Memoir of a survivor of the Darfur genocide

 

Mint condition. PB. 224pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The young life of Daoud Hari–his friends call him David–has been one of bravery and mesmerizing adventure. The Translator is a suspenseful, harrowing, and deeply moving memoir of how one person has made a difference in the world, an on-the-ground account of one of the biggest stories of our time: the brutal genocide under way in Darfur.

In 2003, Daoud Hari, a Zaghawa tribesman, was among the hundreds of thousands of villagers attacked and driven from their homes by Sudanese-government-backed militia groups. Though Hari’s village was burned to the ground, his family decimated and dispersed, he himself escaped, eventually finding safety across the border. With his high school knowledge of languages, Hari offered his services as a translator and guide. In doing so, however, he had to return to the heart of darkness–and he has risked his life again and again to help ensure that the story of his people is told while there is still time to save them.

Travels across the African continent

 

Mint condition. PB. 352pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Welcome to the latest hilarious instalment in the travels of Peter Moore, bestselling author of NO SHITTING IN THE TOILET, THE WRONG WAY HOME and THE FULL MONTEZUMA. This time Peter has found the perfect antidote for a broken heart- to pick up his backpack and trek from the southernmost tip of Africa to the pyramids of Egypt by any means possible. But of course!Needless to say, almost every country along the way is in a state of political agitation and Peter must grapple with wild animals, civil wars, natural disasters and corrupt governments. Travelling on his own, it's inevitable that Peter falls in with the usual motley crew of locals and fellow travellers, and has plenty of misadventures -all recounted in his hilarious, gut-wrenching, bottom-clenching style.'Moore has a parched dry wit, the solid brass cojones of a true traveller and a rare eye for the madness of the wider world.' JOHN BIRMINGHAM

SOLD Travels of a Somali refugee

 

SOLD to a lawyer in East Sydney, NSW

Mint condition. PB. 256pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia

An inspirational and uplifting memoir, this is the story of an optimistic man and his journey of struggle, hardship and survival against the odds.

Abdi's world fell apart when he was only thirteen and his home was destroyed in Somalia's vicious civil war. Effectively an orphan, he fled Mogadishu with 300 others and headed to Kenya. On the way, death squads hunted them and they daily faced violence, danger and starvation. After almost four months, they arrived in Kenya - of the three hundred that set out, only five had survived.

All alone in the world, Abdi made his way first back to Mogadishu, to search for his family, then onto Romania, where he lived for a time with gypsies, then to Germany. He was fifteen years old when he arrived in Melbourne. He had no English, family or friends. Homeless for the first year, he slept in churches and mosques. One lunchtime, he was bashed by three men in suits in Melbourne's CBD. Yet, against these odds, he survived. In fact, he's done more than just survive. Abdi went on to complete secondary education and attended university. He became a youth worker, was acknowledged with the 2007 Victorian Refugee Recognition Award and was featured in the SBS second series of Go Back to Where You Came From.

Despite what he has suffered, Abdi is the most extraordinary and inspiring man, who is constantly thankful for his life and what he has. Along his journey, Abdi met many, many other refugees. He knows quite a few who, faced with the same circumstances that he did, did not make it. Some died, some gave up, some committed suicide, and some became bitter. Abdi did not. Everything he has endured and achieved is testament to his quiet strength and courage, his resilience and most of all, his shining and enduring optimism.

SOLD A Dutchman travels across the Sahara in a Mercedes

 

SOLD

Rare book. Mint condition. PB. 210pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”
—Janis Joplin

A journalist’s intrepid endeavor to sell his used car abroad results in a high-spirited and revealing look at West Africa.

“Look, there’s my car,” I say, pointing at my Mercedes in the parking lot.

“Where?” a fellow desert traveler asks.

“There, that Mercedes,” I say.

He looks at me, questioning. “You want to drive that through the Sahara?”
 
Jeroen van Bergeijk came up with what seemed like a great scheme for making a quick profit: buy a clunker of a car in his native Amsterdam and resell it in the Third World, where a market even for jalopies still thrives. His chariot of choice is a rusted-out 1988 Mercedes 190D with 220,000 kilometers on its odometer; his route will take him from Holland through Morocco, across the Sahara, and into some of the least trodden parts of Africa.

My Mercedes Is Not for Sale is a rollicking tale of an innocent abroad. The author finds himself facing a driving challenge akin to the Dakar Rally but encounters obstacles never dreamed of by race-car drivers: active minefields, occasional banditry—mostly by the border guards—and a teenage, chain-smoking desert guide with a fondness for Tupac lyrics. 

Food and water are scarce, sandstorms are frequent, and all he has to patch up his many car breakdowns thousands of miles from civilization is a bar of soap, some duct tape, and a pair of women’s nylons. Then there’s the coup he survived.

My Mercedes Is Not for Sale captures more than the adventure—it vividly portrays the impact of globalization on Africa through a surprise-filled journey into its thriving car culture, while asking the question: is the white man’s burden really a used car?

SOLD Memoir of a young woman from Somalia

 

SOLD

Mint condition. HB. 368pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This is the extraordinary first-person account of a young woman's coming of age in Somalia and her struggles against the obligations and strictures of family and society.  

By the time she is nine, Aman has undergone a ritual circumcision ceremony; at eleven, her innocent romance with a white boy leads to a murder; at thirteen she is given away in an arranged marriage to a stranger.  

Aman eventually runs away to Mogadishu, where her beauty and rebellious spirit leads her to the decadent demimonde of white colonialists.  

Hers is a world in which women are both chattel and freewheeling entrepreneurs, subject to the caprices of male relatives, yet keenly aware of the loopholes that lead to freedom.  

Aman is an astonishing history, opening a window onto traditional Somali life and the universal quest for female self-awareness.

Reportage from African war zones

 

Excellent condition. PB. 224pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

During 1991-95 James Schofield was the only Australian journalist based in Africa to report regularly on the major crises in Somalia, Rwanda, Goma and Zaire. In this book Schofield records his personal experience of the trauma and horror of events in modern Africa: famine and clan conflict in Somalia; genocide in Rwanda; cholera in Zaire; and civil war in the Sudan.

SOLD Memoirs of an Arabian Princess from Zanzibar

 

SOLD

Mint condition. PB. 288pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This 19th-century autobiography offers a rare inside look at the society surrounding a sultan's palace. A real-life princess in exile recalls her vanished world of harems, slave trading, and court intrigues.

Return to an era when Zanzibar was ruled by sultans, and enter a vanished world of harems, slave trading, and court intrigues. In this insider's story, a sultan's daughter who fled her gilded cage offers a compelling look at nineteenth-century Arabic and African royal life. After years of exile in Europe, the former princess wrote this fascinating memoir as a legacy for her children and a warm reminiscence of her island home.

Born Salamah bint Said, Princess of Zanzibar, in 1844, author Emily Ruete grew up in a harem with scores of siblings. The royal family maintained its fabulous wealth and luxury with a robust traffic in ivory, spices, and human bondage. Ruete ventures beyond the palace, into the city and plantations where European traders, missionaries, and colonists exercised a growing influence.

After her dramatic elopement with a German trader, Ruete attained the perspective to form a comparison of the lives of women in Muslim society with those of their European contemporaries. Originally published in 1886, this remarkable autobiography will captivate readers interested in Zanzibar and Eastern Africa as well as students of Arabic, Islam, and women's studies.

About the Author

"Ruete could be the subject of a thrilling romance," enthused Publishers Weekly of this author, who was born in 1840 as Salme, Princess of Oman and Zanzibar. As a 16-year-old, Ruete fled from her cloistered existence to Germany, where she found the freedom to marry her secret lover. Ruete wrote this colorful and informative memoir to introduce her children to their African heritage.

SOLD Travels across Yemen and the Red Sea

 

SOLD

Rare book. Very good condition. PB. 264pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

In 1978 Eric Hansen found himself shipwrecked on a desert island in the Red Sea. When goat smugglers offered him safe passage to Yemen, he buried seven years' worth of travel journals deep in the sand and took his place alongside the animals on a leaky boat bound for a country that he'd never planned to visit.

As he tells of the turbulent seas that stranded him on the island and of his efforts to retrieve his buried journals when he returned to Yemen ten years later, Hansen enthralls us with a portrait -- uncannily sympathetic and wildly offbeat -- of this forgotten corner of the Middle East. 

With a host of extraordinary characters from his guide, Mohammed, ever on the lookout for one more sheep to squeeze into the back seat of his car, to madcap expatriates and Eritrean gun runners- and with landscapes that include cities of dreamlike architectural splendor, endless sand dunes, and terrifying mountain passes, Hansen reveals the indelible allure of a land steeped in custom, conflicts old and new, and uncommon beauty.

Across Africa on a bike

 

 

Mint condition. PB. 528pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Who has not wanted to escape the daily grind, to search for life and adventure elsewhere? Australian-born and London-based Pamela Watson had a comfortable, if overworked existence, as a management consultant but yearned for freedom and the adventure. "That's it!" she thought. "I'll cycle across Africa!" Join her on this intoxicating journey that began as a search for adventure and turned into a journey of self-discovery.

Perplexed by what causes her to choose suffering over comfort, she perseveres and along the way discovers companionship, kindness and compassion, and injustices that burn through the page. Cycling for a year and a half, covering nearly 15,000 kilometres and crossing through seventeen countries, she encountered an Africa rarely reported in the media and experienced first-hand the violent tinderbox of local politics. She discovers women are the backbone of rural Africa and is shocked to learn their responsibilities are not matched by their access to basic human rights.

Now in its third edition, Esprit de Battuta: Alone Across Africa on a Bicycle is a must-read for all armchair adventurers, those who are curious about the everyday lives of the people of the rural villages of Africa and those who dare to challenge the status quo.

About the author

Pamela Watson is an intrepid adventurer and businesswoman. Born in Perth, Western Australia she grew up watching the sun setting in the west and as an adult followed its pathway to Africa. From her intoxicating solo cycling journey in the `90s, travels to 32 countries in Africa, her thrilling entrepreneurial and diplomatic adventures in Nigeria in the 2000s and her ongoing work in Africa, she has a rare insight into Africa's complex and challenging past and present, and offers an optimistic appraisal of how its future might unfold. Pamela is passionate about doing business to her own beat and championing Lagos and the unleashed potential of Africa's female entrepreneurs.

Walking from London to the Sahara

 

Excellent condition. PB. 304pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

When Paula Constant and her husband, Gary, attempt to break away from the conventional 9-to-5 routine, a few weeks lazing in a resort or packed in a tour bus is not what they have in mind. 

What starts out as an idle daydream to embark on 'a travel to end all travels' turns into something far greater- an epic year-long 5000-kilometre walk from Trafalgar Square in London to Morocco and the threshold of the Sahara Desert. 

Quite an ambition for an unfit woman who favours sharing cigarettes and a few bottles of wine with friends over logging time on the treadmill. 

But if the sheer arduousness of walking over 25 kilometres a day through the landscapes and cultural labyrinths of France, Spain, Portugal and Morocco - without a support vehicle - is overlooked in her excitement, then so too is the unexpected journey of self discovery and awakening that lies beyond every bend. 

Both the companions she meets on the road and the road itself provide what no university can offer- a chance to experience life's simple truths face to face. 

Paula's transformation from an urban primary school teacher into a successful expeditioner is a true tale of an ordinary woman achieving something extraordinary. 

It is a journey that begins with one footstep.

Traveling through warzones in Africa

 

Rare book. Good condition. PB. 240pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

For ten years Andrew Buckoke wrote articles about Africa for many of the major newspapers including "The Guardian", "The Times" and "The Observer". 

He brings his experience and knowledge of the African continent to bear in a book which attempts to open up this often romanticized and little understood land to the general reader. 

"Fishing in Africa" concentrates interest on the people of the continent rather than the animals, while looking at the ways in which these peoples are governed. 

The author follows the antics of governments, rebels, aid agencies and fellow journalists and while persuing his interest in fishing, travels to areas where few Westerners had ventured.

On the path of snakebites

 

Rare travelogue in search of snakes! Excellent condition. PB. 352pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia. 

Snakes are Jeremy Seal's fascination, and his greatest fear. In an attempt to overcome his phobia, he decides to journey into America, Australia, Africa and India in search of the most notorious and deadly snakes, and to meet the people who live among them. 

His travels take him to Kenya's snake man, whose entire life seems like a preparation for a bite from the terrible black mamba, and to witch doctors, who use snakes as instruments of vengeance. 

He recalls the stories of Australian convicts condemned to prison in the land of the world's deadliest snake, and the story of a Southern preacher who tries to murder his wife with his church's rattlesnakes. 

Mixed in with all these bizarre tales are fascinating scientific facts, snake lore and ancient legends.

An erudite but highly entertaining travel narrative, The Snakebite Survivors' Club taps into our general fear of snakes to tell a funny and somewhat gruesome account of the world of snakes and the people they repel, mesmerize, and sometimes kill.

SOLD Journey through the Moroccan Desert

 

SOLD

Another rare travelogue, this time through the Moroccan desert. PB. Mint condition. 335pp. $30 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The 450-mile-long Draa River Valley in the Moroccan Sahara contains some of the most sumptuous oases and searing desert of the Arab world. Jeffrey Tayler follows the Draa by foot and on camel, recounting stays in casbah homes, visits to mosques and marabouts, and nights in hashish dens.

About the author

Jeffrey Tayler is a U.S.-born author and journalist. He is the Russia correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and a contributor to several other magazines as well as to NPR's All Things Considered. He has written several non-fiction books about different regions of the world which include Facing the Congo, Siberian Dawn, Glory in a Camel's Eye, and Angry Wind, the latter being a portrait of a journey through the Muslim portion of black Africa. His most recent book, River of No Reprieve, is about a challenging raft trip down Russia's Lena River.

Tayler is an accomplished linguist; in addition to his native English, he is fluent in Russian, Arabic, French, and modern Greek, and has a functioning knowledge of Spanish and Turkish.

SOLD Exploring the Jewish thread of Africa

 

SOLD

Rare book. Mint condition. PB. 400pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

In a mixture of travel, adventure, and scholarship, historian Tudor Parfitt sets out in search of answers to a fascinating ethnological puzzle: is the Lemba tribe of Southern Africa really one of the lost tribes of Israel, descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba?

Beginning in the Lemba villages in South Africa, where he witnesses customs such as food taboos and circumcision rites that seem part of Jewish tradition, Parfitt retraces the supposed path of the Lembas' through Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Tanzania, taking in sights like Zanzibar and the remains of the stone city Great Zimbabwe.  The story of his eccentric travels, a blend of the ancient allure of King Solomon's mines and Prester John with contemporary Africa in all its beauty and brutality, makes for an irresistible glimpse at a various and rapidly changing continent.

And in a new epilogue, Parfitt discusses recent DNA evidence that, amazingly, lends credence to the Lemba's tribal myth.

France's delusional colonial conquest in the Sahara desert

 

Mint condition. PB. 349pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

The Sahara was the missing link in France's African Empire. The Sword and the Cross is the story of two fanatical adventurers who helped complete their country's imperial conquest. 

Viscomte Charles de Foucauld was a sensualist who lounged in bed eating foie gras with a silver spoon. Henri Laperrine was a stern perfectionist who lived only for soldiering. 

Each of them found his vocation in the desert: Foucauld found religion and an asceticism so great that even Trappism seemed too comfortable; Laperrine formed a legendary camel corps to pursue the Tuareg nomads across the desert. 

By 1910, the Sahara had been won - but as Europe lurched towards war in the years after, both men were to pay a terrible price. 

Weaving together hatred and friendship, self-sacrifice and utter self-delusion, The Sword and the Cross is a brilliant story of a forgotten episode in Europe's colonial history.