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Black Man White House
Brief Summary
Black Man, White House: An Oral History of the Obama Years
From legendary comedian D.L. Hughley comes a bitingly funny send-up of the Obama years, as "told” by the key political players on both sides of the aisle.
What do the Clintons, Republicans, fellow Democrats, and Obama’s own family really think of President Barack Obama? Finally, the truth is revealed in this raucously funny "oral history” parody.
There is no more astute—and hilarious—critic of politics, entertainment, and race in America than D. L. Hughley, famed comedian, radio star, and original member of the "Kings of Comedy.” In the vein of Jon Stewart’s America: The Book, Black Man, White House is an acerbic and witty take on Obama’s two terms, looking at the president’s accomplishments and foibles through the imagined eyes of those who saw history unfold.
Hughley draws upon satirical interviews with the most notorious public figures of our day: Mitt Romney ("What’s ‘poverty’? Is that some sort of rap jargon?”); Nancy Pelosi ("I play Fuck/Marry/Kill, and there’s a lot more kills than fucks in Congress, believe me.”); Rod Blagojevich ("You can’t sell political offices on eBay; I discovered that personally.”); Joe Biden ("I like wrestling.”); and other politicians, media pundits, and buffoons. It is sure to be the most irreverent— and perhaps the most honest—look at American politics today.
ISBN:9780062399793
Author:D.L. Hughley
Joe Kadenge The Life of a Football Le...
Brief Summary
Kadenge na mpira...
This is the stuff of legend; a real tour de force, brilliant and uncompromising, told in simple conversational style that feels like listening to a great storyteller. This is a story that will capture the attention of all Kenyans. It's part birthday card, part an engrossing portrait to a legendary footballer. The story spans decades —from a crotchety start to the incising portrait of a great man of our times.
John Nene is a Kenyan journalist working for the BBC World Service as a sports producer, and is based at their East Africa Bureau office in Nairobi. He has covered sports in Kenya extensively and travelled widely to report on major international events. Some of the big international competitions he has covered are Olympic Games in 1988 (Seoul), 2004 (Athens) and 2008 (Beijing), World Athletics Championships in 1993 (Stuttgart), 2001 (Edmonton), 2007 (Osaka) and 2015 in Beijing, 1999 All-Africa Games in Johannesburg and 2012 Olympic boxing qualifiers in Casablanca, Morocco.
The climax to his illustrious career in sports journalism was when he covered the 2010 World Cup in South Africa in which he travelled by road, winning the hearts of sports fans in the region with his lively reports on his way to Johannesburg via Arusha, Morogoro, Mbeya, Kabwe, Lusaka, Livingstone, Francistown and Gaborone. He started his sports journalism career as a boxing correspondent for the defunct Weekly Review/Nairobi Times publications having himself been a boxer, then moved to Kenya Times, Kenya Television Network (KTN) as chief sports presenter, Daily Nation as a sports sub-editor and now with BBC. His creative, incisive, authoritative and well-researched stories have twice earned him the Kenya Media Council Sports Journalist of the Year award. He is currently working on his next book, boxing in Kenya.
ISBN:9789966478764
Author:John Nene
African Nights Kuki Gallmann
Brief Summary
African Nights: True Stories from the Author of I Dreamed of Africa
Africa evokes a deep sense of mystery. It is a place that retains what most of the world has lost: space, roots, traditions, awesome beauty, true wilderness, rare animals, and extraordinary people. In this wonderful and haunting collection of stories, Kuki Gallmann writes of her life in Africa, where every day brings challenge and adventure.
African Nightsis a treasury of memories, in which fascinating people and places are brought to life. The healing powers Africa can have on those who embrace the land as a place of mystery, superstition, danger, and beauty.
ISBN:9780060954833
Author:Kuki Gallmann
Fighting the Mau Mau The British Army...
Fighting the Mau Mau: The British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency
British Army counterinsurgency campaigns were supposedly waged within the bounds of international law, overcoming insurgents with the minimum force necessary. This revealing study questions what this meant for the civilian population during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, one of Britain's most violent decolonization wars.
For the first time Huw Bennett examines the conduct of soldiers in detail, uncovering the uneasy relationship between notions of minimum force and the colonial tradition of exemplary force where harsh repression was frequently employed as a valid means of quickly crushing rebellion.
Although a range of restrained policies such as Special Forces methods, restrictive rules of engagement and surrender schemes prevented the campaign from degenerating into genocide, the army simultaneously coerced the population to drop their support for the rebels, imposing collective fines, mass detentions and frequent interrogations, often tolerating rape, indiscriminate killing and torture to terrorize the population into submission.
Mandela Mobutu and me A NewswomanR...
Brief Summary
In this stunning memoir, veteran Washington Post correspondent Lynne Duke takes readers on a wrenching but riveting journey through Africa during the pivotal 1990s and brilliantly illuminates a continent where hope and humanity thrive amid unimaginable depredation and horrors.
For four years as her newspaper's Johannesburg bureau chief, Lynne Duke cut a rare figure as a black American woman foreign correspondent as she raced from story to story in numerous countries of central and southern Africa. From the battle zones of Congo-Zaire to the quest for truth and reconciliation in South Africa; from the teeming displaced person’s camps of Angola and the killing field of the Rwanda genocide to the calming Indian Ocean shores of Mozambique.
She interviewed heads of state, captains of industry, activists, tribal leaders, medicine men and women, mercenaries, rebels, refugees, and ordinary, hardworking people. And it is they, the ordinary people of Africa, who fueled the hope and affection that drove Duke’s reporting. The nobility of the ordinary African struggles, so often absent from accounts of the continent, is at the heart of Duke’s searing story.
MANDELA, MOBUTU, AND ME is a richly detailed, clear-eyed account of the hard realities Duke discovered, including the devastation wrought by ruthless, rapacious dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko and his successor, Laurent Kabila, in the Congo, and appalling indifference of Europeans and Americans to the legacy of their own exploitation of the continent and its people. But Duke also records with admiration the visionary leadership and personal style of Nelson Mandela in south Africa as he led his country’s inspiring transition from apartheid in the twilight of his incredible life.
Whether it was touring underground gold and copper mines, learning to carry water on her head, filing stories by flashlight or dodging gunmen, Duke’s tour of Africa reveals not only the spirit and travails of an amazing but troubled continent -- it also explores the heart and fearlessness of a dedicated journalist.
ISBN:9780767910347
Author:Lynne Duke
Mammals of Africa: Volumes 1 – ...
Mammals of Africa (MoA) is a series of six volumes which describes, in detail, every currently recognized species of African land mammal. This is the first time that such extensive coverage has ever been attempted, and the volumes incorporate the very latest information and detailed discussion of the morphology, distribution, biology and evolution (including reference to fossil and molecular data) of Africa's mammals.
With 1,160 species and 16 orders, Africa has the greatest diversity and abundance of mammals in the world.
The reasons for this and the mechanisms behind their evolution are given special attention in the series.
Each volume follows the same format, with detailed profiles of every species and higher taxa. The series includes some 660 colour illustrations by Jonathan Kingdon and his many drawings highlight details of morphology and behaviour of the species concerned.
Diagrams, schematic details and line drawings of skulls and jaws are by Jonathan Kingdon and Meredith Happold. Every species also includes a detailed distribution map. Extensive references alert readers to more detailed information.
• Volume I: Introductory Chapters and Afrotheria (352 pages)
• Volume II: Primates (560 pages)
• Volume III: Rodents, Hares and Rabbits (784 pages)
• Volume IV: Hedgehogs, Shrews and Bats (800 pages)
• Volume V: Carnivores, Pangolins, Equids and Rhinoceroses (560 pages)
• Volume VI: Hippopotamuses, Pigs, Deer, Giraffe and Bovids (704 pages)
Remote Dawn
Brief Summary
Bwiza - a small girl with a name containing the property of beauty is getting the worst start a child can have in this world when she is losing her whole family at young age.
But when she is growing up her noble character and the mysterious power of love gives her a new foundation for a meaningful life by helping other orphans.
And finally she is also embraced by happiness when Wilson, a young man who is completely reappraising his life, by chance is crossing her path and the sweet music of love arises around them during one blessed night in the enchanted realm of a dark warm garden under the yellow African moon.
ISBN:9789186528041
Author:Barassa
Teta A Story of a Young Girl
Brief Summary
It is a rainy day in Kibuye in 1962, when Teta is born. She is a spoiled child, the only daughter in her family. Everybody spoils her. Life offers her everything she wants. It even offers her the dream of every girl; love . . . She is seventeen when she meets Kayira. It is love at first sight. Her family agrees. She will get married with the man she loves.
But is this her destiny? To be happy and to get everything that she wants? Her destiny was pre-determined when she was born and all she could do was to follow her destiny. Will their love resist her destiny? Will the love that fill their young hearts endure the trials of life?
ISBN:9789186528065
Author:Barassa
The Fugitive’s Love
Brief Summary
Five years ago, a faceless guardian angel rescued James Lavin from prison during a trial that would have ended with him hanging at the lower end of a hangman’s rope by his neck. After a chaotic five years, he decides to go back to his birth town, pulled to the ridges and the hills by the memories of an innocence he doesn’t feel anymore. His travails lead him to Kathleen, his childhood sweetheart who also happens to be his first and only love.
Old flames are re-ignited, and Lavin comes down to earth six blissful months later to find himself cornered. See, for a fugitive, a few moments of lascivious distraction can be the difference between freedom and jail time, or worse, death. When old foes ensnare him, Lavin discovers that going back home may not have been such a good idea.
He appears to be destined back to jail or a painful death, but the faceless benefactor, like a competent guardian angel, swoops in and saves the day, and his hide, again. The Fugitive’s Love is a romantic story infused with intrigue, mystery, and suspense.
ISBN:9781370392971
Author:P. G. Gatuna
The Penguin Book of Historic Speeches
Brief Summary
Great leaders of history have sought to take their followers to the Promised Land through the uplifting power of speech. Editor Brian MacArthur surveys the greatest oratory past and present.
From Moses to Abraham Lincoln, he shows that great speeches can be placed alongside the work of artists, poets, and priests and read with the same pleasure and intellectual enlightenment.
ISBN:9780140176193
Author:Brian MacArthur
Zone One
Brief Summary
In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.
Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild¬ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern¬ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One—but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety—the "malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.
Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work¬ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.
And then things start to go wrong.
Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, Zone One bril¬liantly subverts the genre’s conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century.
ISBN:9780385528078
Author:Colson Whitehead
Ethnicity and Conflict in the Horn of...
Brief Summary
Conflicts in the Horn have all too often dominated press coverage of Africa. This book exposes the subtle and ambiguous role ethnicity can play in social conflict - a role that is nowhere as simple and direct as commonly assumed.
Social conflict is routinely attributed to ethnic differentiation because dividing lines between rival groups often follow ethnic contours; and cultural symbolism has proved a potent ideological weapon. The purpose of this book is to examine the nature of the bond linking ethnicity to conflict in a variety of circumstances.
The diverse groups are involved in confrontations at different levels and of varying intensity, ranging from elemental struggles for physical survival of groups at the margin of society, to contests for state power and control of resources at the center.
The ten studies from Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya are based on primary research by anthropologists and historians who have long experience of the region. The insights gained from this comparative work help to refine common assumptions about conflict among ethnic groups.
ISBN:9780852552261
Author:Katsuyoshi Fukui and John Markakis
The Road to Hell
Brief Summary
The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity.
A former aid worker explains how misguided foreign aid, charity, development assistance, and food relief have propagated a culture of destructive dependency that damages the local economy and promotes corruption. 35,000 first printing. Tour.
ISBN:9780743227865
Author:Michael Maren
A Short History of Slavery
Brief Summary
As we approach the bicentenary of the abolition of the Atlantic trade, Walvin has selected the historical texts that recreate the mindset that made such a savage institution possible - morally acceptable even.
Setting these historical documents against Walvin's own incisive historical narrative, the two layers of this extraordinary, definitive account of the Atlantic slave trade enable us to understand the rise and fall of one of the most shameful chapters in British history, the repercussions of which the modern world is still living with.
ISBN:9780141027982
Author:James Walvin
The Africans by David Lamb
Brief Summary
During the four years he spent in black Africa as the bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, David Lamb traveled through almost every country south of the Sahara, logging more than 300,000 miles. He talked to presidents and guerrilla leaders, university professors and witch doctors.
He bounced from wars to coups oceans apart, catching midnight flights to little-known countries where supposedly decent people were doing unspeakable things to one another. In the tradition of John Gunther's Inside Africa,
The Africans is an extraordinary combination of analysis and adventure. Part travelogue, part contemporary history, it is a portrait of a continent that sometimes seems hell-bent on destroying itself, and of people who are as courageous as they are long-suffering.
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ISBN:9780394753089
Author:David Lamb
One Long Night
Brief Summary
One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps
A powerful exploration of the evolution of a harrowing phenomenon that forever changed the landscape of conflict in the twentieth century: the concentration and work camps
Concentration camps--the preemptive communal detention of innocent civilians--first took foothold in Cuba in the late 1800s when Spain's Captain General Valeriano Weyler drove a half million Cuban refugees into makeshift camps, ultimately killing over 100,000 of them through starvation and disease. Although Teddy Roosevelt and President McKinley condemned such tactical atrocities, the U.S. would establish concentration camps of its own in the Philippines just two years later, leading to the deaths of 11,000 people.
These colonial experiments paved the way for the worldwide internment of foreigners during World War I, followed by the extreme horrors of Nazi Germany and the Gulag. Yet greater consciousness and condemnation proved ineffective during the post-war years, as China and Korea soon adopted camps of their own, and the British continued their use overseas. Even Guantanamo Bay, established in 1898 partially in response to the savage abuses of the first camps, echoes their philosophy today in the detention of prisoners who have not been charged.
Far from being an exclusively World War II tool for perpetrating genocide, camps have existed for more than 100 years, recurring with appalling frequency. Shocking, powerful, and necessary, One Long Night seeks to answer the question of how these atrocities continued through the years after worldwide exposure, condemnation, and the solemn promise of "never again."
ISBN:9780316303590
Author:Andrea Pitzer
Sudans Nuba Mountains People Under Siege
Brief Summary
Sudan's Nuba Mountains People under Siege: Essays by Humanitarians in the Battle Zone
This collection of first-person accounts chronicles the experiences of 13 humanitarian aid workers who travelled to Sudan to provide food, medical care and spiritual support to the besieged people of the Nuba Mountains.
A diverse group of men and women of various ages, professions and religious beliefs, the essayists describe in detail the tragedies of the Civil War in South Sudan, their own close calls with death, and why they are committed to helping a group of people - Nuba civilians - little known by the rest of the world.
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ISBN:9781476667225
Author:Samuel Totten
This House is Not for Sale
Brief Summary
The award-winning author of Voice of America paints a vivid, fully imagined portrait of an extraordinary African family and the house that holds them together.
A powerful tale of family and community, This House Is Not for Sale brings to life an African neighborhood and one remarkable house, seen through the eyes of a young member of the household. The house lies in a town seemingly lost in time, full of colorful, larger-than-life characters; at the narrative’s heart are Grandpa, the family patriarch whose occasional cruelty is balanced by his willingness to open his doors to those in need, and the house itself, which becomes a character in its own right and takes on the scale of legend.
From the decades-long rivalry between owners of two competing convenience stores to the man who convinces his neighbors to give up their earthly possessions to prepare for the end of the world, Osondu’s story captures a place beyond the reach of the outside world, full of superstitions and myths that sustain its people.
Osondu’s prose has the lightness and magic of fable, but his themes—poverty, disease, the arrival of civilization in an isolated community—are timeless and profound. At once full of joyful energy and quiet heartbreak, This House Is Not for Sale is an utterly original novel from a master storyteller.
ISBN:9780061990885
Author:E.C. Osondu
The Idealist Jeffrey Sachs and the Qu...
Brief Summary
A powerful portrayal of Jeffrey Sachs's ambitious quest to end global poverty
"The poor you will always have with you," to cite the Gospel of Matthew 26:11. Jeffrey Sachs—celebrated economist, special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, and author of the influential bestseller The End of Poverty—disagrees. In his view, poverty is a problem that can be solved. With single-minded determination he has attempted to put into practice his theories about ending extreme poverty, to prove that the world's most destitute people can be lifted onto "the ladder of development."
In 2006, Sachs launched the Millennium Villages Project, a daring five-year experiment designed to test his theories in Africa. The first Millennium village was in Sauri, a remote cluster of farming communities in western Kenya. The initial results were encouraging. With his first taste of success, and backed by one hundred twenty million dollars from George Soros and other likeminded donors, Sachs rolled out a dozen model villages in ten sub-Saharan countries. Once his approach was validated it would be scaled up across the entire continent. At least that was the idea.
For the past six years, Nina Munk has reported deeply on the Millennium Villages Project, accompanying Sachs on his official trips to Africa and listening in on conversations with heads-of-state, humanitarian organizations, rival economists, and development experts. She has immersed herself in the lives of people in two Millennium villages: Ruhiira, in southwest Uganda, and Dertu, in the arid borderland between Kenya and Somalia. Accepting the hospitality of camel herders and small-hold farmers, and witnessing their struggle to survive, 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 reality of human life.
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ISBN:9780771062506
Author:Nina Munk
Creating Africas Struggles Over Nature
Brief Summary
Creating Africa’s: Struggles Over Nature, Conservation and Land
In Africa, conflicts between protected areas for fauna and flora and space for their surrounding human populations continue despite years spent trying to find an accommodation between the needs of both parties.
Creating Africas investigates the roots of the current conservation boom, demonstrates that it is part of a struggle over various definitions of existing realities, and examines the global effects of this struggle. The book discusses the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in South Africa, the Isimangaliso (St Lucia) Wetland Park. Here, conservation interests are pitted against those of industrial forestry, commercial farming, and local communities struggling to have their lands returned to them. They all seek to define and create their own realities, but do so with very different resources at their disposal. In his expert analysis, Nustad treats these realities not as different representations but rather as multiple, often competing, viewpoints that involve a wide range of actors, both human and non-human.
Nustad posits that in order to avoid being accused of neo-colonial land grabbing, the conservation lobby will need to find a new way of imagining nature and protection that includes people.
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ISBN:9781849042581
Author:Knut Nustad