Social Science Books
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City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp
Rawlence, Ben
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $5.09
The Dadaab refugee camp is many things: to the charity workers, it’s a humanitarian crisis; to the Kenyan government, a “nursery for terrorists”; to the Western media, a dangerous no-go area. But to its half a million residents, it’s their last resort.Situated hundreds of miles from any other settlement, deep within the inhospitable desert of northern Kenya where only thorn bushes grow, Dadaab is a city like no other. Its buildings are made from mud, sticks, or plastic. Its entire economy is grey. And its citizens survive on rations and luck. Over the course of four years, Ben Rawlence became a firsthand witness to a strange and desperate place, getting to know many of those who had come seeking sanctuary. Among them are Guled, a former child soldier who lives for football; Nisho, who scrapes an existence by pushing a wheelbarrow and dreaming of riches; Tawane, the indomitable youth leader; and Kheyro, a student whose future hangs upon her education.In City of Thorns, Rawlence interweaves the stories of nine individuals to show what life is like in the camp, sketching the wider political forces that keep the refugees trapped. Lucid, vivid, and illuminating, City of Thorns is an urgent human story with deep international repercussions, brought to life through the people who call Dabaab home.
The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty
Munk, Nina
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.95 Sale: $5.51
In 2006, Jeffrey Sachs - celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential bestseller The End of Poverty - launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring, $120-million experiment designed to test his theories about ending poverty. For six years, Nina Munk shadowed Sachs on his trips to Africa, listened in on conversations with heads-of-state and humanitarian organizations, and immersed herself in the lives of people in two remote African villages. Munk came to understand the real-life issues that challenge Sachs’s formula for ending global poverty. The Idealist is the profound and moving story of what happens when the abstract theories of a brilliant, driven man meet the realities of human life.
China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa
French, Howard W.
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.95 Sale: $5.51
Chinese immigrants of the recent past and unfolding twenty-first century are in search of the African dream. So explains indefatigable traveler Howard W. French, prize-winning investigative journalist and former New York Times bureau chief in Africa and China, in the definitive account of this seismic geopolitical development. China’s burgeoning presence in Africa is already shaping, and reshaping, the future of millions of people. From Liberia to Senegal to Mozambique, in creaky trucks and by back roads, French introduces us to the characters who make up China’s dogged emigrant population: entrepreneurs singlehandedly reshaping African infrastructure, and less-lucky migrants barely scraping by but still convinced of Africa’s opportunities. French’s acute observations offer illuminating insight into the most pressing unknowns of modern Sino-African relations: Why China is making these cultural and economic incursions into the continent; what Africa’s role is in this equation; and what the ramifications for both parties and their people - and the watching world - will be in the foreseeable future.
Do They Hear You When You Cry
Kassindja, Fauziya
(Paperback)
List Price: $14.95 Sale: $6.02
Fauziya Kassindja's progressive father had shielded her from the tribal practices of polygamy and genital mutilation until his death in 1993. Then, at age seventeen, she was forced to marry a forty-five-year-old man who already had three wives, and was threatened with female circumcision - without her consent, without antibiotics. Shortly before the ritual was to take place, Fauziya's sister helped her escape to Germany. From there, she traveled to the United States seeking political asylum. Instead, she was stripped, shackled handcuffed, and imprisoned in a series of INS detention facilities. When Layli Miller Bashir, a second-year law student assigned to the case met Fauziya, she found an emotionally broken, emaciated girl with whom she forged an extraordinary friendship. Putting her heart and soul into the case, Layli enlisted help from the American University International Human Rights Clinic. Here is Fauziya's dramatic personal story, told in her own words, vividly detailing her nightmarish day-to-day existence in U.S. prisons. A story of faith and freedom, courage and inspiration, once read it is not easily forgotten.
Fisherman's Blues: A West African Community at Sea
Badkhen, Anna
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Sale: $2.79
The sea is broken, fishermen say. The sea is empty. The Genii have taken the fish elsewhere.For centuries, fishermen have launched their pirogues off the Senegalese coast, where the fish used to be so plentiful a man could dip his hand into the gray-green ocean and pull one out as big as his thigh. But in an Atlantic decimated by overfishing and climate change, the fish are harder and harder to find.Here, as writer Anna Badkhen discovers, all boundaries are permeable - between land and sea, between myth and truth, even between storyteller and story.Fisherman's Blues immerses us in a community tugged by currents ancient and modern, navigating a time of unprecedented environmental, economic, and cultural upheaval with resilience, ingenuity, and wonder.
Fisherman's Blues: A West African Community at Sea
Badkhen, Anna
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $5.09
An intimate account of life in a West African fishing village, tugged by currents ancient and modern, and dependent on an ocean that is being radically transformed.For centuries, fishermen have launched their pirogues from the Senegalese port of Joal, where the fish used to be so plentiful a man could dip his hand into the grey-green ocean and pull one out as big as his thigh. But in an Atlantic decimated by overfishing and climate change, the fish are harder and harder to find. Here, Badkhen discovers, all boundaries are permeable--between land and sea, between myth and truth, even between storyteller and story. Fisherman's Blues immerses us in a community navigating a time of unprecedented environmental, economic, and cultural upheaval with resilience, ingenuity, and wonder.
Memoirs of a Born Free: Reflections on the New South Africa by a Member of the Post-Apartheid Generation
Wa Azania, Malaika
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.95 Sale: $5.51
Apartheid isn't over - so Malaika Wa Azania boldly argues in Memoirs of a Born Free, her account of growing up black in modern-day South Africa.
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