A side from having one of the more entertaining titles for a book released this year, Joshua Hammer's The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts is also an excellent source for those who wish to understand the background to the ongoing conflict in the Sahel. A journalist by background, he bases his book on the story of how locals sought to protect thousands of priceless manuscripts during the takeover of northern Mali by Tuareg nationalists and Islamist rebels in 2012. The tale of the exploits of librarian Abdul Kader Haidara and his friends reads like a modern-day thriller with bad guys and tension aplenty but is a work of non-fiction. Having spent most of his life trying to gather together these manuscripts so that they can be studied and enjoyed, the book describes the extraordinary lengths that he took to protect them from destruction after the Islamist takeover. However, this story is interwoven with a very accessible narrative history of the region, its peoples and its religion, as well as a detailed description of the context and events that led to the 2012 takeover and the subsequent French-led intervention. It is this combination that marks out The Bad-Ass Librarians as a book that manages to successfully combine both insight and entertainment.
展开▼
