The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic

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

â€œTimbuktu is a real place, and Charlie English will fuel your wanderlust with true descriptions of the fabled cityâ€™s past, present, and future.â€ â€“Fodorâ€™sÂ

Two tales of a city: The historical race to â€œdiscoverâ€ one of the worldâ€™s most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of al Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.

To Westerners, the name â€œTimbuktuâ€ long conjured a tantalizing paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold.Â Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of explorers gripped by the fever forÂ â€œdiscoveryâ€ Â tried repeatedly to reach the fabled city.Â Â 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 thousandsâ€”according to some, hundreds of thousandsâ€”of ancient manuscripts, on subjects ranging from religion to poetry, law to history, pharmacology, and astronomy. When al-Qaedaâ€“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.

Country	USA
Author	Charlie English
Binding	Kindle Edition
EISBN	9780698197145
Format	Kindle eBook
Label	Riverhead Books
Manufacturer	Riverhead Books
NumberOfPages	410
PublicationDate	2017-05-02
Publisher	Riverhead Books
ReleaseDate	2017-05-02
Studio	Riverhead Books

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

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