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    The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
    The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
    The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

    Written by Joshua Hammer

    Narrated by Paul Boehmer

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of desert farmers. His goal was to preserve this crucial part of the world's patrimony in a gorgeous library. But then Al Qaeda showed up at the door.

    The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, became one of the world's greatest and most brazen smugglers by saving the texts from sure destruction. With bravery and patience, he organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali. This real-life thriller is a reminder that ordinary citizens often do the most to protect the beauty and imagination of their culture. It is also the story of a man who, through extreme circumstances, discovered his higher calling and was changed forever by it.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateApr 19, 2016
    ISBN9781681681436
    Author

    Joshua Hammer

    Joshua Hammer is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and The Mesopotamian Riddle. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Smithsonian, and Outside. He lives in Berlin.

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    Reviews for The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

    3.5/5

    311 ratings46 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The book concentrated more on the military and political situation in Mali than on the books. Violence level high. Now if the subtitle had been 'and the fight to save Mali from radical Islamists' that would have been fine. But I expected more about the librarians and much more about the books.
    • 4/5
      This is the story of how a vast collection of ancient manuscripts in Africa were saved in the 80s from nature and obscurity and then later saved again in 2012 from Islamic extremists. The middle part of the book became less about the manuscripts and more about Al Qaeda and the political uprisings of the time. Would have liked more about the books, but it was a very good read, and I learned a lot about a region and time in history that I know very little about.
    • 5/5
      An excellent book discussing the preservation of Islamic manuscripts from Timbuktu and other sites in northern Mali. It also deals with the geopolitics of northern Mali during a time of conflict involving Tuareg separatists and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb jihadists. Entirely recommended.
    • 4/5
      Reads like fiction, but it's nonfiction. In much the same vane as The Swerve but less academic.
    • 5/5
      Terrific!
      Incredible story and history.
      Well written, good flow to it.
      Definitely recommend.
    • 4/5
      In this narrative non-fiction, journalist Joshua Hammer relates the efforts to collect and preserve centuries-old manuscripts in Timbuktu, Mali. It covers the lives of Mamma Haidara and his son, Adbel Kader Haidara, the methods they used to gather the historic documents, and the establishment of a library. In the wake of a 2012 military coup and jihadist takeover, the librarians and archivists associated with Haidera worked in secret, at great risk to personal safety, to transport these precious manuscripts to a more secure location. It includes a history of Timbuktu and surrounding areas in northern Africa, as well as a recounting of the recent political turmoil.

      It will appeal to those interested in African history, the preservation of historic manuscripts, or the heroic efforts to safeguard cultural artifacts from those who seek to destroy them. Be aware that it contains extremely graphic and disturbing accounts of executions and other terrorist activities. If you are unfamiliar with this region of the world, it will be useful to keep a map of Africa at hand. I found it both informative and engrossing.
    • 4/5
      There have been some complaints about the title for various reasons. I don't have a problem with it. The actions these librarians took to save the ancient and medieval manuscripts in their care were truly "bad-ass" in my opinion! I love books and felt like crying when, as a child, I learned of the library in Alexandria burning down. The loss of even one of these manuscripts from Mali is more than the world should have to bear.

      There have also been complaints that most of the action in the book was about the jihadis who threatened the books. I don't have an issue with this either. Considering how much the concept of jihad has changed our modern world and how poorly I and many of my peers understand the basis of it and how it has changed the world, I think Hammer did a fantastic job of getting across both the history and the ideology that supports it.

      I found the book amazing, inspiring, and heartbreaking all at the same time. I highly recommend it to anyone who loves knowledge and anyone who cares about world events.

      As an aside, it also introduced me to the Desert Blues, which I am really enjoying.
    • 4/5
      Title is silly, but the story and the judgement is not. Depressing and uplifting.
    • 3/5
      This book was all over the place. The title made me think it was going to focus on the manuscripts and literary heritage of Timbuktu but it spends more time talking about the larger was against AQIM, which, while interesting, isn't what interested me in the book.
    • 4/5
      The subject matter here is promising- a group of brave librarians and scholars try to save precious Arabic texts from the devilish hands of Al Qaeda. The execution of the story is a bit problematic, uneven and somewhat repetitive but I still found enough to enjoy. I much preferred his later book, The Falcon Thief.
    • 4/5
      A perfectly fine account of the Timbuktu-area manuscripts and the efforts made by many to save them from destruction. Would have been significantly, improved, though, with more about the manuscripts themselves, as well as at least some images of the materials.
    • 4/5
      A harrowing account of a modern day hero doing everything he could to save thousands of ancient priceless manuscripts during a fundamentalist Al Qaeda occupation. An important cautionary tale and a must read for anyone involved in literary history, art history, library studies, historical restoration and preservation, censorship, or philanthropy.
    • 3/5
      A book of great immediacy, and an interesting vision of what shifts the retention of knowledge might have to sink to in the face of religious prejudice. Mr. Hammer has an essentially journalistic approach to his account of the period of history which passed in Mali a few years past. In the face of a very fundamentalist uprising against the government of the sub-Saharan state of Mali, the inhabitants of the famous city of Timbuktu were forced to flee, and smuggle their hoarded manuscripts, at the peril of their lives, or of personal mutilation. The prose is clear, and the escapes hairbreadth. So, it is compelling reading, and a cautionary tale in an age of increasing tendencies towards theocracy in Europe and the Americas.
    • 4/5
      I definitely bought this book because of its title. Yes, I was once a librarian, and though I didn't start out to be mean and nasty, I quickly was fed up with students who didn't read and with patrons who didn't return their books on time. But I would never, not in a million years, have tried to smuggle priceless manuscripts under the noses of Jihadists and Al-Qaeda terrorists.

      My geography is pretty poor. A downside to listening to an audible.com book is there are no maps. I suspect that had I read a paper book, there would have been several illustrations of the area. Even so, I am now much more fluent in land-locked African geography than I ever thought to be.

      Throughout the second half of the book, however, I worried that religious fanatics now know that these treasures exist, and probably are located in the libraries of Timbuktu. Hammer rather leaves the reader in suspense....

      The narration was ably handled by Bochmer. His accents (French, English, African languages) rang true.
    • 3/5
      In Timbuktu, Mali, a man named Abdel Kader Haidara first worked for the Ahmed Baba Institute where he was instrumental in convincing people around the country to donate their manuscripts of works of science, medicine, astronomy and more - ancient manuscripts that had been kept in private collections for generations - and later started his own Mamma Haidara Library with his own private collection. But fairly recently these manuscripts were threatened by extremists who wanted to impose Sharia law on even the Muslims in Timbuktu, and Haidara and his comrades have to use all their wit and ingenuity to spirit them away.

      By the title, you might be expecting a fairly light-hearted look at librarianship in Timbuktu. You would be sorely disappointed. This is much more a story of the rise of a particular Islamic faction in Mali, and what happened particularly in 2011-12 when Qaddafi was deposed in Libya and Tuaregs wanting independence allied with Al Qaeda to overtake Timbuktu until the French came in. Not a bad book, per se, but not what I was expecting: very little description of what exactly makes these "libraries" (rather than just conserving the manuscripts and digitize them). I would have been much more interested if it were focused on the manuscripts, but instead the libraries themselves are mostly a lens used to show the effect of the extremists on those living in Timbuktu. The journalist author clearly has done a lot of work to interview Haidara and military personnel involved, but I think the audience for this book may not find it and those who pick it up for the title (as I did) will want to know more about the manuscripts.
    • 5/5
      Timbuktu is a city with a storied history, and one lesser-known piece of that history is that twice during the Middle Ages it was the center of a flowering of education and scholarship. In the 1980s, a young man named Abdel Kader Haidara, a collector for a government library, traveled the Sahara Desert and the Niger River, collecting ancient Arabic manuscripts, both religious and secular, rescuing them from decay and destruction, and bringing them back for preservation. This part of the story include some amazing adventures in itself. But there's more.

      Haidara over the years matured into a mild-mannered archivist and historian, along with marrying and raising a family. Then in 2012, Al Qaeda militants seized control of Mali, including Timbuktu, and the marvelous collection and the scholarship around it was in danger of being destroyed.

      At first Al Qaeda leaders were outwardly respectful of the collection and its value, but as their grip tightened, that didn't last. Priceless manuscripts representing an important part of Mali and the world's literary heritage, was in danger of being destroyed.

      Haidara, thirty years after his original adventures, organized a massive smuggling operation, to get that amazing collection of priceless manuscripts out of the country, right under the noses of the Al Qaeda occupiers. No short review can capture how thrilling this story is, or how well Hammer recounts it. Haidara and his crew of scholarly librarians risked their lives and smuggled crates of manuscripts downriver to safety at risk of horrible punishments Al Qaeda imposed on those who violated their version of Sharia law. It's an exciting, amazing, thrilling story, and an exceptional example of the devotion of dedicated librarians to preservation of and access to knowledge.

      Highly recommended.

      I bought this book.
    • 4/5
      Reads like fiction, but it's nonfiction. In much the same vane as The Swerve but less academic.
    • 4/5
      In fact the saving of the books of Timbuktu seems to have been well enough planned and executed that it cannot in itself take up many chapters of any book. We are given a survey of the known history of Timbuktu, an interesting introduction to Abdel Kader Haidara and how he traveled though the Niger area collecting manuscripts, then established private libraries in Timbuktu resulting in around 400,000 volumes dating from the 12th century onward in 45 libraries. Then we follow the history of the jihadists who lead the invasion in Mali and how the military was in no shape to resist. After that comes the actual rescue, with a couple of hair-raising incidents, but no direct loss of manuscripts. The French offensive which routed the jihadists just as they were moving toward the capitol to the death of one of the 3 jihadist leaders. The manuscripts are left in a better situation at the end, but not in Timbuktu.

      Well enough written and balanced to keep a predominantly fiction reader from putting it down. However, it had no illustrations and the fly-leaf map sucked.

      Another book covering the same rescue The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu: The Quest for this Storied City and the Race to Save its Treasures by Charlie English may give a slightly less glorified report.
    • 3/5
      I’m a grad student working towards a master’s in library and information science, so I was really jazzed to read this book. I have a hard time reading through nonfiction and a fast clip (unlike fiction), so I usually listen to my nonfiction choices on audio. I listened to this one on audio and I don’t think I would’ve been able to finish it otherwise.

      The overall description of the book on goodreads led me to believe I’d be reading all about the daring escapades of these librarians in Timbuktu and get to know them all individually as well. Instead, while there is an underlying plot that follows one specific “librarian” and his efforts to preserve the family heirloom manuscripts of the people in Timbuktu, the book’s overlying plot really follows the rise and fall of Al-Qaeda and the jihadist movement in the area (most specifically Timbuktu but the greater area of Mali).

      The history and events there are important for understanding the heroic actions taken by those who wished to preserve the precious manuscripts of their people, but it definitely ended up taking center stage rather than the librarians themselves (for the most part). That history and storyline of those events are all quiet well done, but for me it took a lot of effort to remain focused during these times and to stick with the book.

      For those who want to know more about these sorts of events and places like Mali that have battled Al-Qaeda for so long, I think this would be a great book to pick up. It is well done in that regard. For book nerds and librarians who expected a book mostly about books and bookish things, this one might not be the one for you.
    • 2/5
      I really wanted to like this book. I'm an archivist and I'm interested in world cultures so i feel like I'm the perfect target audience for this. But the author took an interesting story and just made it dry and dull. He didn't show the characters of the people very well and spent most of his time just chronicling wars instead of focusing on the manuscripts and the librarians. In the hands of a more gifted author, this could have been great, but unfortunately this writer took all the life out of the story.
    • 5/5
      Almost one man's determination to rescue and preserve the ancient manuscripts secreted in and around the ancient Islamic University city of Timbuktu. Brilliant exposition of the challenges which had to be overcome and the utter insanity of fanatics.
    • 2/5
      According to the title (and subtitle), this is meant to be about librarians in Timbuktu (a city in the African country of Mali) who saved over 300,000 manuscripts from Al Qaeda after they occupied Timbuktu. Really, there was some about the guy collecting all these manuscripts, and later on, about evacuating them all; but, the majority of the book was really about the history of Islam, and the history of the area.

      I was disappointed. I guess I’m just not that interested in the history, at least the way it was written in this book, anyway. I listened to the audio, which may have had a bearing on what I thought, but in all honesty, I still don’t think I would have liked it.
    • 4/5
      A 5-star thriller, but in need of a bit more editing. And, so many unsettling questions are left unanswered by the end of the epilogue. Will these books ever get scanned? That was a close call, will they ever truly get saved? The descriptions and history of the fighting and warfare were well done. I just wish there was more about the content and future preservation of these ancient desert manuscripts.
    • 3/5
      Moderately interesting, but got bogged down in the details and did not finish.
    • 3/5
      Synopsis: This is the true story of the protection of ancient African documents from Al Qaeda. Haidara begins the Mali collection by going to collectors and asking them to donate their manuscripts to the national library. He ends by saving the largest percentage from destruction.
      Review: The title is misleading in that it appears to be an adventure novel. It's really a well written history of happenings in and around Timbuktu. I found large sections of the book ponderous despite the well written prose.
    • 4/5
      I received this as a gift and was very excited to read it. Three book focused more on mid-east politics. It was nearly as entertaining as reading the"begats" in the Bible. Good info but not wheat I was looking to read based on the book's description.
    • 5/5
      Bad-Ass is the appropriate adjective here, wow.

      In a story that's only a moment from being current events, learn about the improbable yet actually true story of how Abdel Kader Haidera rescued ~95% of Timbuktu's precious manuscripts (hundreds of thousands of volumes) from destruction by jihadis. Haidera's bad-assery begins long before occupation of Mali by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb (AQIM) as a young man, searching out manuscripts in dusty villages and landing overseas grants to build state-of-the-art restoration facilities.

      I'll be honest- before this book, I was only dimly aware of how much math, science, and culture were generated in medieval MENA beyond it existing, but wow. The vibrant literature and depth make it *that* much more irritating when I come across online comments implying all Islam "encourages followers to kill as many people as possible" or are backwards in some way- that'd be like assuming all of Christianity is similar to how a sect like Westboro Baptist behaves.

      A very timely read, and definitely does it's job of a) highlighting Haidera as the bad-ass librarian he is, b) informing Western readers like me about these cultural gems in need of preservation, and c) pointing out again that the main victims of radical Islamic terror are Muslims, so as much as people handwring here over locking international doors out of safety concerns, our fears are pale in comparison to the threat of mutilation, death, and cultural destruction MENA citizens face daily. The only thing I found lacking was pictures of manuscripts- I understand they're in storage, but descriptions only go so far!
    • 4/5
      This fascinating account of how some priceless ancient manuscripts were gathered and smuggled out of the destructive path of Islamic jihadists turns out to be more of a history of the extremists and how closely tied their movement is to the land itself--the vast desert spaces of Africa that many of us never think about at all.
    • 3/5
      Abdel Kader Haidara collected many ancient and priceless Arabic manuscripts that had been passed down in families for generations throughout the Saharan desert, and placed them in a historic library in the fabled town of Timbuktu in the hope of preserving them for posterity. When an fundamentalist Islamist terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda showed up on Timbuktu's doorstep, the 350,000 or so manuscripts were threatened with destruction. This book is the fascinating and exciting story of how Abdel and his friends, family and colleagues smuggled all of the manuscripts to safety out of Timbuktu, the story of a meek librarian who becomes a world-class smuggler, if you will.

      The book combines a thriller/adventure story with the story of the rise of al Qaeda in Africa. I highly recommend it.

      3 stars
    • 3/5
      An interesting read covering the recent and ancient history of Timbuktu and Mali, none of which I had been aware of before. The tradition of keeping manuscripts in homes rather than in large libraries was fascinating, as was the history of conflict and destruction which made this tradition sensible. It was intriguing to see how the more recent trend to centralise the location of texts in libraries was reversed again in the face of the risk of loss of manuscript materials to extremists in modern times.

      I found the author's ego a little intrusive at times, but it was worth reading to find out more about this part of Africa and its rich manuscript traditions.