Enjoyed learning about the manuscripts themselves and learned a lot about how al Qaeda operates in countries like Mali. Wish there had been more detail on the manuscripts themselves ( )

Some days I just feel like screaming.

Reading Joshua Hammer's story about how Abel Kadeem Haidara risked life and limb to save hundreds of thousands of books and manuscripts from destruction at the hands of Al Qaeda operatives is one of those stories that just stops me in my tracks.

Haidara follows in the steps of his near mythical father in finding, fixing, cataloguing, and preserving Arabic books and manuscripts which reach back into the early days of Islam and the origins of Empire in West Central Africa.

And when the collection appears threatened by an Arabist coup, he takes matters into his own hands by coopting friends and family to move the collection to a safe haven.

That such world treasures are at risk boils my blood. Reading as Haidara has to resort to bribes to protect the collection drives me to the edge. These people ought to get on their knees and thank the man, not threaten him with extinction.

"Skip" Gates plays a cameo in this story as an important link to the west and western foundations for protecting the heritage.

Equally as valuable in this story are the close-up portraits of the jihadis who take over Timbuktu with their own brand of Salafist Islam. That each of the leaders has a unique personal, sometimes political or cultural agenda shouldn't come as a surprise. History and colonialism plays as big a role in this story as the Islamist revivals.

Here we have principally Sunni financing with a little kidnapping, drug running, sabotage, and smuggling mixed in for good measure. All elements that we see playing themselves out in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen.

And there is the settling of scores aplenty.

This is a near lawless part of the world. I don't see how you separate out religion from domestic corruption and centuries of tribal behaviours.

I don't live in one of these hot, dangerous places but if I did I'd probably keep my head low.

( )

A lot of history of the whose who in terrorist activity in the region. The shear volume of the volumes is jaw dropping. It’s a harrowing tale of heroism. The extremist backward facing zealots of the world are truly odious.

The underlying story here is fascinating: illuminated manuscripts representing muslim thinking through the ages are strewn about as family heirlooms in Mali surrounding the area of Timbuktu. Initially scattered in the face of French colonialism that resisted evidence that Africans and Muslims were highly intelligent with a pre-existing deep culture, many of the manuscripts were being ravaged by time and the elements. A single man, Abdel Kader Haidara, heir to his father's own massive collection, was recruited to save the manuscripts and house them in a formal library in Timbuktu. As a native, armed with his knowledge of the local culture he manages to ingratiate himself and buy back manuscripts. As a well-spoken, well-read individual he also manages to ingratiate himself with NGO funders to plan and build a climate-controlled building in Timbuktu to house the documents (despite building the first library on a floodplain by accident and having to ask all of his funders to refund him!) Then Al-Qaeda invades Timbuktu and wants to destroy the manuscripts as they are largely Sufi in origin and have a more nuanced approach to Muslim law. Abdel, aided by his family, "Emily" ([a:Stephanie Diakité|5078224|Stephanie Diakité|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png], for some reason her real name is obscured but her bibliography is listed, which confused the heck out of me) and crowdfunding to evacuate the manuscripts to safety.

This is a great story. Unfortunately, this is also about all you get of the story in over 300 pages of the Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, which probably would have been better if left as a longform article.

It's not all bad: I learned a lot about the major players in Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb, Islamic and North African history, and the Tuareg ethnic group, which is something I wouldn't have otherwise been exposed to and it was interesting. But the writing style really got to me: a frequent complaint I have of popular nonfiction is it is often multiple longform articles strung together, which requires a strong editor to make it cohere. The Bad-Ass Librarians is the most flawed book in this direction that I've ever read: characters would be introduced and discussed in four or five chapters and then all of a sudden at their sixth mention would get several pages of backstory, much of it redundant to their shorter previous introductions. Acronyms would remain undefined for their first ten mentions then arbitrarily expanded on the 11th. This was particularly unwieldy because I think some parts of the book were originally from unrelated articles and plopped down unedited in the book, which made the whole thing feel very incoherent. Remember the story that I told you was the ostensible premise above? Hammer goes over a third of the book in the middle without mentioning a single person or concept from it, instead giving us the entire backstory of a terrorist who never turns out to be related.

My final complaint is that Hammer's self-insertion is really distracting. I love self-insertion in non-fiction (says the girl who's read everything Mary Roach has ever written), but Hammer does it in a way I found intrusive, perhaps because I was frustrated with his diversion from his premise. We hear what he was thinking about while he rode a boat down a river to meet with a source, and what type of iced tea he drank while sitting in a hotel lobby to meet with another source and I did not find it evocative of Northern Africa or introspective I found it completely useless noise.

So overall, these is a really weird book: I'm glad I read it because I learned so much about a region and a history that I had little prior knowledge, but I found it extremely frustrating to read. ( )

A book about terrorism with a dash of books and librarians. Invert that and I would be very excited, but as it stands this book is everything I actively try to keep out of my consciousness.

The parts about the literary traditions of Mali/West Africa were wonderful, and I'll try to find a different book that focuses on that.

Abandoned. ( )