Listen free for 30 days
-
The Storied City
- The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past
- Narrated by: Enn Reitel
- Length: 13 hrs and 54 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $26.22
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's Summary
To Westerners, the name Timbuktu long conjured a tantalizing paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold. Beginning in the late 18th 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.
What the critics say
“[Charlie English] reconstruct[s] vivid scenes.... A classic nonfiction braid…fits perfectly into ongoing narrative of Timbuktu, a place where the magnificence of the tale can occlude the plain fact of what’s there.” (New York Times Book Review)
"Spellbinding." (The New Yorker)
"Thrilling...English tells the new and the older tales in parallel.... The two stories illuminate each other... a brilliant device." (The Economist)