After reading The Enormous Egg as a child, I’ve been devoted to stories where the strange, the uncanny, and the magical are all elements of the worlds characters must negotiate. I’m most drawn to fiction containing seemingly unreal elements because, in my experience, that is reality. Those moments when the past suddenly feels present, or when you glimpse something at the edge of your vision that feels significant, but you can’t quite catch it. Moments when anything is possible. No surprise that I write fiction that explores those moments of uncertainty and leaves the reader unmoored, thinking about the people and their experiences long after they’ve left the book.
One of my favorite fiction collections, it contains everything from selkies to homework assignments to imagined histories.
I’m drawn to stories that illuminate hidden literature, imagine landscapes, or unearth a secret history. Stories with footnotes, poems, and epistolaries. Tender is all these things, and in the best fabulist tradition, these elements are not the point. They heighten the stakes and experiences.
I love books where the unreal and uncanny don’t distract from reality but create a focus to make a fictional reality more real. In Tender, even stories that appear to be straight science fiction become something bigger and stranger.
Samatar is a masterful stylist, and her prose is outrageously good.
World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Locus award finalist
Divided into "Tender Bodies" and "Tender Landscapes," the stories collected here in this first collection of short fiction from a rising star travel from the commonplace to the edges of reality. Some of Samatar's weird and compassionate fabulations spring from her life and literary studies; some spring from the world, some from the void. Tender explores the fragility of bodies, emotions, and landscapes, in settings that range from medieval Egypt to colonial Kenya to the stars, and the voices of those who question: children, students, servants, researchers, writers.
By Bruce Bueno de Mesquita And Alastair Smith
Author
Why am I passionate about this?
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith are professors of politics at New York University. They use the mathematical approach of game theory to understand the incentives of leaders in different settings. The Dictator’s Handbook distills decades of academic work into a few essential rules that encapsulate how leaders come to power and remain there.
By far the most academic of our recommendations, Throup and Hornsby describe the constraints that having to hold an election imposes on leaders and, most tellingly, how easy leaders find it to flaunt these binds.
This book uses the Kenyan political system to address issues relevant to recent political developments throughout Africa. The authors analyze the construction of the Moi state since 1978. They show the marginalization of Kikuyu interests as the political economy of Kenya has been reconstructed to benefit President Moi's Kalenjin people and their allies. Mounting Kikuyu dissatisfaction led to the growth of demands for multi-party democracy. The book places contemporary Kenyan politics and the 1992 election in their historical context, contrasting the present multi-party era with the previous one during the sixties. The authors question the hopes for a \u201csecond independence\u201d…
Writing for children is the most gloriously tricky thing in the world, and I love doing it. With fiction, am I telling a story worth telling to someone who’s new to the planet and new to our way of life? With non-fiction, am I distilling complexity into a shape they can grasp quickly? Am I showing them how wonderful and strange our world is, and can I make ‘em laugh while learning? I’ve written 18 books for kids, many commissioned by Think Equal for their global SEL program and used in the national curricula of 20 countries.
I found Kenyan biologist and environmental activist Wangari Maathai’s story inspiring, heartbreaking, and ultimately, triumphant.
Prévot’s text may require you to read this one closely with your kids – and be ready for conversations about authoritarianism and political rights. At the same time, Maathai’s successes and accomplishments are astonishing: the book’s title is an understatement – the Green Belt Movement which she founded has planted about 50 million trees now.
Fronty’s illustrations are beautiful, easy to get lost in, and make this book sing. This is a visually striking work with an important story to tell about science, perseverance, and the true value of a tree.
“Trees are living symbols of peace and hope.” –Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace laureate
Wangari Maathai changed the way the world thinks about nature, ecology, freedom, and democracy, inspiring radical efforts that continue to this day.This simply told story begins with Green Belt Movement founder Wangari Maathai’s childhood at the foot of Mount Kenya where, as the oldest child in her family, her responsibility was to stay home and help her mother. When the chance to go to school presented itself, she seized it with both hands. She traveled to the US to study, where she saw that even in the…
I’m a Sibert Honor author and write books for kids and teens about nature. Ever since I saw an elephant skull on the savanna in Kenya, I’ve been fascinated by elephants. When my daughter was an undergrad, she worked with Katy Payne and the Elephant Listening Project, and I knew I had to write about ELP’s astounding work—one of the only groups working with forest elephants. I hope you enjoy the QR codes in Eavesdropping on Elephants. Katy and her colleagues were very generous with their work. The more I write the more I discover our connections to our natural world that humble me and fill me with gratitude.
As an author of children’s books, I love to share what I’m passionate about with kids. As you read Elephant Memories by Cynthia Moss, give A Passion for Elephants to the children in your life. Imagine the terrific discussions you can have about Cynthia’s adventures sharing two books about the same person. You’ll be able to supplement the kids’ knowledge with some startling facts of your own.
A science and nature biography of Cynthia Moss, the elephant expert, by the author of Caldecott Honor book One Cool Friend
Cynthia Moss was never afraid of BIG things. As a kid, she loved to ride through the countryside on her tall horse. She loved to visit faraway places. And she especially loved to learn about nature and the world around her. So when Cynthia traveled to Africa and met the world’s most ENORMOUS land animal, the African elephant, at Amboseli National Park in Kenya, she knew she had found her life’s work.
I’ve travelled to the Pantanal and along the Amazon both ways from Brazil and Colombia while I was teaching English in Brazil and will never forget the destruction of the Amazon. A visit to the gaping hole of Serra Pelada, a gold mine, had a lasting effect on me as did the forest fires and scorched earth, devoid of any bird or animal apart from the skinny cattle grazing amongst the blackened trees, stretching for miles. A run-in with a hyacinth macaw egg thief, who was smuggling the beautiful birds into Europe, spurred my interest in writing a children’s series which touches on conservation, endangered species, and illegal wildlife trafficking.
Born Freewas my favourite book growing up. Not only did it make me fall in love with reading and wildlife but made merealise human adults and society are full of contradictions. Elsa the lioness is hand raised by Joy, the wife of George, a game warden who shoots Elsa’s mother when she charges at him because she’s protecting her cubs. Though I understand there may be detractors on how the Adamsons viewed other animals, which are endangered today, it’s widely agreed that the book helped the public become aware of wildlife conservation. Elsa’s release back into the wild pioneered ‘rewilding’, reintroducing captive animals back into their own environments. At its heart, there is a beautifully observed relationship between Joy and Elsa as she grows up and is released.
Fifty years ago Joy Adamson first introduced to the world the story of her life alongside Elsa the lioness, whom she had rescued as an orphaned cub, and raised at her home in Kenya. But as Elsa had been born free, Joy made the heartbreaking decision that she must be returned to the wild when she was old enough to fend for herself.
Since the first publication of Born Free and its sequels Living Free and Forever Free, generations of readers have been enchanted, inspired and moved by these books' uplifting charm and the remarkable interaction between Joy and Elsa.…
EM Forster said, "Only Connect." That has inspired my life and work. The Oxford Times published my Oxtopian castaway series, and those life stories were turned into three books. The castaways, with links to Oxford, were from five continents. One of those castaways was Kenyan-born Nancy Mudenyo Hunt. Nancy founded the Nasio Trust, which has transformed the lives of hundreds of disadvantaged young people in West Kenya and Oxfordshire. With friends, I’m currently fundraising to build the first community library in West Kenya. Nancy asked if we could write a book together, and we did. We wrote a novel inspired by her life.
On a trip through Africa, Nancy stumbled upon this captivating book by Corinne Hofmann in a Tanzanian airport shop. Intrigued, she bought it and couldn’t put it down! It's an autobiographical story of Hofmann's life in Kenya, where she fell in love with and married a Maasai warrior.
This book resonated deeply with Nancy and me because we are both in mixed relationships. Nancy once followed a Maasai friend to their village, a land unlike any other. Living in a traditional hut and being the only educated person, especially a girl, was inspiring. Those were truly unforgettable moments. The right to education is one many African girls have to fight for.
The runaway international bestseller is now an American must-read for lovers of adventure, travel writing, and romance. Corinne Hofmann tells how she falls in love with an African warrior while on holiday in Kenya. After overcoming severe obstacles, she moves into a tiny hut with him and his mother, and spends four years in his Kenyan village. Slowly but surely, the dream starts to crumble, and she hatches a plan to return home with her daughter, a baby born of the seemingly indestructible love between a white European woman and a Masai. Compulsively readable, The White Masai is at once…
I grew up in the high plains mining towns of Montana and Wyoming but I couldn’t wait to get out and see the world. Peace Corps was my ticket. A teaching post in Chad, Africa, was open, but civil war and famine loomed, so I chose Afghanistan. After my two-year contract in Kabul, I continued traveling but my fascination with Africa never waned. A job teaching college English allowed me summers to continue traveling. However, I never did get to Africa, so when Carolyn suggested we write about Namibia, I agreed. Someday, I hope to visit before the magnificent black rhino has been wiped off the face of the planet.
Huxley’s parents go to Kenya to start a coffee plantation. And like Blixen and her husband, they know nothing about Africa or growing coffee and must depend on Africans to teach them. Huxley writes a delightful account of her life and the struggles they endure. Her portrayal of the people who work on the family’s plantation is brilliant as is the description of the environment and animals. Huxley also writes from the unsentimental eyes of a child.
When Elspeth Huxley's pioneer father buys a remote plot of land in Kenya, the family sets off to discover their new home: five hundred acres of Kenyan scrubland, infested with ticks and white ants, and quavering with heat. What they lack in know-how they make up for in determination: building a grass house, employing local Kikuyu tribe members and painstakingly transforming their patch of wilderness into a working farm. Huxley's unforgettable childhood memoir is a sensitive account of settler life at the turn of the twentieth century and a love song to the harshness and beauty of East Africa.
EM Forster said, "Only Connect." That has inspired my life and work. The Oxford Times published my Oxtopian castaway series, and those life stories were turned into three books. The castaways, with links to Oxford, were from five continents. One of those castaways was Kenyan-born Nancy Mudenyo Hunt. Nancy founded the Nasio Trust, which has transformed the lives of hundreds of disadvantaged young people in West Kenya and Oxfordshire. With friends, I’m currently fundraising to build the first community library in West Kenya. Nancy asked if we could write a book together, and we did. We wrote a novel inspired by her life.
I appreciate books that help me understand the world and how we got here. Professor of History at Harvard, Caroline Elkins, spent seven years researching Britain’s Gulag. The UK is justly proud of standing up to Hitler’s fascism, but we need to look dispassionately at the history of the British Empire. Kenyan soldiers fought alongside British armed forces in WW2, but their reward was not medals.
The Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in the fifties was a massive armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of one-and-a-half-million - to hold them in camps or confine them in villages ringed with barbed wire - to treat and portray them, including ex-British soldiers, as sub-human savages.
Only a few years after Britain defeated fascism came the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya - a mass armed rebellion by the Kikuyu people, demanding the return of their land and freedom. The draconian response of Britain's colonial government was to detain nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million and to portray them as sub-human savages. Detainees in their thousands - possibly a hundred thousand or more - died from exhaustion, disease, starvation and systemic physical brutality. For decades these events remained untold.
Caroline Elkins conducted years of research to piece together this story, unearthing reams of documents and…
Women’s empowerment is my passion and my purpose, which is why I founded Women Connect4Good, Inc., a 501(c)3 foundation to help support other organizations that work to advance women and girls. Our name says it, and our work proves it. Women make phenomenal leaders, and while I can do a lot through my foundation to promote women’s leadership, we can all do something in our day-to-day lives to help women lead. Every day we can do something to support another woman, or partner with another woman, like the women who’ve written the books I’ve reviewed here – friends, colleagues, and fierce advocates for equality on every level. We are all lifting as we rise.
Guess what? Your abilities matter and according to Linda Rendleman simply taking a few minutes to recognize and utilize them positions you to be part of the change and spread positivity in the world. Linda takes time in this third book in the Women Like Us series to share the stories of some well-known and not-so-well-known women who are coming together with their own voices to speak up for more vulnerable women, linking arms with compassion and connection. Most importantly, she shares how you can also be a part of the change in your own way. When we hear one another’s stories, we are inspired to learn more and support each other. I couldn’t agree with her more.
Your basic abilities matter and by recognizing and utilizing them, you can be a part in positive change for the world. This third book in the Women Like Us Series focuses on the stories of well-known and little-known women who are coming together in their own way with their own voices to speak up for the vulnerable, link arms with compassion and connection and share how the reader, in her own way, can be a part of the change.
Narrated by Linda Rendleman, MS, CEO and Cofounder of the Women Like Us Foundation, she introduces you to women who have…
First, I'm a woman and I'm inspired by women from the past who overcame the rules of the day in which they lived. It doesn’t matter where they lived, or what they tried to overcome, but to have bucked the patriarchal system and achieved some measure of success, is phenomenal. Second, I became inspired by silent film star Marion Davies, and I wrote a book about it. I never intended to write historical fiction. My first book was a memoir about sailing to Tahiti at fourteen with my father and two sisters. But life has a funny way of directing us where we need to go. Here I am: inspired by women from the past!
Wild Africa is romantic and daring and I loved the danger and inspiration of 1920s Africa, when British born real life woman Beryl Markham becomes one of the first female pilots. It’s a bit of Out of Africa and riveting.
Markham encounters many obstacles and has several disastrous relationships but eventually she overcomes and succeeds. She becomes the first person (not woman) to fly solo from Britain to North America.
As a young girl, Beryl Markham was brought to Kenya from Britain by parents dreaming of a new life. For her mother, the dream quickly turned sour, and she returned home; Beryl was brought up by her father, who switched between indulgence and heavy-handed authority, allowing her first to run wild on their farm, then incarcerating her in the classroom. The scourge of governesses and serial absconder from boarding school, by the age of sixteen Beryl had been catapulted into a disastrous marriage - but it was in facing up to this reality that she…
