Africa Biography

Michael Palin is off again, this time to the seemingly desolate Sahara Desert. There's no easy way across, as he and his team discover on their most challenging expedition yet.

From the author of the New York Times best-selling and award-winning Not on Our Watch, John Prendergast co-writes a compelling book with Fidel Bafilemba—with stunning photographs by Ryan Gosling—revealing the way in which the people and resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo have been used throughout the last five centuries to build, develop, advance, and safeguard the United States and Europe. The book highlights the devastating price Congo has paid for that support.

As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal’s chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he’s encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife.

When Rosamond Halsey Carr first arrived in Africa, she didn't realize that she would spend the rest of her life there. As a young fashion illustrator living in New York City in the 1940s, she seemed the least likely candidate for such a life of adventure. But marriage to a hunter-explorer took her to what was then the Belgian Congo, and divorce left her determined to stay on in neighboring Rwanda as the manager of a flower plantation.

In this gripping – and sometimes terrifying – account, former South African Police Service (SAPS) head profiler Dr Gérard Labuschagne, successor to the legendary Micki Pistorius, recalls some of the 110 murder series and countless other bizarre crimes he analysed during his career. An expert on serial murder and rape cases, Labuschagne saw it all in his 14 and a half years in the SAPS.

The New York Times best-selling true story of an all-American girl and a boy from Zimbabwe and the letter that changed both of their lives forever. It started as an assignment. Everyone in Caitlin's class wrote to an unknown student somewhere in a distant place. Martin was lucky to even receive a pen-pal letter. There were only 10 letters, and 50 kids in his class. But he was the top student, so he got the first one. That letter was the beginning of a correspondence that spanned six years and changed two lives.

In this riveting new book, John Laband, pre-eminent historian of the Zulu Kingdom, tackles some of the questions that swirl around the assassination in 1828 of King Shaka, the celebrated founder of the Zulu Kingdom and war leader of legendary brilliance. In his search for answers, Laband turns to the Zulu voice heard through recorded oral testimony and praise-poems, and to the written accounts and reminiscences of the Port Natal trader-hunters and the despatches of Cape officials.

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, the second part of his epic trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Civil Rights Movement. In the second volume of his three-part history, a monumental trilogy that began with Parting the Waters, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Taylor Branch portrays the Civil Rights Movement at its zenith, recounting the climactic struggles as they commanded the national stage.

Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. From being attacked by lions to close encounters with deadly reef sharks, from getting lost in the African bush without water to crawling the precarious tunnels of gold mines, from marlin fishing with Lee Marvin to near death from crash-landing a Cessna airplane, from brutal school days to redemption through writing and falling in love, Wilbur Smith tells us the intimate stories of his life that have been the raw material for his fiction.

When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa's Barbary coast routinely captured American sailors and held them as slaves, demanding ransom and tribute payments far beyond what the new country could afford.

This is the harrowing but triumphant story of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, leader of the Liberian women's movement, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first democratically elected female president in African history.

Soraya was just 15 when she was given the honor of presenting a bouquet of flowers to Colonel Gaddafi, the "Guide", on a visit he was making to her school the following week. This one meeting, a presentation of flowers, a pat on the head from Gaddafi, changed Soraya’s life forever. Soon afterwards, she was summoned to Bab al-Azizia, Gaddafi’s palatial compound near Tripoli, where she joined a number of young women who were violently abused, raped and degraded by Gaddafi.

In 1849 Heinrich Barth joined a small British expedition into unexplored regions of Islamic North and Central Africa. One by one his companions died, but he carried on alone, eventually reaching the fabled city of gold, Timbuktu. His five-and-a-half-year, 10,000-mile adventure ranks among the greatest journeys in the annals of exploration, and his discoveries are considered indispensable by modern scholars of Africa.

Good. Evil. Dangerous. Glamorous. Will the real Cleopatra please stand up? Almost everything we know about the last queen of Egypt came from her enemies the Romans. Now it's time to meet the ''real'' Cleopatra, a ruler more complex, brilliant, and powerful than we ever knew. Cleopatra didn't just rock the boat when she became queen at seventeen. She rocked the world with brilliant alliances that kept her in power and in control. When Mark Antony tried to put Egypt under his thumb, she negotiated for - and won - more territory than any Egyptian ruler had snagged in generations.

David Livingstone was a Scottish missionary and one of the greatest European explorers who ever lived. He fought all his life against slavery, and is remembered as a national hero for opening up the interior of the so-called "Dark Continent"; his expeditions had a tremendous influence on the colonization of Africa and the relation between Europeans and Africans. The son of a Christian missionary himself, Livingstone felt a spiritual calling to reach people in the interior of Africa in order to find new commercial routes and thus free the Africans from the plague of slavery.

This small book is mainly a personal record of my adventures and impressions during the first five months of the African War. It may also be found to give a tolerably coherent account of the operations conducted by Sir Redvers Buller for the Relief of Ladysmith. The correspondence of which it is mainly composed appeared in the columns of the Morning Post newspaper, and I propose, if I am not interrupted by the accidents of war, to continue the series of letters.

In November 1942, as a part of Operation Torch, 33,000 American soldiers sailed undetected across the Atlantic and stormed the beaches of French Morocco. Seventy-four hours later, the Americans controlled the country and one of the most valuable wartime ports: Casablanca. In the years preceding, Casablanca had evolved from an exotic travel destination to a key military target after France's surrender to Germany. Jewish refugees from Europe poured in, hoping to obtain visas and passage to the United States and beyond.

Of Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, Ngugi wa Thiongo was born in 1938 in the backlands of his country (Kiambu district) to a father whose four wives bore him two dozen or so children. Ngugi was the fifth child of the third wife. His father was a peasant farmer forced to become a squatter after the British Imperial Act of 1915. Before going off to school, he had what was then considered a bizarre and inexplicable thirst for learning....

Once a Hussar is a vivid account of the wartime experiences of Ray Ellis, a gunner who in later life recorded this well-written, candid, and perceptive memoir of the conflict he knew as a young man seventy years ago. His story is an honest and moving memoir that relays graphic eyewitness accounts of the horrors of warfare, but it also reveals the surprising triumphs of the human spirit in times of great hardship. Ellis's self-deprecating humor skillfully counters the harsh realities related in a personal recollection of a war that claimed so many young lives.

Único entre sus libros, Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria: Congo es un retrato del Che brutalmente honesto que ilustra su capacidad como cuentista; en sus relatos de los fascinantes episodios de conflicto armado de la guerrilla no hay hesitación, endulzamiento o jerga. Algunos lo consideran el mejor libro del Che, también es uno de los pocos que editó para la publicación luego de escribirlo.