Swahili
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guides
History
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Biographies and
memories
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Biographies and memoires
 | African Nights:True stories from the author of I dreamed of Africa By Kuki Gallmann Lyrical, beautifully written tales of life in 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 Nights is 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. |
 | Dangerous Beauty:Life and Death in Africa(true stories from a guide) By Mark C. Ross Dangerous Beauty is the story of that love and that trouble. Ross is one of the most seasoned and skilled safari guides at work in Africa today, and he writes here about his close-hand encounters with danger and natural beauty in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Uganda. He describes his walks in the bush and the way he teaches his clients to read the unearthly silences and stillness in the wind that signify trouble. He writes about deadly charges by elephants, encounters with lions, cheetah and Cape buffalo, and the electric excitement of witnessing the mass migrations of wildebeest and zebras. He writes in detail about the terrible events of March 1999, and their aftermath. Ross also conveys the tranquility of dawn in the wild, and the times when the extraordinary loveliness of the land bear down on the guide and his safari companions. The result is an immensely powerful book: the culmination of a life spent close to the edge, and a tribute to a land and its remarkable, menacing beauty. |
 | I Dreamed of Africa By Kuki Gallmann At the age of 25, Kuki Gallmann moved to Kenya with her future husband, where they established a vast ranch. But Africa's beauty doesn’t come without a price, and when tragedy struck, Kuki found herself pregnant and alone with her young son and 90,000 acres of Africa to oversee. 32 pages of photos, half in full color. |
 | Jambo,Mama By Melinda Atwood A beguiling, frank an unpretentious memoir of life in Africa. Highly recommended reading for those who appreciate engaging biographies of interesting people caught up in usual circumstances told with honesty and humor. "Jambo Mama" is a remedy for travelers, a piece of Africa, which you can carry in your pocket". |
 | Letters from Africa 1914-1931 By Isak Dinesen, Frans Lasson (Editor), Anne Born (Translator) In her own words Isak Dinesen gives you a peak into life on her beloved farm. Her impressions of her new world, her hopes, triumphs and failures. Kinanjui, Farah, Kamante, Denys, Delamere characters that one came to love in her tales from "Out of Africa" are all in these letters. It was also fascinating to see from reading the letters how her writing style evolved. A style that would later mature into the legacy of work she would leave behind. |
 | Out of Africa (Modern Library Series) By Isak Dinesen In 1921, the year that Baroness Karen Blixen found herself stranded by her divorce on a Kenyan mountain farm, most women in her circumstances would have fled back to civilization. But instead of returning to her native Denmark, the 35-year-old Blixen stayed on and ran the farm. In 1931 coffee prices collapsed and she was forced to leave. She returned to Denmark where she poured her memories into a passionate love letter about the life that would hold her in thrall till the end of her days. |
 | Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass (Vintage International) By Isak Dinesen With classic simplicity and a painter's feeling for atmosphere and detail, Isak Dinesen tells of the years she spent from 1914 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya. |
 | Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa: Karen Blixen's untold story By Linda Donelson This new analysis of "Out of Africa" describes the young Baroness Blixen's struggles with a difficult marriage, a pioneer coffee farm, and a complicated love affair in Kenya. |
 | Red Strangers By Elspeth Huxley, Richard Dawkins (Introduction) New editions of Elspeth Huxley's stirring account of her childhood in Kenya and her novel of the destructive forces of colonization. Epic in its scale, Red Strangers spans four generations of a Kikuyu family in Africa and their relationship with European settlers, nicknamed "red" strangers because of their sunburns. Huxley's engrossing portrait of a Kenyan tribe and their way of life, with its rituals, its beliefs, its codes and its morality, shows Europeans and their customs in stark, unflattering contrast with the Kikuyu. The differences in their attitudes to war, methods of cultivation, the administering of justice, and the use of money are played out in this novel of the damaging forces of colonization. |
 | Somebody Else:Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 By Charles Nicholl Nicholl fuses the genres of biography and travelogue to tell an emotional story of Arthur Rimbaud's ten years in Africa, unveiling the mystery of the leading French symbolist's post-poetry period. Rimbaud gained world renown for his symbolist verse and for a brief but tumultuous homosexual relationship with Paul Verlaine, who left his family to join the teenage Rimbaud (only to shoot him after the younger poet jilted him). However, the man who was hailed as the founder of a new poetic movement... |
 | The Flame Trees of Thika:Memories of an African Childhood By Elspeth Huxley New editions of Elspeth Huxley's stirring account of her childhood in Kenya and her novel of the destructive forces of colonization. In an open cart Elspeth Huxley set off with her parents to travel to Thika in Kenya. As pioneering settlers, they built a house of grass, ate off a damask cloth spread over packing cases, and discovered--the hard way--the world of the African. With an extraordinary gift for detail and a keen sense of humor, Huxley recalls her childhood on the small farm at a time... |
 | The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior:An autobiography By Tepilit Ole Saitoti Excellent book, very accurate and really worth the money. It gives the picture of a boy growing up as a real Maasai and the new life in civilized world of Germany and USA - a man between two cultures and the difficult question to decide which way to go along. |
 | West With the Night By Beryl Markham A chronicle of Markham's growing up in Kenya, sharing hunting adventures with native tribes and her careers as racehorse trainer and aviatrix. Born in England in 1902, Markham was taken by her father to East Africa in 1906. She spent her childhood playing with native Maruni children and apprenticing with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses. In the 1930s, she became an African bush pilot, and in September 1936, became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. |
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