ANGRY WIND: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel
Jeffrey Tayler
This engrossing narration of crossing the Sahel—the Saharan borderlands of Chad, Nigeria, Niger and Mali—by tortuous and frequently hair-raising local conveyances finds a barren, Continue reading »
Murderers in Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing
Jeffrey Tayler
Tayler (Siberian Dawn
) takes readers on an extraordinary adventure across the largest landmass on earth, from Russia through the Caucasus into South Ossetia and Continue reading »
The ideal readers for this book would be World Bank advisers drawing up credit agreements in their five-star Moscow hotel rooms as they dine on German beef. Yet anyone seeking an understanding of Continue reading »
In this Heart of Darkness-revisited tale, Tayler (Siberian Dawn) sets out to retrace the steps of British explorer Henry Morton Stanley, who in the 1870s, accompanied by a crew of hundreds of Continue reading »
In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones
Jeffrey Tayler, Nina Khrushcheva
Khrushcheva (The Lost Khrushchev), Russian-born professor of international affairs at the New School, and Tayler (Siberian Dawn), a Moscow-based American journalist married to a Continue reading »
Look Out: The Delight and Danger of Taking the Long View
Edward McPherson
Guggenheim fellow McPherson (The History of the Future) presents a charming, idiosyncratic meditation on the human urge to see further, and more, in this cultural history of the Continue reading »
Japanese studies scholar Sheftall turns to the bombing of Nagasaki in this harrowing follow-up to Hiroshima. In his opening passages, Sheftall briefly surveys Nagasaki’s Continue reading »
Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur
Jeff Pearlman
Biographer Pearlman (The Last Folk Hero) chronicles the brief, chaotic life of rap legend Tupac Shakur in this excellent biography. Shakur was born in 1971 to mother Afeni, a Continue reading »
The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding
Joseph J Ellis
This incisive history from Pulitzer winner Ellis (American Sphinx) probes the contradiction between the Revolutionary era’s defense of universal rights and its complicity in Continue reading »