Caravan-Serai Tours

Reading List

Forgotten Voices: Power and Agency in Colonial and Postcolonial Libya - Ali Abdullatif Ahmida
University of New England Professor Alid Abdullaf Ahmida, a native of Libya, says that since he came to the United States as a teacher and political scientist/historian, he has "worked to tell the individual stories of my family and the forgotten human history of the Libyan people, as illustrated by Libyan folk poetry" in the Italian fascist concentration camps in Libya beginning in 1929.

But Ahmida's new book, published by the Routlege Taylor & Francis Group, has a number of broader objectives. In Forgotten Voices, Ahmida employs archival research, oral interviews, and comparative analysis to rethink the history of colonial and nationalist categories and analyses of modern Libya. He explores the ambiguities, failures, and silences manufactured by current colonial and nationalist scholarship, and he presents the voices of the Libyan people as they have confronted the contradictions of modernity, the nation-state, and alienation in the contemporary nation.

Footprint Libya Handbook - James Azema
GUIDEBOOK * 2000 * PAPER * 338 PAGES
A comprehensive guide to Libya, North Africa's second largest country, in the British series. Most of the book is devoted to an overview of places and sights with chapters on Tripolitania, Mysrata and Syrtica, Cyrenaica, Mamarica, The Jabul Nafusa and Fezzan. With a few color photographs, site plans and a 50-page overview of history and culture. (NAF22, $21.95)

The Tuareg, People of the Ahaggar - Jeremy Keenan
CULTURAL PORTRAIT * 2002 * PAPER * 385 PAGES
A vivid portrait of the blue-veiled Berber nomads of Algeria and central Sahara by a British anthopologist, film maker and Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Orginally published in 1977, Keenan lived and worked among the Tuareg in the early 1970s. This edition includes a new preface by Keenan (NAF14, $29.95)

Sahara, The Extraordinary History of the World's Largest Desert - Marq de Villiers, Sheila Hirtle
NATURAL HISTORY * 2003 * PAPER * 326 PAGES
A chronicle of the geography, formation, history and nature of the Sahara. The author (who has also written about water) combines travelogue, science and archaeology in this informative report. In the second half of the book de Villiers brings in the great cities and civilizations of the Sahara. With a few black-and-white photographs, notes and bibliography. A Canadian journalist (whose family has roots in South Africa), de Villiers draws on travels through North Africa in the 1970s with his collaborator Sheila Hirtle. (NAF13, $14.00)

A Traveller's History of North Africa - Barnaby Rogerson
HISTORY * 2000 * PAPER * 400 PAGES
A brief history of Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria and Libya through the 1990s - wide-ranging, accessible and effectively condensed. With a useful chronology and historical gazetteer, this book marches confidently through the centuries. Read it as an overview. (NAF01, $15.95)

Libya Since Independence, Oil and State-Building - Dirk Vandewalle
HISTORY * 1998 * PAPER * 232 PAGES
A detailed overview of political and economic development in Libya since indep endence in 1951, this scholarly history is a must read for anyone interested in present-day Libya and its role in the world. Vandervalle, a professor of government at Dartmouth, has written widely on Libya and on state building in oil exporting countries. (NAF27, $19.95)

Northern Libya Map
Cartographia 2001 * MAP
A detailed traveler's road map of northern Libya with insets of Tripoli, the area around Tripoli and Benghaziat a scale of 1:2 million. If you are not venturing further south into the Sahara (not covered by the map), this map provides excellent coverage of the Mediterranean coast, including Sabha. It does not cover the portion of Libya, Northern Africa's second largest country, below 26 degrees North (about the level of Marzuq). (NAF20, $11.00)

See our Children's Reading List, and our general Reading List for Islam and the Middle East.