The Bad-A** Librarians of Timbuktu And Their Race To Save the World's Precious Manuscripts

I thought this was going to be an epic non-fiction piece like Before and After, but after the first five or six chapters, I struggled so hard. I just couldn't finish it. 

 This story is about how a librarian named Abdel Kader Haidara who worked all throughout the 80's and 90's to gather as many ancient documents and manuscripts from around Mali and its surrounding countries and gathered many of them in Timbuktu and his own collections. He preserved and restored many of them. They were gorgeous pieces of literature, Qurans embossed in gold, mercantile documents, and so much more. Though as the political scene in Africa during the late 90's and early 00's got more and more violent with Al-Qaida becoming more prevalent, foreigners getting kidnapped and murdered, and religious/historical everything getting destroyed, Haidara and others like him worked to get the many thousands of manuscripts out of Timbuktu to safe places where these historical documents from the 15th Century . 

I was really excited to learn about these librarians who worked so hard to save these documents of such historical significant that showed how Africa isn't just a bunch of desert and bush, but that they had thriving communities of intellectual and tolerance. The beginning and Haidara's story was engaging. But after a while that story telling became very dry. Names were thrown all over the place and I didn't know who they were even through the are of modern historical significance. I, personally, wasn't around for the 80's and was only a little kid in the 90's so many of the names were vaguely familiar, but I didn't know what they had done. I became very bogged down. If I had more basic information about what Al-Qaida was doing I might have been able to understand it more. 

I, sadly, didn't finish it. It was an audiobook, so it made it really hard to skim through the parts to get to the other parts I was more engaged in, and then had to return it. I tried. Four or five extra chapters. But I felt like I was just more lost. The reader could have been better too. 

I still want to know more about it and thankfully there is actually a TedTalk by the author Joshua Hammer talking about it and what Haidara did which I will be diving into. Here is a link to the TedTalk as well as (1 a five minute clip, (2 A BBC documentary, (3 an Extra History presentation on the Empire of Mali links for documentaries about it. It is very fascinating and learning more in a different format is probably what will be best for me.  

Read on. Find out more.