Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa
10 best books like Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa (Wendy Kann): The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt, Of Spirits and Madness: An American Psychiatrist in Africa, The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe, Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir, Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge, Somebody's Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa, My Fathers' Daughter, Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival, Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe, Rainbow's End: A Memoir of Childhood, War and an African Farm
The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt
| Author | Brian M. Fagan |
| ISBN | 0813340616 |
The scandalous rape of Ancient Egypt is a historical vignette of greed, vanity, and dedicated archaeological research. It is a tale vividly told by renowned archaeology author, Brian Fagan, with characters that include the ancient historian Herodotus; Theban tomb robbers; obelisk-stealing Romans;...
| Author | Paul R. Linde |
| ISBN | 0071407995 |
"This is a wonderful book. It gives a warm and loving picture of an isolated African country regularly castigated in the US press. It reiterates eloquently lessons lost by our medical establishment and our populace, which need to be regained." --Journal of the American Medical Association.
An...
The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
| Author | Douglas Rogers |
| ISBN | 0307407977 |
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...
Love in the Driest Season: A Family Memoir
| Author | Neely Tucker |
| ISBN | 1400081602 |
Against a background of war, terrorism, disease and unbearable uncertainty about the future, this story of how a foreign correspondent and his wife fought to adopt a Zimbabwean baby emerges as an inspiring testament to the miracles that love and dogged determination can sometimes achieve. Don't...
| Author | William Powers |
| ISBN | 1582346445 |
"A haunting account of one man's determination and the struggles of a people living in a deeply troubled country."--Booklist
When William Powers went to Liberia as a fresh-faced aid worker in 1999, he was given the mandate to "fight poverty and save the rainforest." It wasn't long before Powers...
| Author | Tanya Shaffer |
| ISBN | 1400032598 |
“It's my life, and if I want to run from it I can,” quips Tanya Shaffer. An incorrigible wanderer, Shaffer has a habit of fleeing domesticity for the joys and rigors of the open road. This time her destination is Ghana, and what results is a transformative year spent roaming the African continent....
| Author | Hannah Pool |
| ISBN | 0141016043 |
In 1974 Hannah Pool was adopted from an orphanage in Eritrea and brought to England by her white adoptive father. She grew up unable to imagine what it must be like to look into the eyes of a blood relative until one day a letter arrived from a brother she never knew she had. Not knowing what to do with the letter,...
Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival
| Author | Fadumo Korn |
| ISBN | 1558615318 |
This powerful memoir portrays the life-altering transformation of a feisty nomad girl who undergoes genital excision. Crippled with rheumatism as a result of the cutting, Fadumo Korn, who once freely roamed the deserts of her native Somalia, is sent to live with a wealthy uncle, brother to the...
Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
| Author | Andrew Meldrum |
| ISBN | 0802142516 |
Where We Have Hope is the gripping memoir of a young American journalist. In 1980, Andrew Meldrum arrived in a Zimbabwe flush with new independence, and he fell in love with the country and its optimism. But over the twenty years he lived there, Meldrum watched as President Robert Mugabe consolidated...
Rainbow's End: A Memoir of Childhood, War and an African Farm
| Author | Lauren St. John |
| ISBN | 0743286790 |
This is a story about a paradise lost. . . . About an African dream that began with a murder . . .In 1978, in the final, bloodiest phase of the Rhodesian civil war, eleven-year-old Lauren St John moves with her family to Rainbow's End, a wild, beautiful farm and game reserve set on the banks of a slowflowing...
| Author | Kira Salak |
| ISBN | 0792274571 |
After 37 years of never reading about Mali, I have managed two books about that country in the last month. The previous book (The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts) gave more information about the history of the region, and informed my reading...
| Author | Robert Klitgaard |
| ISBN | 0465087604 |
I'm not really sure why I enjoyed this book so much; the author talked a lot about economic restructuring/ governmental organization/ etc (snore). But, every time it threatened to get bogged down, he redirected his focus to the people, culture, and natural beauty of the country. He came away from his...
| Author | Ann Jones |
| ISBN | 0375705333 |
The adventure began when a young British photographer, Kevin Muggleton, suggested driving from one end of Africa to the other–“You know, the old ‘Cape to Cairo’ sort of thing.” For the renowned feminist writer Ann Jones, it soon became an expedition with a mission: to find the legendary...
Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as a rising star among travel writers, Jeffrey Tayler penetrates one of the most isolated, forbidding regions on earth--the Sahel. This lower expanse of the Sahara, which marks the southern limit of Islam’s reach in West and Central Africa,...
Little Boys Come from the Stars
| Author | Emmanuel Dongala |
| ISBN | 0385721226 |
Sardonic, subtle, and sweetly scathing, Little Boys Come from the Stars is satire at its best.
Set in an unnamed country in equatorial Africa, it tells the story of Michel, a precocious teen dubbed Matapari (“trouble”) because of his extraordinary birth. Though his father is a reclusive...
One Day the Soldiers Came: Voices of Children in War
| Author | Charles London |
| ISBN | 0061240478 |
Today, in violence-torn regions across the globe, 20 million children have been uprooted, orphaned, or injured by war, famine, and poverty. This is their story . . . and ours.
In this powerful and unforgettable book—by turns painful, funny, terrifying, and triumphant—Charles London...
Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure
| Author | Julian Smith |
| ISBN | 0061873470 |
Here is the amazing true story of Julian Smith, who retraced the journey of legendary British explorer Ewart ''the Leopard'' Grogan, the first man to cross the length of Africa, in hopes of winning the heart of the woman he loved.
In 1898 the dashing young British explorer Ewart ''the Leopard''...
The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa
| Author | Adam Roberts |
| ISBN | 1586483714 |
Equatorial Guinea is a tiny country roughly the size of the state of Maryland. Humid, jungle covered, and rife with unpleasant diseases, natives call it Devil Island. Its president in 2004, Obiang Nguema, had been accused of cannibalism, belief in witchcraft, mass murder, billiondollar corruption,...
House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe
| Author | Christina Lamb |
| ISBN | 1556527357 |
Blue mountains, golden fields, gin and tonics on the terrace--once it had seemed the most idyllic place on earth. But by August 2002, Marondera, in eastern Zimbabwe, had been turned into a bloody battleground, the center of a violent campaign. One bright morning, Nigel Hough, one of the few remaining...
Sufferings in Africa: The Incredible True Story of a Shipwreck, Enslavement, and Survival on the Sahara
| Author | James Riley |
| ISBN | 1602390428 |
Listed by Abraham Lincoln, alongside the Bible and Pilgrim's Progress, as one of the books that most influenced his life, few true tales of adventure and survival are as astonishing as this one. Shipwrecked off the western coast of North Africa in August of 1815, James Riley and his crew had no idea of...
The Price of Stones: Building a School for My Village
| Author | Twesigye Jackson Kaguri |
| ISBN | 0670021849 |
The extraordinary story of one man's gift to orphaned children in need of hope
Can one person really make a difference in the world? Twesigye Jackson Kaguri defied many naysayers-and his own nagging doubts-and proved that, with a dream and incredible determination, he could change many lives....
God Sleeps in Rwanda: A Journey of Transformation
| Author | Joseph Sebarenzi |
| ISBN | 1416575731 |
A harrowing tale of survival and reconciliation by a Rwandan Tutsi who flees his homeland before the 1994 genocide and later returns to be elected speaker of the Rwandan parliament, only to be forced into exile once again
This memoir tells the story of Joseph Sebarenzi, whose parents, seven...
The Lassa Ward: One Man's Fight Against One of the World's Deadliest Diseases
| Author | Ross I. Donaldson |
| ISBN | 0312377002 |
Ross Donaldson is one of just a few who have ventured into dark territory of a country ravaged by war to study one of the world’s most deadly diseases. As an untried medical student studying the intersection of global health and communicable disease, Donaldson soon found himself in dangerous Sierra...
The Flamboya Tree: Memories of a Family's War Time Courage
| Author | Clara Olink Kelly |
| ISBN | 0099445530 |
“The Flamboya Tree is a fascinating story that will leave the reader informed about a missing piece of the World War II experience, and in awe of one family’s survival.”
—It is a well-known fact that war, any war, is senseless and degrading. When innocent people are brought into that war...
Nowhere in Africa: An Autobiographical Novel
| Author | Stefanie Zweig |
| ISBN | 0299199606 |
Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter, Regina, each deal with the harsh realities of their...
