The Storied City
The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past
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“Timbuktu is a real place, and Charlie English will fuel your wanderlust with true descriptions of the fabled city’s past, present, and future.” –Fodor’s
Two tales of a city: The historical race to “discover” one of the world’s most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.
To Westerners, the name “Timbuktu” long conjured a tantalizing paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of explorers gripped by the fever for “discovery” tried repeatedly to reach the fabled city. But one expedition after another went disastrously awry, succumbing to attack, the climate, and disease. Timbuktu was rich in another way too. A medieval center of learning, it was home to tens of thousands—according to some, hundreds of thousands—of ancient manuscripts, on subjects ranging from religion to poetry, law to history, pharmacology, and astronomy. When al-Qaeda–linked jihadists surged across Mali in 2012, threatening the existence of these precious documents, a remarkable thing happened: a team of librarians and archivists joined forces to spirit the manuscripts into hiding.
Relying on extensive research and firsthand reporting, Charlie English expertly twines these two suspenseful strands into a fraught and fascinating account of one of the planet's extraordinary places, and the myths from which it has become inseparable.
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Like a real-life El Dorado, Timbuktu titillated European explorers for centuries, but its quotidian realities were shielded from their view by the arid desert and distrustful nomads. The modern-day city remains threatened by violent extremists, and its real riches, unbeknownst to the early explorers, are its manuscripts, an unrivaled library of Islamic literature predating Oxford and Cambridge. English (The Snow Tourist), international editor of the Guardian, draws parallels between the intrepid, mostly ill-fated adventurers who were intent on bringing fabulous news of Timbuktu back to Europe and today's fearless, scholarly inhabitants, who resolutely strive to save the yellowing tomes from destruction at the hands of al-Qaeda. "Any well-informed European asked in 1788 to travel into Africa's interior should have recognized the journey as the death sentence it was and stayed at home," English writes. "But the African Association's recruits were not well-informed. That, in many ways, was the point." The city's inhabitants, far more cognizant of the dangers they face, have nevertheless persevered. English shares his firsthand observations of the region's people and its treasures, offering a no less fantastical or unlikely tale than those imagined in the fever-dreams of the first Europeans to venture up the Niger.
