The Ponds of Kalambayi
10 best books like The Ponds of Kalambayi (Mike Tidwell): Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali, Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman, Mango Elephants in the Sun: How Life in an African Village Let Me Be in My Skin, Patchwork, The Witch Doctor's Wife, Malaria Dreams: An African Adventure, Miriam's Song: A Memoir, The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, Emma's War, Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa's Fragile Edge
Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali
Monique and the Mango Rains is the compelling story of a rare friendship between a young Peace Corps volunteer and a midwife who became a legend. Monique Dembele saved lives and dispensed hope in a place where childbirth is a life-and-death matter. This book tells of her unquenchable passion to better...
Singing Away the Hunger: The Autobiography of an African Woman
| Author | Mpho M'Atsepo Nthunya |
A compelling and unique autobiography by an African woman with little formal education, less privilege, and almost no experience of books or writing. Mpho's voice is a voice almost never heard in literature or history, a voice from within the struggle of "ordinary" African women to negotiate a world...
| Author | Susana Herrera |
| ISBN | 1570625727 |
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...
| Author | Ellen Banda-Aaku |
| ISBN | 0143527533 |
Winner of the Penguin Prize for African Writing 2010 (fiction). Destined from birth to inhabit two very different worlds - that of her father, the wealthy Joseph Sakavungo, and that of her mother, his mistress - this emotive tale takes us to the heart of a young girl's attempts to come to terms with her...
| Author | Tamar Myers |
| ISBN | 0061727830 |
The Congo beckons a young Amanda Brown in 1958, as she follows her missionary calling to the mysterious "dark continent" far from her South Carolina home. But her enthusiasm cannot cushion her from the shock of a very foreign culture - where competing missionaries are as plentiful as flies, and oppressive...
Malaria Dreams is a book about the author and his friend's trip from West Africa to the Mediterranean in a questionable car, and it's well written. So why the one star?
I like adventure travel and adventure travel books better than the next guy usually- depending on who the next guy actually is,...
| Author | Mark Mathabane |
| ISBN | 0743203240 |
Mark Mathabane first came to prominence with the publication of Kaffir Boy, which became a New York Times bestseller. His story of growing up in South Africa was one of the most riveting accounts of life under apartheid. Mathabane's newest book, Miriam's Song, is the story of Mark's sister, who was left...
| Author | Josh Swiller |
| ISBN | 0805082107 |
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...
| Author | Deborah Scroggins |
| ISBN | 0375703772 |
Tall, striking, and adventurous to a fault, young British relief worker Emma McCune came to Sudan determined to make a difference in a country decimated by the longest-running civil war in Africa. She became a near legend in the bullet-scarred, famine-ridden country, but her eventual marriage to...
| 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 | Sarah Erdman |
| ISBN | 0312423128 |
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...
Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna
| Author | Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton |
| ISBN | 0792272978 |
Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton gives American kids a firsthand look at growing up in Kenya as a member of a tribe of nomads whose livelihood centers on the raising and grazing of cattle. Readers share Lekuton's first encounter with a lion, the epitome of bravery in the warrior tradition. They follow his mischievous...
| Author | Mark Jenkins |
| ISBN | 0688115853 |
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,...
| Author | George Packer |
| ISBN | 0374527806 |
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...
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,...
| Author | Rosamond Halsey Carr |
| ISBN | 0452282020 |
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...
The Shadow of Kilimanjaro: On Foot Across East Africa
| Author | Rick Ridgeway |
| ISBN | 0805053905 |
In one of the most acclaimed travel and adventure books of the past year, Rick Ridgeway chronicles his trek from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro to the Indian Ocean, through Kenya's famed Tsavo Park. His tale is, according to The Boston Globe, "a gripping account of how it feels to be charged by an incensed...
Surviving on her own in the desert, 12-year-old Jahohora searches for her family while hiding from the German soldiers. It's 1904, and Germany has claimed all of South West Africa. Since the Herero would rather fight than surrender their ancestral homes, Gen. von Trotha has declared that they all should...
Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria
| Author | Noo Saro-Wiwa |
| ISBN | 1847080308 |
Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England, but every summer she was dragged back to Nigeria—a country she viewed as an annoying parallel universe where she had to relinquish all her creature comforts and sense of individuality. Then her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was murdered there, and she didn't...
Wine to Water: A Bartender's Quest to Bring Clean Water to the World
| Author | Doc Hendley |
| ISBN | 1583334629 |
The captivating story of an ordinary bartender who's changing the world through clean water.
Doc Hendley never set out to be a hero. In 2004, Hendley-a small- town bartender- launched a series of wine-tasting events to raise funds for clean-water projects and to bring awareness to the world's...
| Author | Moritz Thomsen |
| ISBN | 0295969288 |
this was the one of MANY peace corps memoirs i suffered through (reading material choices were limited to our paltry communal bookshelves in the volunteer lounge of the swaziland peace corps office).
anyway, i used to write a monthly literature review box or our volunteer newsletter, and one month...
Padre!: A Place Whose Rules Rearrange Your Own
| Author | Raven Moore |
| ISBN | 0989726606 |
Described as 'that missing voice from Generation X' by Roger Muntu from Voice of America, Raven fashions you front row seats to the ride of a lifetime. She is a cultural, nonfictionist tyrannosaurus rex and her narration of the lives of Ivoiriens during her 2 years living in Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa...
| Author | Albert Memmi |
| ISBN | 0807083275 |
Every day that I picked this up, I thought how fortunate I am to be part of the Goodreads community. Otherwise, I likely would never have known about this book, nor availed myself of the opportunity of reading it. It isn't long enough for it to have taken nearly a week to finish. I found myself time-challenged...
Radio Congo: Signals of Hope from Africa's Deadliest War
| Author | Ben Rawlence |
| ISBN | 1851689656 |
While poring over dust-caked pamphlets in the library, Ben Rawlence stumbles upon the photo of a lost city of colonial Congo--a glistening, modern metropolis built by huge tin mines and European capitalists. Today, that city, Manono, sits beyond the infamous “Triangle of Death,” in an area rarely...
