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Somebody's Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa

10 best books like Somebody's Heart Is Burning: A Woman Wanderer in Africa (Tanya Shaffer): Mango Elephants in the Sun: How Life in an African Village Let Me Be in My Skin, Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa, The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge, Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village, Travels in West Africa, Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents, The Black Nile: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years, Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles To Timbuktu

Mango Elephants in the Sun: How Life in an African Village Let Me Be in My Skin
AuthorSusana Herrera
ISBN1570625727
When the Peace Corps sends Susana Herrera to teach English in Northern Cameroon, she yearns to embrace her adopted village and its people, to drink deep from the spirit of Mother Africa—and to forget a bitter childhood and painful past. To the villagers, however, she's a rich American tourist, a nasara...
Casting with a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa
AuthorWendy Kann
ISBN0805079564
In this poignant, lyric memoir, a sister's tragic death prompts a woman's unbidden journey into her turbulent African past

A comfortable suburban housewife with three children living in Connecticut, Wendy Kann thought she had put her volatile childhood in colonial Rhodesia--now Zimbabwe--behind...
The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa
AuthorJosh Swiller
ISBN0805082107
A young man's quest to reconcile his deafness in an unforgiving world leads to a remarkable sojourn in a remote African village that pulsates with beauty and violence

These are hearing aids. They take the sounds of the world and amplify them." Josh Swiller recited this speech to himself on the...
Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge
AuthorWilliam Powers
ISBN1582346445
"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...
Nine Hills to Nambonkaha: Two Years in the Heart of an African Village
AuthorSarah Erdman
ISBN0312423128
The village of Nambonkaha in the Ivory Coast is a place where electricity hasn't yet arrived, where sorcerers still conjure magic, where the tok-tok sound of women pounding corn fills the morning air like a drumbeat. As Sarah Erdman enters the social fold of the village as a Peace Corps volunteer, she...
Travels in West Africa
AuthorMary Henrietta Kingsley
ISBN0792266382
In 1893, defying every convention of Victorian womanhood, Mary Kingsley set off alone for West Africa to collect botanical specimens. Unaccompanied except for native guides, she plunged boldly into forbidding jungles, often the first European--and almost always the first white woman--ever to...
Into Thick Air: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents
AuthorJim Malusa
With plenty of sunscreen and a cold beer swaddled in his sleeping bag, writer and botanist Jim Malusa bicycled alone to the lowest point on each of six continents, a six-year series of “anti-expeditions” to the “anti-summits.” His journeys took him to Lake Eyre in the arid heart of Australia,...
The Black Nile: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River
AuthorDan Morrison
ISBN0670021989
A spectacular modern-day adventure along the Nile River from Lake Victoria to the Mediterranean Sea

With news of tenuous peace in Sudan, foreign correspondent Dan Morrison bought a plank-board boat, summoned a childhood friend who'd never been off American soil and set out from Uganda,...
Recollections of My Life as a Woman: The New York Years
AuthorDiane di Prima
ISBN0140231587
In Recollections of My Life as a Woman, Diane di Prima explores the first three decades of her extraordinary life. Born into a conservative Italian American family, di Prima grew up in Brooklyn but broke away from her roots to follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she...
Cruelest Journey: Six Hundred Miles To Timbuktu
AuthorKira Salak
ISBN0792274571
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...
To Timbuktu: A Journey Down the Niger
AuthorMark Jenkins
ISBN0688115853
Twenty years ago, when the author and his best friend, Mike Moe, were eighteen years old, they lit out from Wyoming to explore the world. They washed up in Africa and without forethought or planning set off for the most remote place on earth they could imagine: Timbuktu. Stopped by disease and the desert,...
Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for Women Who Are Changing the World
AuthorHolly Morris
ISBN0375760636
After years of working behind a desk, Holly Morris had finally had enough. So she quit her job and set out to prove that adventure is not just a vacation style but a philosophy of living and to find like-minded, risk-taking women around the globe. With modest backing, a small television crew, her spirited...
The Best American Travel Writing 2009
AuthorSimon Winchester
ISBN0618858660
**Heh, 3.5 stars if GoodReads had such a thing**

I tethered with the rating on this one because some of the essays were non-memorable and almost boring, not bothering to uncover the travel experience through narrator experience and setting authenticity.

Yet some were indeed memorable....
The Village of Waiting
AuthorGeorge Packer
ISBN0374527806
Now restored to print with a new Foreword by Philip Gourevitch and an Afterword by the author, this book is a frank, moving, and vivid account of contemporary life in West Africa. Stationed as a Peace Corps instructor in the village of Lavié (the name means "wait a little more") in tiny and underdeveloped...
Looking for Lovedu: A Woman's Journey Through Africa
AuthorAnn Jones
ISBN0375705333
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...
The Ponds of Kalambayi
AuthorMike Tidwell
My impression of Peace Corps memoirs, before reading this book, was not good. This seems to be recognized as one of the better ones, and as an engaging, perceptive memoir with a strong writing style, it certainly exceeded my expectations.

Tidwell spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in...
Dear Exile: The True Story of Two Friends Separated (for a Year) by an Ocean
AuthorHilary Liftin
ISBN0375703675
A funny and moving story told through the letters of two women nurturing a friendship as they are separated by distance, experience, and time.

Close friends and former college roommates, Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery promised to write when Kate's Peace Corps assignment took her to Africa.  Over...
Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea
AuthorRobert D. Kaplan
ISBN1400034523
Robert D. Kaplan is one of our leading international journalists, someone who can explain the most complicated and volatile regions and show why they’re relevant to our world. In Surrender or Starve, Kaplan illuminates the fault lines in the Horn of Africa, which is emerging as a crucial region for...
Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel
AuthorJeffrey Tayler
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,...
Lost Decency, the Untold Afghan Story
AuthorAtta Arghandiwal
ISBN0615557589
Atta's thrilling and inspiring story uncovers the truth about how his beloved and once-peaceful nation turned into one of the deadliest and most dangerous in the world. Every refugee's story deserves to be heard, but many memoirs written by exiles represent the country's more privileged classes...
The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working
AuthorRobert Calderisi
ISBN0300120176
After years of frustration at the stifling atmosphere of political correctness surrounding discussions of Africa, long time World Bank official Robert Calderisi speaks out. He boldly reveals how most of Africa's misfortunes are self-imposed, and why the world must now deal differently with the...
Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda
AuthorRosamond Halsey Carr
ISBN0452282020
In 1949, Rosamond Halsey Carr, a young fashion illustrator living in New York City, accompanied her dashing hunter-explorer husband to what was then the Belgian Congo. When the marriage fell apart, she decided to stay on in neighboring Rwanda, as the manager of a flower plantation. Land of a Thousand...
Worst Laid Plans: When Bad Sex Happens to Good People
AuthorAlexandra Lydon
ISBN0810989026
“When bad sex happens to good people, there is no recourse like full disclosure,” is the motto of Worst Laid Plans, a collection of forty probably-too-intimate, but shockingly funny, true-life tales of lust gone wrong.  The stories are divided into themed sections including Foreign Affairs...
The Island That Dared: Journeys in Cuba
AuthorDervla Murphy
ISBN1906011354
Take a three-generation family holiday in Cuba in the company of Dervla Murphy, her daughter, and three young granddaughters as they trek into the hills and along the coast as a family, camping out on empty beaches beneath the stars and relishing the ubiquitous Cuban hospitality. But this is no more...
Breaking News: A Stunning and Memorable Account of Reporting from Some of the Most Dangerous Places in the World
AuthorMartin Fletcher
ISBN0312371187
Martin Fletcher doesn't claim to be a hero. Yet he didn't flinch, either. During three decades covering wars, revolutions, and natural disasters, Fletcher worked his way from news agency cameraman to top network correspondent, facing down his own fears while facing up to mass killers, warlords,...
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