Title:The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade
Author(s): Robert W. Harms 
Paperback: 496 pages
Publisher: Basic Books
Publication date: December 21st 2002 (first published January 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0465028721
ISBN-13: 9780465028726
Product Dimensions: 5 x 1.1 x 8 inches 

Book summary
The Diligent began her journey in Brittany in 1731, and Harms follows her along the African coast where her goods were traded for slaves, to Martinique where her captives were sold to work on sugar plantations. Harms brings to life a world in which slavery was a commerce carried out without qualms. He shows the gruesome details of daily life aboard a slave ship, as well as French merchants wrangling with their government for the right to traffic in slaves, African kings waging epic wars for control of European slave trading posts, and representatives of European governments negotiating the complicated politics of the Guinea coast to ensure a stead supply of labor for their countries' colonies. The Diligent is filled with rich stories that explain how the slave trade worked on all levels, from geopolitics to the rigging of ships.

Title:The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild
Author(s): Lawrence Anthony, Graham Spence
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Publication date: November 10th 2009 (first published November 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 031256578X
ISBN-13: 9780312565787
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches

Book Description
When South African conservationist Lawrence Anthony was asked to accept a herd of "rogue" wild elephants on his Thula Thula game reserve in Zululand, his common sense told him to refuse. But he was the herd's last chance of survival: they would be killed if he wouldn't take them.

In order to save their lives, Anthony took them in. In the years that followed he became a part of their family. And as he battled to create a bond with the elephants, he came to realize that they had a great deal to teach him about life, loyalty, and freedom.

The Elephant Whisperer is a heartwarming, exciting, funny, and sometimes sad account of Anthony's experiences with these huge yet sympathetic creatures. Set against the background of life on an African game reserve, with unforgettable characters and exotic wildlife, it is a delightful book that will appeal to animal lovers and adventurous souls everywhere.

Title: Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier
Author(s): Alexandra Fuller
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Penguin Press HC
Publication date: May 3rd 2004 (first published January 1st 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1594200165
ISBN-13: 9781594200168
Product Dimensions:  6.1 x 0.7 x 9.1 inches

Book Description
Best-selling memoirist Alexandra Fuller travels with a strangely charismatic Rhodesian war veteran into a modern-day heart of darkness.

When Alexandra ("Bo") Fuller was home in Zambia a few years ago, visiting her parents for Christmas, she asked her father about a nearby banana farmer who was known for being a "tough bugger." Her father's response was a warning to steer clear of him; he told Bo: "Curiosity scribbled the cat." Nonetheless, Fuller began her strange friendship with the man she calls K, a white African and veteran of the Rhodesian war. With the same fiercely beautiful prose that won her acclaim for Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller here recounts her friendship with K.

K is, seemingly, a man of contradictions: tattooed, battle scarred, and weathered by farm work, he is a lion of a man, feral and bulletproof. Yet he is also a born-again Christian, given to weeping when he recollects his failed romantic life, and more than anything else welling up inside with memories of battle. For his war, like all wars, was a brutal one, marked by racial strife, jungle battles, unimaginable tortures, and the murdering of innocent civilians-and K, like all the veterans of the war, has blood on his hands.

Title: Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa
Author(s): Dambisa Moyo, Niall Ferguson
Paperback: 188 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: March 17th 2009
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374139563
ISBN-13: 9780374139568

Book summary
In the past fifty years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Has this assistance improved the lives of Africans? No. In fact, across the continent, the recipients of this aid are not better off as a result of it, but worse—much worse.

In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth. In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined—and millions continue to suffer. Provocatively drawing a sharp contrast between African countries that have rejected the aid route and prospered and others that have become aid-dependent and seen poverty increase, Moyo illuminates the way in which overreliance on aid has trapped developing nations in a vicious circle of aid dependency, corruption, market distortion, and further poverty, leaving them with nothing but the “need” for more aid. Debunking the current model of international aid promoted by both Hollywood celebrities and policy makers, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world’s poorest countries that guarantees economic growth and a significant decline in poverty—without reliance on foreign aid or aid-related assistance.

Dead Aid is an unsettling yet optimistic work, a powerful challenge to the assumptions and arguments that support a profoundly misguided development policy in Africa. And it is a clarion call to a new, more hopeful vision of how to address the desperate poverty that plagues millions.

Title: The Village of Waiting
Author(s): George Packer
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date: August 1st 2001 (first published August 12th 1988)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374527806
ISBN-13: 9780374527808

Book Description
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 Togo, Packer reveals his own schooling at the hands of an unforgettable array of townspeople--peasants, chiefs, charlatans, children, cripples, crazies, and those who, having lost or given up much of their traditional identity and fastened their hopes on "development," find themselves trapped between the familiar repetitions of rural life and the chafing monotony of waiting for change.

Title: Don't Look Behind You!: A Safari Guide's Encounters with Ravenous Lions, Stampeding Elephants, and Lovesick Rhinos
Author(s): Peter Allison
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Lyons Press
Publication date: September 1st 2009 (first published 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1599214695
ISBN-13: 9781599214696

Book Description
Join Peter Allison for a riveting, rollicking, behind-the-scenes dose of everyone’s dream experience—going on safari—and coming through amazed but, thankfully, without a scratch. In Don’t Look Behind You, Allison recounts adventures few would live to tell.

Title: Out of Africa
Author(s): Karen Blixen, Isak Dinesen 
Paperback: 399 pages
Publisher:  Modern Library
Publication date: September 5th 1992 (first published 1937) 
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0679600213
ISBN-13: 9780679600213

Book Description
Out of Africa is Isak Dinesen's memoir of her years in Africa, from 1914 to 1931, on a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi. She had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, and when they separated she stayed on to manage the farm by herself, visited frequently by her lover, the big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, for whom she would make up stories "like Scheherazade." In Africa, "I learned how to tell tales," she recalled many years later. "The natives have an ear still. I told stories constantly to them, all kinds." Her account of her African adventures, written after she had lost her beloved farm and returned to Denmark, is that of a master storyteller, a woman whom John Updike called "one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century."

Title: Green Hills of Africa (Vintage Classics)
Author(s): Ernest Hemingway, Edward Shenton (Illustrator)  
Paperback: 200 pages
Publisher:  London
Publication date: March 4th 2004 (first published January 1st 1930)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0099460955
ISBN-13: 9780099460954

Book Description
"There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things, and because it takes a man's life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave."-- ERNEST HEMINGWAY

In the winter of 1933, Ernest Hemingway and his wife Pauline set out on a two-month safari in the big-game country of East Africa, camping out on the great Serengeti Plain at the foot of magnificent Mount Kilimanjaro. "I had quite a trip," the author told his friend Philip Percival, with characteristic understatement.

"Green Hills of Africa" is Hemingway's account of that expedition, of what it taught him about Africa and himself. Richly evocative of the region's natural beauty, tremendously alive to its character, culture, and customs, and pregnant with a hard-won wisdom gained from the extraordinary situations it describes, it is widely held to be one of the twentieth century's classic travelogues.

Title: Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa
Author(s): Peter Godwin (Goodreads Author) 
Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher:  Grove Press
Publication date: November 30th 2004 (first published 1996)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0802141927
ISBN-13: 9780802141927

Book Description
Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa is the story of Peter Godwin's experiences growing up in Rhodesia. He recounts the story of that country's violent transformation into Zimbabwe, as well as his own personal metamorphoses from privileged boy to reluctant soldier to investigative journalist.

Godwin's story begins, "I think I first realized something was wrong when our next door neighbor, Oom Piet Oberholzer, was murdered. I must have been about five then. It was still five years before the real war would start." The Godwins enjoyed a typical genteel existence in 1960 rural Rhodesia, their household including a "garden boy," a "cook boy," and a nanny. Peter's father managed a wood- and sugarcane-processing plant. His mother, a rural government doctor, was often called to pronounce deaths or conduct autopsies, for which she brought along her "assistant," five-year-old Peter, who was responsible for shooing away the flies.

Godwin's plans for attending college were squashed when he was drafted into the Rhodesian army and assigned to the "Anti-Terrorist Unit," which proved to be an important experience in his life. When he later looked at himself, he saw a man "coursed through with anger and despair. It was the face of someone who would kill an unarmed civilian for withholding information." Disturbed by what he had become, Godwin left Rhodesia after he got out of the army, only to return in 1981 as a journalist. Rhodesia was now Zimbabwe, and the "terrorists" he had reluctantly fought against were now the country's rulers.

Godwin reported on theutterbrutalities in Zimbabwe and the fate of Matabeleland, a black minority region in Zimbabwe. He described the army style of interrogation, in which "before they even began to question you, they would break one wrist," and wrote about the old mines where bodies of the dead were buried. When Godwin's writings received worldwide attention, the Zimbabwean government tried to discredit him, and he received numerous death threats, escaping the country just hours before the police came looking for him.

Mukiwa is not only a memoir but also a compelling adventure story that tells a personal saga that needs to be heard.

Title: The African Queen
Author(s): C.S. Forester
Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Publication date: June 30th 1984 (first published January 1st 1935)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 9780316289108

Book Description
A classic story of adventure and romance - the novel that inspired the legendary movie starring Katherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart

A fast-moving tale and a very good yarn...Mr Forester again and again proves himself a master of suspense - New York Times Book Review

As World War I reaches the heart of the African jungle, Charlie Allnutt and Rose Sayer, a dishevelled trader and an English spinster missionary, find themselves thrown together by circumstance. Fighting time, heat, malaria, and bullets, they make their escape on the rickety steamboat The African Queen...and hatch their own outrageous military plan. Originally published in 1935, The African Queen is a tale replete with vintage Forester drama - unrelenting suspense, reckless heroism, impromptu military manoeuvres, near-death experiences - and a good old-fashioned love story to boot.

Title: Alexandria of Africa
Author(s): Eric Walters 
Paperback: 200 pages
Publisher: Doubleday Canada 
Publication date: September 9th 2008
Language: English
ISBN-10: 038566639X
ISBN-13: 9780385666398

Book Description
For Alexandria Hyatt having a fabulous life is easy: she knows what she wants and she knows how to get it. Being glamorous and rich is simply what she was born to be. When Alexandria is arrested for shoplifting, having to drag herself into court to face a judge just seems like a major inconvenience. But Alexandria has been in trouble before–and this time she can’t find a way to scheme out of the consequences. Before she knows it, she’s on a plane headed to Kenya where she has been ordered to work for an international charity.

Over 7,000 miles away from home with no hot water, no cell phone reception, no friends or family, Alexandria is confronted with a land as unfamiliar as it is unsettling. Over the course of her month in Africa, Alexandria will face a reality she could never have imagined, and will have to look inside herself to see if she has what it takes to confront it.