The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts by Joshua Hammer

Protecting cultural heritage from al-Qaeda

During the Middle Ages, when Europe was experiencing an extended descent towards barbarism, Islamic scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, and poets played an important role in carrying the torch of knowledge and advancing intellectual discourse. Western history books tend to depict sub-Saharan Africa as a cultural blank slate until the modern era, but from the 13th to the 17th century the city of Timbuktu in the nation of Mali was a thriving center of Islamic learning and written scholarship. Prior to the printing press, ideas were disseminated through hand-copied manuscripts, usually written on parchment and often augmented by beautiful painted illustrations and elaborately decorated bindings.

In his 2016 book The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, journalist Joshua Hammer reveals that hundreds of thousands of these historic manuscripts have survived to the present day, mostly hidden in the homes of private citizens and passed down within families for generations. Hammer explains how in the last few decades cultural heritage organizations, and one dedicated librarian in particular, began collecting these manuscripts and transferring them to newly built libraries so they could be restored and preserved, thus making centuries-old texts newly accessible to contemporary scholars.

In this book, Hammer provides a revealing glimpse into Timbuktu’s centuries-old history as a center of learning, but he also gives the reader a vivid view of life in contemporary Mali. He meticulously charts the 21st-century rise of Islamic jihadism in North Africa, which poses a severe threat to the existence of these priceless artifacts. When a combined force of al-Qaeda militants and Tuareg rebels invaded northern Mali, Timbuktu was occupied by a jihadist government that instituted a brutally draconian form of Sharia law. Under this ultraconservative interpretation of Islam, the manuscripts were seen as immoral and targeted for destruction. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible and inspiring story of how a few brave Malian librarians, with the help of many local volunteers and international donors, managed to save hundreds of thousands of these medieval manuscripts by smuggling them out from under al-Qaeda’s nose.

If you are approaching this book as a bibliophile or lover of libraries, be forewarned that the majority of the story is about politics, terrorism, and military activity. The manuscripts themselves only feature prominently in the first few chapters of the book. Nevertheless, even though I’m not one to buy books on current political events, I found Hammer’s telling of this story captivating from beginning to end. He delves into a great deal of detail on Islamic terrorists and the formation of their various factions, but he does so in an articulate style that makes the history accessible and memorable even to news-challenged general readers. I learned quite a bit about Islam from this book, not just the negative aspects we see on the news, such as terrorism and war, but also the positive aspects of Islamic culture and the intellectual tradition of Islamic science, arts, and letters in African history. Hammer’s skillfully penned account delivers an eye-opening education amid a political thriller that will have you rooting for these unsung book-saving heroes.
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Essential Fantastic Four, Volume 1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby

Glory days of the Silver Age

Essential Fantastic Four, Volume 1 reprints the first twenty issues of the Fantastic Four comic book, which originally ran from November 1961 to November 1963, as well as the first Fantastic Four Annual from 1963. Marvel’s Essential series reproduces comics in black-and-white on newsprint paper. I have previously read the first ten issues of Fantastic Four in Marvel Masterworks: The Fantastic Four, Volume 1, which reprints the comics in color on glossier paper. With over twice as many issues included, however, the Essential version gives one a better idea of how the characters and the series developed over time.

Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s work for Marvel in the 1960s was truly groundbreaking, and perhaps no title was more innovative than Fantastic Four, which they immodestly subtitled “The World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!” Though the FF bears obvious similarities to an earlier team of heroes that Kirby created for DC, the Challengers of the Unknown, the addition of a woman to the cast and the introduction of a family dynamic among the heroes made the FF a unique reading experience for its era. While saving the world, the FF faced real-life problems and displayed the personality flaws of mere mortals. At the same time, however, this was the most sci-fi of Marvel’s Silver Age superhero titles, and the Four faced bizarre and outlandish menaces at every turn. In these first 20 issues, Lee and Kirby introduced villains that would prove eminently memorable for decades to come, most notably Dr. Doom, Marvel’s all-around top bad guy. In addition to resurrecting Bill Everett’s Golden Age character the Sub-Mariner, Lee and Kirby introduce readers to the Mole Man, the Skrulls, the Puppet Master, the Impossible Man, the Red Ghost and his Super Apes, the Mad Thinker, the Molecule Man, and Rama-Tut (later revealed to be an incarnation of the time-traveling Kang).

These landmark stories are not without their flaws, however. The first is the role of Susan Storm, the Invisible Girl. She hasn’t yet discovered her ability to create force fields, so her powers here are limited to just turning herself invisible. This gives her very little to do but play the hostage in most situations. On the other hand, the other three members protest too much when they assert that she plays a valuable role in the team by providing moral support to the men. In contrast, the powers of the Human Torch and Mr. Fantastic seem almost limitless. Like some orange version of Green Lantern, the Torch seems to be able to make all sorts of unreasonable constructions out of flame. He can even create “fire that doesn’t burn” and holographic “flame images.” He already knows he can burn hotter than a supernova, which always seemed ridiculous, but even more so in these earlier tales. Reed Richards can manage his stretching ability so well he’s able to squeeze through molecule-thin gaps, and one panel describes him as a judo expert!

Though these issues were some of the most innovative comics for their day, to the modern reader the first 20 issues do start to get a bit monotonous. Dr. Doom and the Sub-Mariner make multiple appearances, the Thing continually changes to Ben Grimm and back, and the squabbles between team members start to get repetitive. Fantastic Four Annual #1 is a great addition to this volume because the epic 37 page story gives Kirby a chance to indulge in elaborate world-building visuals for the Sub-Mariner’s Atlantis, like an undersea Asgard. In terms of plot, these first few years of the Fantastic Four have their ups and downs, but Kirby’s art is always a joy to behold, and there’s no denying that these initial stories laid a monumental foundation upon which to build many classic comic adventures to come.
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Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America During the Years 1799-1804, Volume 2 by Alexander von Humboldt

From the Orinoco to the Amazon and back

Alexander von Humboldt

Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s expedition to the New World from 1799 to 1804 was a landmark event not only for the history of scientific exploration but also for the nascent genre of nature writing. Humboldt’s journey to Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Cuba, and Mexico yielded at least 30 volumes of published findings. Most of these books were specialized tomes on botany, zoology, mineralogy, or cultural geography. His Personal Narrative, however, was intended to be the all-encompassing account of the expedition for general readers. In this three-volume work, Humboldt combines copious scientific data with personal reflections on his travels, including numerous diversions into a variety of fields that represent his staggeringly broad range of interests and expertise.

Though the first volume of the Personal Narrative was a fascinating read, the second volume is more enjoyable, for a few reasons. One is that the entire narrative takes place in Venezuela, since the previous volume already covered the journey to get there. Also, the events related in Volume 2 are unified by a single compelling mission. Humboldt and his traveling companion, the French botanist Aimé Bonpland, set out to investigate the rumor of a natural canal, the Casiquiare, that connects the watersheds of the Orinoco and Amazon river basins. The pair traveled 1,725 miles to establish the veracity of this unique geographical feature. In addition, Humboldt’s writing in this second volume is more accessible than that of Volume 1. His prose reads less like a string of empirical data and more like a series of scientific travel essays.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Humboldt production without multiple asides into topics that interest him, often resulting in digressions within digressions. Humboldt, the ultimate generalist, left no field of study untouched in his explorations. He was an expert not only in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, but also in geography, meteorology, astronomy, anthropology, linguistics, and the politics and history of South America. The vast range of subjects he pontificates upon include the influence of physical geography on the worldwide development of agriculture, a tree that produces a milk-like sap, the results of his extensive (and dangerous) experiments with electric eels, the unjust treatment of the Indigenous population by the Spanish missionaries, the chemical properties that determine the different colors of water in various rivers and lakes, the history of cannibalism, the truth behind the rumors of a tribe of women warriors (from which the Amazon river gets its name), and one of Humboldt’s favorite subjects, people who eat dirt (a practice more widespread than you’d think). In all cases Humboldt compares his observations in Venezuela with phenomena he has witnessed and studied throughout the world.

One taxing aspect of the Personal Narrative is that much of Humboldt’s text is devoted to geographical information that could better be conveyed through maps—the direction of mountain ranges, the tributaries of rivers, and so forth. The reader spends a great deal of time wading through a jumble of place names and compass points. Perhaps the original editions of the three volumes included a map or two, but you won’t find them in the public domain versions that you can now download for free. If Humboldt didn’t provide maps, he should have, and if he did, then much of his descriptive text is redundant. Even so, Volume 2 of the Personal Narrative is still a wonderful, intellectually stimulating thrill ride through the sun-drenched plains and dense jungles of South America, with one of history’s great polymaths as your enlightened tour guide.
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The Modern Prometheus by E. Phillips Oppenheim

Guilt-ridden romance

E. Phillips Oppenheim

I recently discovered the work of British author E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866-1946) and have enjoyed reading a couple of his books. He published over 100 novels, most of them thrillers involving espionage, crime, or political intrigue, and many of them bestsellers. Other than The Great Impersonation, which is probably his best-known work, I really don’t know which of his books are considered his best. So when I decided to read more Oppenheim, I just scrolled through the novels in the Delphi Classics’ Collected Works of E. Phillips Oppenheim and chose one randomly by title. Looking for a shorter work, I settled on The Modern Prometheus, published in 1896. The title intrigued me because it is reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. I did not expect Oppenheim’s novel to bear any similarity to Frankenstein, but it is surprising that the story doesn’t seem to have any relation at all to the myth of Prometheus.

In the opening chapter, we are introduced to Francis Kernham, a reluctant celebrity in his hometown of London. He is a self-made man who has struck it rich digging for gold in a foreign land (the details of his meteoric career are never really revealed). He has returned to London for the first time in a decade, and his primary goal is to track down an old flame. Ten years earlier, Kernham was a struggling writer in a relationship with an equally struggling young actress. He left her to seek his fortune, knowing full well that he was possibly abandoning her to an iniquitous fate, forcing her to capitalize on her beauty and become a “kept woman” (somebody’s mistress) in order to survive. Motivated by both love and guilt, Kernham is now resolved to find his lost lover and face the truth of her unknown fate.

Oppenheim’s forte may be spy stories and adventure tales, but this is just a romance, and a rather dreary one. It is unclear to the reader why any two people in this novel are in love with each other because we never actually see any of the characters enjoying one another’s company. Though there’s a lot of grandiose talk here about love, the only factors that seem to bind couples together are money and physical attraction. The latter element might be sufficiently captivating for a movie, depending on the casting, but not for Victorian prose. For a novel of this era, The Modern Prometheus is admirably forward in its discussions of premarital and extramarital affairs. This is no erotic thriller that capitalizes on scandalousness, however. The narrative is still hampered by the Victorian code of mores that binds gentleman and ladies. Any sexuality that’s hinted at in the narrative only serves to pile on more guilt.

For the first half of the book, Oppenheim does a great job of keeping the reader guessing as to what exactly is going on between Kernham and his mystery woman. Each chapter ends with a bit of a cliffhanger that makes one look forward to the succeeding chapter. Once the basic premise is revealed and established, however, the novel becomes awfully formulaic and clichéd. In scenes seen countless times in old movies and pulp fiction, the characters all take turns renouncing love in the name of honor.

The Modern Prometheus is one of Oppenheim’s earlier works, so perhaps he was still finding his mature authorial voice. His later works call to mind the thrillers of Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. Though this novel was a disappointment, I will continue to delve blindly into Oppenheim’s prodigious body of work, where I know there are gold nuggets to be found.
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The Stranger by Albert Camus

A meaningful testament to meaninglessness

Albert Camus, winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Algeria to French parents when the North African nation was ruled as a colony of France. Algeria also serves as the setting for his 1942 novel The Stranger. Its protagonist, Meursault, was born in France and has settled in North Africa with his mother. In his adopted homeland, Meursault lives as a Frenchman and only associates with other European settlers. This makes him “L’Étranger”—the French title of the work, which can be translated as the “foreigner,” “The Outsider” (the book’s British title) or “The Stranger” (its American title). Only a few Arab citizens of Algeria appear in the book, and they remain unnamed, referred to only as “the Arab,” thus emphasizing Meursault’s (and France’s) detachment from his colonial home.

Meursault’s indifference, however, is not directed at any particular race or demographic, but rather at the world and life in general, making him somewhat of a stranger to humanity. Under almost all circumstances, he demonstrates himself peculiarly incapable of feeling empathy or emotion, whether anger, fear, or love. Meursault narrates the novel in a detached, deadpan style that almost mocks everything that happens in the plot. He relates his dramatic saga of crime and punishment, love and sex, life and death in short, choppy sentences of bareboned syntax as if he were mentioning the most mundane of occurrences. This linguistic style is aptly evocative of Meursault’s apathetic attitude towards life and the world around him.

Likewise, the universe itself treats Meursault with harsh indifference. As if driven towards an inevitable fate by random variables beyond his control, he commits a crime almost unthinkingly. The circumstances of the crime exhibit some characteristics of self-defense and some of premeditation, leaving the outcome of his trial uncertain. During the actual court proceedings, however, Meursault finds that he is not being tried for what he has done but rather for who he is. The judge, jury, and courtroom crowd judges him for the very unfeeling personality that characterizes his nature. The details of his life are scrutinized as evidence of his otherness, his indifference to the way people are supposed to be, his status as a stranger among normal humans who dutifully love their mothers and worship God. Despite this negative turn of events, Meursault greets this persecution with his characteristic lack of concern, because life really doesn’t matter anyway.

Camus manages to convey all this in a tone that’s relentlessly bleak but with touches of absurd humor. Though Meursault’s narration remains dispassionate for most of the book, the plot does culminate in a climactic outburst, through which Meursault’s (and presumably Camus’s) philosophy of the absurdity and meaninglessness of existence is revealed with harsh and brutal frankness. Even so, this outlook of pointlessness is oddly liberating. The Stranger is one of the twentieth century’s most thought-provoking works of philosophical fiction. It certainly is no “feel-good” book, however, and it makes for a reading experience that’s obviously not to everyone’s taste. If you just don’t “get” The Stranger, then chances are you’re a rather happy, optimistic, and well-adjusted person. Congratulations!
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Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse, translated and edited by Paul Selver

Eastern European stories and poems in English translation

Wladyslaw Reymont

As the title suggests, Anthology of Modern Slavonic Literature in Prose and Verse is a collection of short literary works from Eastern Europe. In this context, “Slavonic” means the same as “Slavic.” The book includes selections from Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian authors. This volume was edited by British writer Paul Selver, who also translated all of the works into English. In addition to writing his own novels and poetry, Selver was a multilinguist who also translated German, French, and Norwegian works. He was primarily known for his Czech translations, in particular the works of Karel Capek (who does not appear in this book). This anthology was published in 1919, but the works included date as far back as 1845.

The prose section of this volume includes short stories, brief essays, and a couple of one-act plays. A few recognizable names appear in this volume. The great Russian master of short stories Anton Chekhov provides a finely drawn comical tale, “In a Foreign Land.” Polish Nobel Prize-winner Wladyslaw Reymont is represented by a scene excerpted from his novel Promised Land. Polish author Boleslaw Prus’s story “From the Legends of Ancient Egypt” calls to mind his novel Pharaoh, set in the same era. The rest of the names on the table of contents will likely be new to the vast majority of English-language readers. The better entries include Czech author Jan Neruda’s “The Vampire,” which is not the horror story its title implies, but it does deliver a surprisingly morbid ending. Polish writer Wiktor Gomulicki’s portrait of an aged farmer is the literary equivalent of a gritty Gustave Courbet painting. Ukraine’s foremost poet of the 19th century, Taras Shevtchenko, tells his own story in an autobiographical essay written for a literary journal. Reymont’s selection is the best in the book, but if this were a short-story Olympics, the Russians would take the gold with strong showings by Chekhov, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, and Fyodor Sologub.

The latter half of the book is devoted to poetry, about 130 pages worth from the authors of seven nations. Almost all are written in rhyming verse, with Selver doing his best to preserve the rhyme schemes in his English translations. Many are romantic evocations of nature typical of the late 19th century. The more interesting selections deal with subject matter unique to the authors’ nationalities and ethnicity, the most obvious example being Czech poet Petar Preradovic’s anthemic “To Slavdom.” Shevtchenko’s poem “If Lordlings, Ye Could Only Know . . .” depicts a hellish view of serfdom. Petr Bezruc, in his series of poems, laments the plight of the oppressed Silesian Czechs. One surprising entry is Czech poet Antonin Sova’s “To Theodor Mommsen.” Rather than a tribute to the German Nobel laureate and classical historian, Sova’s poem is an extended insult that attacks Mommsen as the “arrogant spokesman of slavery.”

Classic Slavic literature is hard to come by in English translation. Selver’s welcome anthology does the valuable service of introducing the British or American reader to many hitherto unfamiliar authors. He even includes helpful mini-biographies of each writer. If you discover authors you like here, however, it may be impossible to find further samples of their work in English. Overall, the good and bad entries in this volume average out to a middling collection. Those with an interest in Eastern European culture, however, will appreciate the bits of history, artistic heritage, and national customs revealed in these stories and poems. Because of the large quantity of verse, it will especially appeal to readers who enjoy poetry.

Stories in this collection
(Also 130 pages of poems, not listed below)

In a Foreign Land by Anton Chekhov

My Life by Dimitri Merezhkovsky

The Tiny Man by Fyodor Sologub

The Demigod by S. N. Sergeyev-Tsensky

Autobiography by Taras Shevtchenko

The Ploughman by Wiktor Gomulicki

From the Legends of Ancient Egypt by Boleslaw Prus

Chopin by Stanislaw Przybyszewski

In the Old Town at Lodz by Wladyslaw Reymont

Sonia by Jan Svatopluk Machar

The Vampire by Jan Neruda

The Advent of Spring in the South by Arne Novák

June (play in one act) by Frána Srámek

The Latin Boy by Simo Matavulj

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Growing Soles: A Ninety-Six Year Journey Around the World by Micae Martinet

Circling the globe on foot in 1920 and 2016

I first encountered the name Hippolyte Martinet while doing genealogical research. He is a distant cousin of mine; we share some Belgian ancestors. Whereas my Belgians settled in Wisconsin, Hippolyte’s grandfather settled in New Orleans, where he fell in love with a mulatto slave, purchased her freedom, and married her. Both of Hippolyte’s parents were free Blacks with one-quarter African ancestry, making him one-quarter Black as well. While the circumstances of Hippolyte’s birth are quite interesting, the circumstances surrounding his death are even more so.

In 1920, at the age of 41, Hippolyte Martinet decided to walk around the world, barefoot, relying on the kindness of strangers. Having previously moved to Washington State, he set out from Seattle, marched to New York, and then took a ship to England. After hiking across 16 nations in Europe and Asia, he died of malaria in Yunnan, China. Growing Soles, a book on Hippolyte’s life and travels, was published in 2020. The author, Micae Martinet, is Hippolyte’s great-grandniece. Not only has she researched the story of her great-granduncle’s epic walk, but she and her husband Doug also set out to complete Hippolyte’s journey from his burial site in China to Hong Kong, which would have been Hippolyte’s departure point back to Seattle. The chapters frequently hop back and forth between Hippolyte in the 1920s and Micae in 2015 and 2016. Growing Soles thus combines a historical biography that brings to life this unique figure from a century past with a personal memoir of the author’s own travel adventures in China.

Hippolyte is a fascinating character, but there isn’t a whole lot of information available on him—just a few articles, a few letters, a few documents, and a few photos. Micae Martinet has certainly done her due diligence in the research department and reprints what she has found in the book. She has also done a great deal of historical research into the events that were happening at the time Hippolyte passed through the places where he walked. This adds valuable context to his travels, particularly in regards to issues of race, class, and labor unrest during the 1920s.

The majority of the book, however, is about the travels of Micae and Doug as they finish the last 1,200 miles of her great-granduncle’s walk. One learns a bit about Chinese culture from Micae’s experiences, but for the most part this is a memoir composed of personal anecdotes about hiking and roughing it on the road. Recurring topics include Asian bathrooms, food and hotel accommodations, Micae’s medical problems, and run-ins with the Chinese police. At times she digresses into other trips she has taken abroad. As a curious traveler myself, I admire Micae and Doug’s adventurous journey and sometimes envied their off-the-beaten-path view of a foreign country. Often, however, the monotony of following one highway for over a thousand miles did not seem like the most enjoyable or educational way to experience an exotic land.

I read this book because I wanted to learn more about Hippolyte, so I was attracted more to the history than to the memoir. I did find much vicarious interest in Micae’s contemporary travel narrative, but I would have preferred more content on Hippolyte’s era. Still, this is likely the most comprehensive source of information on Hippolyte and his walk, and for that I greatly appreciate Micae Martinet’s efforts in researching and writing this valuable account. It is a fascinating story that deserves to be read.
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