4 comments about Black Gold of the Sun: Searching for Home in Africa and Beyond (Vintage).

1. What does home mean for immigrants? What does home mean for black people in a white world?
   
   What pushes Black Gold of the Sun beyond the level of travel literature and memoir is his cultural criticisms of the meaning of British blackness, especially British Africanness contrasted with British West Indianness and African-Americanness. The sounds of his childhood were American, and African American. Eshun was the son of Ghanaian diplomats, but most African Americans are the descendents of West African slaves. Still, it is the African Americans who managed to create a critical consciousness of blackness in England.



2. I give this book a 4 star because I felt I gained something by reading it. Though I am an African American, I could really relate to most of his experiences, accept being isolated from my culture.
   
   I smiled to myself when a character called African American tourists "ugly people" or something to that affect. The character laments about our superiority complex when in Ghana and claiming to be more African then the African, yet we behave like ugly Americans when we don't get 1st world service. There is much truth to that.
   
   However, from personal experiences, the service and the attitudes of the Africans can be really awful when they are dealing with other black people. It sometimes appears they resent our presence. Yet when an Oyinbo or Burenyi comes around they grovel and fawn like toothy hyenas and step on your head to service them with a smile. I guess it is that inferiority complex and viewing whites as superior to them. This is just my opinion. Please no hate notes.
   
   I was also amused about the author's experience in visiting an African Christian church. Those are some scary places. I have attended a few just for curiosity. What an incredible scam and the believers are very cult like.
   
   But most importantly, this book speaks to belonging and knowing where you came from. I have had such experiences in Africa. However, I was never one of those seeking to find "home." I have always been pretty confident that I am a woman of African descent, an amalgamation of various ethnic Africans, born and raised in the US. What I discovered most about my travels to the African continent is that I am an American. There is no one more American than the African Americans.
   
   The "Big Man" phenomenon is so accurate. African societies are very caste oriented, and everyone has a desperate need to feel superior and look down their noses at others. Many of them have this over inflated sense of self. Ekow description of the bank manager screaming at him like a child because he came into the bank out of the rain is accurate. The bank manager's response when he realized that the author had a non-Ghanaian accent that he back downs and grovels, realizing that this must be his superior, simply because he is a westerner. I have had this experience too. It is very strange and disturbing.
   
   Ekow spoke of W.E. Dubois's theory of "double consciousness" of being born into a white world. Yes, all people of African descent have this gift of double consciousness. It is survival technique when born in the west. It allows us to maneuver in our intimate world and with those outside of that world. I can't recall the author's name, but she referred to it as switching. We have double faces. We wear the mask as Paul Lawrence Dunbar alluded to. It is a permanent part of our wardrobe. We take it off and put it back on when the need arises.
   
   Ekow went to Ghana to find out where he is from. However, I am not sure of what his conclusion was. He had some serious emotional issues about his identity. In Ghana he also is an outsider with another aspect of the double consciousness. His roots are in the soil of Ghana, yet his heart and mind is in Britain, the west. He is only a generation removed, yet he feels alienated in Britain and Ghana. Imagine people of African descent who are generations removed from Africa. The question is can you ever go back "home" as they say? I say home is where your heart is and the people you love and the society you relate to and feel most comfortable. Can you go and visit and experience the land of the ancestors? Absolutely! Some of us can even pick our western lives and go and live there. Why note? The Europeans and Asians are living there.
   
   I believe that this book is a good read for anyone of African descent, and those who want to know what it is like to go to an African country and realized you are a foreigner. However, I am a foreigner among familar looking faces, faces of people that I know and family members. I don't mind being a foreigner. Because a native can go a little way up the road in his country and be considered a foreigner. I could relate much to many of Ekow's experiences.



3. Ekow Eshun's Black Gold of the Sun is a spellbinding account of his search for himself. Enchanting and enlightening, tender and vibrant are the images he creates as he shares what is discovered during his journeys.
   
   What is so remarkable about this book is how one can almost imagine traveling along with Ekow. British born, of Ghanaian parents, more often than not, this young man was asked where he was really from. Questions, questions always questions. Yet, none are as pressing as the ones he asks himself.
   
   From the time that his plane lands in Ghana, this saga kept me glued to its pages. I felt as if I was traveling with the author from London to Ghana, from Ghana to London. Ekow searches for his past as he searches for himself and finds out more about his heritage than he bargained for. The climax of this search is well worth the read. As he discovers his family, past and present, he finds his own self worth.
   
   A compelling, skilled author, Ekow Eshun's story should be grasped by any and all who seek to listen and learn. He is allowing all who would like to travel with him just for a while and enjoy the wonder of Black Gold of the Sun.
   
   Armchair Interviews says: Allow yourself to be the author's traveling companion.



4. Ekow Eshun's book offers so many insights to children of immigrants that seem almost universal wisdom. More than once I stopped to read and re-read the words on the page, stunned that Eshun was able to articulate something I, as a Mexican-American, felt all of my life. His experiences in Ghana are intriguing and eye-opening, and he has a way of explaining the things we all feel but just have never been able to say.
   
   Here is an example of one of my favorite quotes, to illustrate my point. It is from a scene where Ekow is a teenager, and his family is having a party. The adults are having a ball, while the younger cousins just kind of look on. Eshun observes:
   "Our parents had their rituals and dance steps. They knew where they were from. By contrast all that connected us was distance from Ghana. Born in Britain, it seemed to us that we were the adults. We bore the pressure of growing up in a strange country while our parents played on the grass like children."
   
   Brilliant! It's so simply stated, yet so powerful. We recommend this to anyone, but children of immigrants/migrants NEED to read this book!
   
   (Review by Amina Garcia)

No comments about Mauritius Travel Map (Globetrotter Travel Map).

5 comments about Egypt: A Practical Guide.

1. Every time I pick up this book, I marvel at how cute it is. Its size is truly practical for travel, yet its pages contain so much information, in a logical order. I can't wait to take it to Egypt with me, and refer to it with each tour stop.



2. Having just returned from Egypt I found this book rather a blinkered view by a man with several bees in his bonnet. Although the descriptions of the tombs were good the book lacked the breadth and detail required by a first time traveller. It certainly lacked the kind of practical step by step realities needed to actually travel around and see these sites. I found the Rough Guide excellent in comparison.



3. It is a good book as it intends to be a quick reference, but not enough to plan a trip by it. I do find the name misleading. Not really what I expected.



4. This is a great little referece book filled with little tidbits of information that other books don't offer. I would reccomend however that you also read other books like The Travelers Key to Ancient Egypt by West for broader detail.
   I enjoyed this book so much that I will definately read more books by this author.



5. As a first time traveler to Egypt, I found this book to be very helpful. There were not a lot of details, however, you should always do your detailed homework on the places you visit BEFORE you leave the country.

   Each night before arriving at the next destination, I would read about the city we would be visiting. It gave very good descriptions on the sites we would be seeing and in general, was a very useful tool. It is small enough that it fits anywhere in your bag. It includes diagrams and history of the tombs and historic sites. Also includes what to wear and what not wear. Word of caution...be very considerate of their customes. You are a guest in a third world country. The author covers other situations too that should be considered when traveling to this exciting land.

   For those of you who have not had the experience of traveling to Egypt, I can say it was the trip of a lifetime! We would go back in a heartbeat! When the world situation calms down, go...the people are friendly and we never felt uncomfortable.

3 comments about A Voyager Out: The Life of Mary Kingsley.

1. I picked up this book at a thrift shop - my usual venue for book purchases - solely due to the title. I knew nothing of Mary Kingsley prior to reading this absorbing account of her life. Her childhood and early adult life would give no clue to the extraordinary adventures she would have in Africa, culminating in her death while serving as a nurse with the British Army in South Africa. Rudyard Kipling said of her that she was "the bravest person I know" - I hope I have the quote correct. I cannot check as I gave my copy of the book to a friend who bears a striking resemblance to Miss Kingsley.



2. Rudyard Kipling said of MH Kingsley, "Being human, she must have feared some things, but one never arrived at what they were." Three species of fish and several books are only part of Kingsley's singular legacy.
   
   Very interesting biography of this intrepid Victorian explorer, whose extraordinary exploits one suspects might have been aided by the blessedly poor socialization afforded her as an untrained, unschooled, half-Cockney and half-forgotten "poor little rich girl", who later escaped a confining existence.
   
   The prose is deft but echoes Kingsley a little gratingly at times, rather than quoting.



3. On the surface, Victorian Englishwoman Mary Kingsley was an unlikely choice for intrepid explorer. The spinster daughter of a wealthy British nobleman who dedicated almost fifteen years of her life to nursing first her invalid mother and then her father, Mary's life was trapped by duty and honoring her parental bond. But when her parents died within months of each other, 29-year old Mary was faced with the task of shaping her own destiny. Her flamboyant, careless father George Kingsley had imbued Mary with a passion for travel and adventure through his occasional letters home to Mary and her sickly mother who suffered from the common complaints of upperclass Victorian women: inexplicable headaches, neuralgia and fainting spells that would always worsen if Mary attempted to escape the family homestead. Inspired by her father, Mary set out to explore West Africa. Dressed in a white cotton blouse and a long black woolen skirt, Mary ran the treacherous rapids of the Ogooue River; fell into a twenty-foot elephant trap studded with spikes, walked unarmed into Fang villages and unflinchingly confronted hostile native chiefs. Through it all, Mary retained a quintessential British attitude of cheerful competence in the face of danger. When a loose bag with a suspicious smell yielded human body parts in the camp of a tribe of cannibals, Mary matter-of-factly took an inventory of everything before returning everything to their containers. She spent almost a year forging through jungles, observing natives before returning to England to write about her adventures. Kingsley's two books, "Travels in West Africa" and "West African Studies" became best sellers. She became a sensation on the lecture circuit, bringing her exciting stories and her dry wit to many venues. But back in England, Mary was plagued by illness, headaches, colds and neuralgia like her mother. Her younger brother expected Mary to become his housekeeper and nurse as she had done for her mother and father. But Mary had fallen in love --- with a country that claimed her soul and filled her waking hours with yearning to return. Frank has written an excellent biography that draws the most exciting, telling parts of Kingsley's books but also fills in what Mary preferred to leave out: the wild, alluring heart of a continent.

No comments about South Africa: The Structure of Things Then.

2 comments about We're Sailing Down the Nile (Travel the World).

1. I bought this book as a gift because I was so impressed with how much fun the book is and how educational the book manages to be at the same time. I have recently come back from a trip to Egypt and I took a cruise down the Nile River. This book although superficial in details(clearly because of the age range) does cover the key points of the trip from Aswan up the Nile River as well as plenty of background material on Ancient Egyptian history in the back. I have always felt it is critical that kids are exposed to history and cultures through their reading and this book does that well. On top of being educational it is very colorful and very much a fun book.



2. The book follows a group of children traveling the Nile River, north from Abu Simbel up to Cairo, the route taken by most river cruises. They stop at some of the best known sites in Egypt: the temples at Abu Simbel, Aswan, Kitchener's Island, the Valley of the Kings, Al-Faiyum Oasis, Cairo and the Cairo Museum, before ending their trip at the Giza plateau.
   
   The main text of the book is simple enough to keep the attention of younger readers. Like the other books by this author, there is a repeating refrain throughout, in this case "Climb aboard the river boat! We're sailing down the Nile. We'll be in ______ in just a little while," that will encourage the participation of those who are familiar with the text. For older readers (even adults) this book, like many published by Barefoot Books, has endnotes that further explain things. In this book's endnotes, the first section is devoted to additional information about each of the sites visited. There are also sections with information about the gods and goddesses shown on each page, the different periods of ancient Egyptian history, life in ancient Egypt, the role of the Nile in Egyptian life, mummies, tombs, and hieroglyphs. While the information is more in depth than the main text of the book, do not be worried that it is too academic or dry. The author presents the information in a way that simplifies complex concepts and makes the easy-to-read paragraphs approachable for children.
   
   The artwork is colorful and attractive; it is a bit stylized though. Most readers will be familiar with the appearance of the Pyramids and Sphinx at Giza, however other sites such as Abu Simbel and the temple on Kitchener's Island are not as well known. Because of the style of illustrations, some readers might become frustrated with the lack of realism in the illustrations (although with the internet those who want to should be able to search for actual pictures of sites described in the book).
   
   All in all, this is a good introduction to the geography and sites of Egypt. Most kids (and adults to be honest) are fascinated with the culture of ancient Egypt and would like the opportunity to visit these famous sites. While this book is not the same as an actual visit to Egypt, it will certainly help to feed the interest

2 comments about Warriors and Strangers.

1. Picked this up about two weeks ago, and found it hard to put it down. Story is of Hanley and his time as a British officer in Somanli in WWII, then a visit back there in 1962. Then his time in Kenya. Wonderful views of the tribes, and what they could become after the war. Should have been read before our 1990 Black Hawk Down story. Always wonderful to read about what was, and then to see what has become of a country.

   Then his observations of Kenya, and Masai and the other tribes. Good story of the Indians and Whites leaving Kenya in the late 1960s.




2. This book is a compelling read. To those who like to read about the desert, about different people, about hardship and courage, this is it. The best book I have read.

   It was out of print for quite some time and it's a big relief it's back. Buy it while you can because there is nothing better.

No comments about Kenya: Identity of A Nation.

3 comments about Cameroon: The Bradt Travel Guide.

1. This book describes Cameroon as the armpit of Africa. Seriously. It said that. At least 1/3 of the book is on all the different types of diseases one is sure to catch being there. It says that Cameroon is unique in that there is a type of malaria that will KILL you in 24 hours of the first symptom. This book scared me so much that I went to Egypt alone instead of going with my friends to Cameroon. There arent really any books just on Cameroon. Lonely Planet has one on West Africa which I should have gotten. My friends went and had a wonderful time. The book should have talked about the good things this country has- which as it turns out there are other things there that Malaria! Perhaps if I would of read a different book then I would have not canceled my flight to Cameroon.



2. I have just returned from 3 weeks in Cameroon and this book made the trip with me. My trip was not the usual tourist excursion, as I traveled with expat Cameroonians and lived exclusively with africans. I could go for days without seeing another european and when I did they were usually zipping past in a tour bus or in an NGO vehicle.
   
   First, the positives. The book is well organized and the local Cameroonians were usually impressed that someone would write so much about their country. The advice presented in the book is generally sound and the descriptions accurate. Douala is an "armpit": shrouded in smog during the dry season, scented by the smoke of burning garbage, and made all the more enjoyable by sweltering heat and oppressive humidity. On the basis of the positives, I would award the book 4 stars.
   
   The negatives? Much of the information regarding accommodations is quite dated. For instance, the description of the Skyline Hotel in Bamenda is at least five to seven years old. It has been years since the pool had water, the night club is closed, the hotel is frequently without electricity and is in a general state of disrepair and decay. Of course, this is merely symptomatic of the overall decay prevalent throughout Cameroon. Do not rely on the phone numbers listed for the hotels, as many may have changed. On the basis of the negatives I would award the book 2 stars.
   
   Overall, however, I can recommend the book as a serviceable resource for planning a trip and as a useful tool while in country.



3. I used this guide in Cameroon for one year while I was on a Fulbright grant from 05-06. I have to say that the guide was surprisingly accurate for about 90% of things I wanted to know: lodging, restaurants, and museums. I toured much of the country when my family visited, and it helped us immeasurably in our travels. I would take the sections regarding trails and nature sites (waterfalls, caves, etc.) with a grain of salt. We spent a day or two in Western Cameroon fruitlessly searching for some caves that the book mentioned. All in all a great guide, but hold out for the revised edition if you can!

1 comments about African Birds.

1. This is an ideal travelling guide a little expensive but less to carry than a standard field guide.Could do with a second part listing more of the birds of africa.