I'll admit it.
I definitely judged this book by its cover.
And man, oh man, did the cover make me want to read it!
The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race To Save The World's Most Precious Manuscripts — it sounds like a Dan Brown historic thriller!! But, the coolest thing about this book written by journalist Joshua Hammer, is that this crazy story is one hundred percent true.
Yup, you read that right.
This is a true story about how thousands of priceless ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts were rediscovered and saved from the elements and human influence in Western Africa.
The book recounts the journey that archivist Abdel Kader Haidera took through the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River to discover these ancient texts that had been passed down in families for generations. He often found these tomes disintegrating in old trunks and had to find ways (often monetary) to convince the owners of these texts to donate them to a library he was building so that they could be preserved.
His discoveries had shocked the Western World (who, at this point largely considered most of the history out of Africa to be oral and discounted the idea that there could be written texts), and as a result he was starting to receive grants and funding that would help with preservation and with sharing these manuscripts with the rest of the world.
Everything was going great — and then Al Qaeda showed up.
Using first-hand accounts from Haidera, former high-ranking officials, the American military, and first-hand witnesses, Hammer tells the captivating true story of how all 350,000 manuscripts in the collection were smuggled to safety in southern Mali under the nose of terrorists who were ready to seize and burn them, not to mention kill anyone who was caught with them.
It's a dramatic adventure that will have you captivated from cover-to-cover!
