The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past

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“Timbuktu is a real place, and Charlie English will fuel your wanderlust with true descriptions of the fabled city’s past, present, and future.” –Fodor’s 

Two tales of a city: The historical race to “discover” one of the crucial world’s most mythologized places, and the story of how a latest band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction by the hands of al Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.

To Westerners, the name “Timbuktu” long conjured a tantalizing paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of explorers gripped by the fever for “discovery”  tried time and again to succeed in the fabled city.  But one expedition after another went disastrously awry, succumbing to attack, the climate, and disease. Timbuktu was once rich in otherwise too. A medieval center of learning, it was once home to tens of thousands—according to a few, 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 crucial planet’s odd places, and the myths from which it has develop into inseparable.

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