Here is a brief selection of favorite, new and hard-to-find books, prepared for your journey. You will find below direct links to Amazon where you will be able to purchase the following recommended books in your preferred format.
Travel & Field Guides
Insight Guides Tanzania & Zanzibar
This guide is a pictorial travel guide in a magazine style providing answers to the key questions before or during your trip. This is an ideal travel guide for travellers seeking inspiration, in-depth cultural and historical information about Tanzania & Zanzibar as well as a great selection of places to see during your trip.
The Safari Companion: A Guide to Watching African Mammals
An invaluable encyclopedic guide to Africa’s mammals by a noted scientist, this perennial bestseller includes black-and- white drawings, an overview of each animal group and in-depth information. Written with a typical safari-goer in mind.
Wildlife of East Africa
Featuring full-color photos of 475 common species of bird, mammal, snake, lizard, insect, tree, and flower, Wildlife of East Africa takes us on an exquisite one-volume tour through the living splendor of the main national parks and game reserves of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. Many of the species included–from pelicans to plovers, ostriches to elephants, from the daintiest of antelopes to cattlelike giants, from leopards to lions, baboons to gorillas, chameleons to crocodiles, acacias to aloes–also inhabit neighboring countries.
Birds of East Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi
Featuring revised text and distribution maps, the latest taxonomy, and much more, this comprehensive but compact guide describes and illustrates 1,448 species―all the resident, migrant, and vagrant birds of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi―in convenient facing-page layout. Featuring 289 color plates with more than 3,500 painstakingly rendered images, the guide depicts all the plumages and major races likely to be encountered. Introductory sections include
information on conservation and where to send records, as well as maps of important bird areas.
The Kingdon Pocket Guide to African Mammals
A conveniently compact edition of Kingdon’s celebrated guide that includes information on distribution, ecology and conservation status, with 480 outstanding color illustrations and maps. This is an essential guide for anyone with an interest in wildlife who visits Africa.
Lonely Planet Swahili Phrasebook & Dictionary
Lonely Planet’s Swahili Phrasebook and Dictionary is
your handy passport to culturally enriching travels with the most
relevant and useful Indian phrases and vocabulary for all your travel needs. Learn the names of wildlife, chat with the locals and adventure on safari; all with your trusted travel companion.
History & Autobiographies
In The Shadow Of Man
Dr. Goodall’s adventure began when Dr. Louis Leakey suggested that a long-term study of chimpanzees in the wild might shed light on the behavior of our closest living relatives. Accompanied by only her mother and her African assistants, she set up camp in the remote Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in Tanzania. As she came to know the chimps as individuals, she began to understand their complicated social hierarchy and observed many extraordinary behaviors, which have forever changed our understanding of the profound connection between humans and chimpanzees.
The Tree Where Man Was Born
Peter Matthiessen exquisitely combines nature and travel writing to portray the sights, scenes, and people he observed firsthand in several trips over the course of a dozen years. From the daily lives of wild herdsmen and the drama of predator kills to the field biologists investigating wild creatures and the anthropologists seeking humanity’s origins in the rift valley, The Tree Where Man Was Born is a classic of journalistic observation.
The Worlds of a Maasai Warrior: An Autobiography
Bridging several worlds with tremendous grace, author Ole Saitoti looks back on this life among the Maasai, both as a spokesperson for his tribe and as one of the first Maasai safari guides.
Green Hills of Africa
When it was first published in 1935, The New York Times called Green Hills of Africa, “The best-written story of big-game hunting anywhere,” Hemingway’s evocative account of his safari through East Africa with his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, captures his fascination with big-game hunting. In examining the grace of the chase and the ferocity of the kill, Hemingway looks inward, seeking to explain the lure of the hunt and the primal undercurrent that comes alive on the plains of Africa. Green Hills of Africa is also an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man.
Revolution In Zanzibar: An American’s Cold War Tale
The Cold War exploded in Zanzibar in 1964 when African rebels slaughtered one of every ten Arabs. Led by a strange, messianic Ugandan, Cuban-trained factions headed the rebels, making Zanzibar (in the eyes of Washington) a potentially cancerous base for the communist subversion of mainland Africa. Exotic Zanzibar had succumbed to the terror of 20th century revolution and Cold War intrigue. In the vivid, eyewitness tradition of The Bang Bang Club and The Skull beneath the Skin , Donald Petterson weaves an engrossing tale of human drama played out against a background of violence and horror. As the only American in Zanzibar throughout the revolution, Petterson reports with the inside authority of a highly placed diplomatic observer, illuminating how the current troubles in Zanzibar are rooted in the Cold War and the revolution of 1964.
Literature
Paradise
Sold by his father in repayment of a debt, twelve-year-old Yusuf is thrown from his simple rural life into complexities of pre- colonial urban East Africa. Through Yusuf’s eyes, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. The result is what Publishers Weekly calls a “vibrant” and “powerful” work that“evokes the Edenic natural beauty of a continent on the verge of full-scale imperialist takeover.”
A Girl Called Problem
Thirteen-year-old Shida, whose name means “problem” in Swahili, certainly has a lot of problems in her life — her father is dead, her depressed mother is rumored to be a witch, her family bears the weight of a curse, and everyone in her rural Tanzanian village expects her to marry rather than pursue her dream of becoming a healer. When the elders of Litongo make a controversial decision to move Shida’s people to a nearby village, Shida welcomes
the change. Nonetheless, mysterious calamities plague Shida’s people after their move. Desperate to stay, Shida must prove to her people that life can be better in their new home.
Afterlives: A Novel
When he was just a boy, Ilyas was stolen from his parents on the coast of east Africa by German colonial troops. After years away, fighting against his own people, he returns home to find his parents gone and his sister, Afiya, abandoned into de facto slavery. Hamza, too, returns home from the war, scarred in body and soul and with nothing but the clothes on his back–until he meets the beautiful, undaunted Afiya. As these young people live and work and fall in love, their fates knotted ever more tightly together, the shadow of a new war on another continent falls over them, threatening once again to carry them away.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories
This collection includes “The Killers,” the first of Hemingway’s mature stories to be accepted by an American periodical; the autobiographical “Fathers and Sons,” which alludes, for the first time in Hemingway’s career, to his father’s suicide; “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a “brilliant fusion of personal observation, hearsay and invention,” wrote Hemingway’s biographer, Carlos Baker; and the title story itself, of which Hemingway said: “I put all the true stuff in,” with enough material, he boasted, to fill four novels. Beautiful in their simplicity, startling in their originality, and unsurpassed in their craftsmanship, the stories in this volume highlight one of America’s master storytellers at the top of his form.
The Last Gift: A Novel
Abbas has never told anyone about his past- before he was a sailor on the high seas, before he met his wife Maryam outside a drugstore in Exeter, before they settled into a quiet life with their children, Jamal and Hanna. Now, at the age of sixty three, he suffers a collapse that renders him unable to speak about things he thought he would one day have too. Jamal and Hanna have grown up and gone out into the world. They were both born in England but cannot shake a sense of apartness. Abbas’s illness forces both children home, to the dark silences of their father and the fretful capability of their mother, Maryam, who has never thought to find herself-until now.
