Filtering the homeless experience through the relentlessly unsentimental eye of a dog, both writers avoid miring their tales in an excess of melodrama. Whereas Berger's book skips among several characters, Timbuktu remains tightly focused on just two: Mr. Bones, "a mutt of no particular worth or distinction," and his master, Willy G. Christmas, a middle-aged schizophrenic who has been on the streets since the death of his mother four years before. The novel begins with Willy and Mr. Bones in Baltimore searching for a former high school English teacher who had encouraged the teenage Willy's writerly aspirations. Now Willy is dying and anxious to find a home for both his dog and the multitude of manuscripts he has stashed in a Greyhound bus terminal. "Willy had written the last sentence he would ever write, and there were no more than a few ticks left in the clock. The words in the locker were all he had to show for himself. If the words vanished, it would be as if he had never lived."

Paul Auster is a cerebral writer, preferring to get to his reader's gut through the brain. When Willy dies, he goes out on a sea of words; as for Mr. Bones, this is a dog who can think about metaphysical issues such as the afterlife--referred to by Willy as "Timbuktu":

What if no pets were allowed? It didn't seem possible, and yet Mr. Bones had lived long enough to know that anything was possible, that impossible things happened all the time. Perhaps this was one of them, and in that perhaps hung a thousand dreads and agonies, an unthinkable horror that gripped him every time he thought about it.

Once Willy dies and Mr. Bones is on his own, things go from bad to worse as the now masterless dog faces a series of betrayals, rejections, and disappointments. By stepping inside a dog's skin, Auster is able to comment on human cruelties and infrequent kindnesses from a unique world view. But reader be warned: the world in Timbuktu is a bleak one, and even the occasional moments of grace are short lived. --Alix Wilber.
Price: $2.03 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $12.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Historically rich, remote, and once unimaginably dangerous for travellers, Timbuktu still teases with "Find me if you can." Rick Antonson's encounters with entertaining train companions Ebou and Ussegnou, a mysterious cook called Nema, and intrepid guide Zak all make you want to pack up and leave for Timbuktu tomorrow.

As Antonson travels in Senegal and Mali by train, four-wheel drive, river pinasse, camel, and foot, he tells of fourteenth-century legends, eighteenth-century explorers, and today's endangered existence of Timbuktu's 700,000 ancient manuscripts in what scholars have described as the most important archaeological discovery since the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Think Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush or Redmond O'Hanlon's Into the Heart of Borneo and you begin to see what kind of writer Rick Antonson is. To Timbuktu for a Haircut combines wry humour with shrewd observation to deliver an armchair experience that will linger in the mind long after the last page is read.

.
Price: $16.83 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $1.60 [Notify me when price goes down.]

CAPITALIST NIGGER excels as an explosive and jarring indictment of the Black Race. Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success (Timbuktu Publishers, September 17, 2000) asserts that the Black Race, is a consumer race and not a productive race. Says the author, Chika Onyeani, "We are a conquered race and it is utterly foolish for us to believe that we are independent. The Black Race depends on other communities for its culture, its language, its feeding, and its clothing." "Despite enormous natural resources," according to the author, "Blacks are economic slaves because they lack the "killer-instinct" and "devil-may-care" attitude of the Caucausian, as well as the "spider web economic mentality" of the Asian." The author is not afriad to use the most hated word, the 'N' word as a title of his book. He says, "It is not what you call me, but what I answer to, that matters most." The further asserts that "Blacks are economic slaves. We are owned lock stock and barrel by people of European-origin ... I am tired of hearing Blacks always blaming others for their lack of progress in this world; I am tired of the whining and victim-mentality. I am tired of listening to the same complaint, day in day out - racism this, racism that. It's getting us nowhere." "Africans have a stance, 'live for today, let tomorrow take care of itself and be damned' attitude," the author says. "We've become a sheep-like consumer race that depends on other communities for our culture, language, feeding, and clothing. We've become economic slaves in Western society." CAPITALIST NIGGER reserves its harshest criticism for African leaders, who according to Onyeani, have allowed Europeans and others to pillage and plunder Africa's wealth, without anything to show for it, other than more starvation, disease, and dictatorships. "We have as little today than when most of the African countries received independence from their colonial masters," Onyeani says. CAPITALIST NIGGER is an anguished cry to the Black race to wake up, stand up and move on." "We must abandon the victim mentality baggage that we've carried for so long: the notion that somebody owes us something," the author says. "We've got to stop whining and stop begging. The Black race needs to wake up and stand on it's own feet." Says Onyeani, "We need to recognize and learn from others what it takes to succeed. We need to adopt the "devil-may-care" attitude and the "killer-instinct and whatever-it-takes attitude" of the white Caucasian, and the "spider web economic mentality" of the Asian.".
Price: $9.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Desert explorer Michael Asher investigates the most disastrous exploration mission in the history of the Sahara.

In 1880, the French government ordered a surveying expedition for a railway that would bring the fabulous wealth of Timbuktu, in French Sudan, to Paris. This trek should have heralded a new era of French prosperity. Instead, it was a deadly fiasco. Under-armed in hostile territory, and foolishly employing the enemy as guides, the one hundred men of the expedition were ambushed and stranded without camels or supplies in the deserts of southern Algeria. Many were killed outright, and for four months the survivors were menaced by the Tuareg, the "lords of the desert," robbed, starved, and tricked into eating poisoned fruit. To escape, the men hid in the wastelands of the Sahara with little hope of finding food or water. They were finally forced to eat their own dead, or, worse, the merely weak. Only a dozen malnourished men lived to tell their tale. The story of their 1,000 mile journey is one of the most astonishing narratives of survival ever recorded.

With a "superb grip of narrative and uncanny ability to evoke battle scenes" (The Guardian), Michael Asher has written an amazing true story that is as dramatic as it is frightening..
Price: $4.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $8.12 [Notify me when price goes down.]