This stunning collection of 720 photographs, many of them drawn from family archives and scrapbooks and all carefully restored, is one of the most important visual records of Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ever to have been published.The early photographers captured the beauty and dangerous allure of life on this spectacular frontier: the ceremonies and traditional attire of the native people, the fantastic machinery used in construction of the Uganda Railway, the gradual development of trade on the coast and in the country's interior, the hardships of the East African Campaign during World War I, and the pioneering spirit of early European settlers and farmers. Many of the most famous names and places connected with Africa appear in these pages, including Karen Blixen's farm and Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Roosevelt on safari. This is a book to delight anyone who has ever traveled to East Africa or been intrigued by its history.

Kenya Kenya: A Country in the Making, 1880-1940

'Out of Africa' is Isak Dinesen's memoir of her years in Africa, from 1914 to 1931, on a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi. She had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, and when they separated she stayed on to manage the farm by herself, visited frequently by her lover, the big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, for whom she would make up stories "like Scheherazade." In Africa, "I learned how to tell tales," she recalled many years later. "The natives have an ear still. I told stories constantly to them, all kinds." Her account of her African adventures, written after she had lost her beloved farm and returned to Denmark, is that of a master storyteller, a woman whom John Updike called "one of the most picturesque and flamboyant literary personalities of the century."

Isak Dinesen (1885-1962_ was born Karen Christence Dinesen in Rungsted, Denmark. She wrote poems, plays, and stories from an early age, including 'Seven Gothic Tales', 'Winter's Tales', 'Last Tales', 'Anecdotes of Destiny', 'Shadows on the Grass' and 'Ebrengard'. 'Out of Africa' is considered her masterpiece.

Out of Africa

Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, "A Grain of Wheat" follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers' tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested.

A Grain of Wheat

The classic memoir of Africa, aviation, and adventure—the inspiration for Paula McLain’s Circling the Sun and “a bloody wonderful book” (Ernest Hemingway).

 Beryl Markham’s life story is a true epic. Not only did she set records and break barriers as a pilot, she shattered societal expectations, threw herself into torrid love affairs, survived desperate crash landings—and chronicled everything. A contemporary of Karen Blixen (better known as Isak Dinesen, the author of Out of Africa), Markham left an enduring memoir that soars with astounding candor and shimmering insights.
 
A rebel from a young age, the British-born Markham was raised in Kenya’s unforgiving farmlands. She trained as a bush pilot at a time when most Africans had never seen a plane. In 1936, she accepted the ultimate challenge: to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean from east to west, a feat that fellow female aviator Amelia Earhart had completed in reverse just a few years before. Markham’s successes and her failures—and her deep, lifelong love of the “soul of Africa”—are all told here with wrenching honesty and agile wit.
 
Hailed as “one of the greatest adventure books of all time” by Newsweek and “the sort of book that makes you think human beings can do anything” by the New York Times, West with the Night remains a powerful testament to one of the iconic lives of the twentieth century.

West with the Night

This text tells of the coming of the British to East Africa in the late 1800s. Following the lives of three generations of a Kikuyu family, Huxley's tale immerses the reader in the language, world view and perceptions of a people whose way of life is changed forever.

Red Strangers

*A "New York Times" Notable Book*
*A "New York Times Book Review" Editors' Choice*
*A "Publishers Weekly" Top Ten Book of the Year*

Binyavanga Wainaina tumbled through his middle-class Kenyan childhood out of kilter with the world around him. This world came to him as a chaos of loud and colorful sounds: the hair dryers at his mother's beauty parlor, black mamba bicycle bells, mechanics in Nairobi, the music of Michael Jackson—all punctuated by the infectious laughter of his brother and sister, Jimmy and Ciru. He could fall in with their patterns, but it would take him a while to carve out his own.

In this vivid and compelling debut memoir, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his mother's religious period, his failed attempt to study in South Africa as a computer programmer, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya. The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood.

Throughout, reading is his refuge and his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all along. A series of fascinating international reporting assignments follow. Finally he circles back to a Kenya in the throes of postelection violence and finds he is not the only one questioning the old certainties.

Resolutely avoiding stereotype and cliché, Wainaina paints every scene in "One Day I Will Write About This Place "with a highly distinctive and hugely memorable brush.

One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

There have been many accounts of the return to the wild of tame animals, but since its original publication in 1960, when "T"he "New York Times" hailed it as a "fascinating and remarkable book," "Born Free" has stood alone in its power to move us.

Joy Adamson's story of a lion cub in transition between the captivity in which she is raised and the fearsome wild to which she is returned captures the abilities of both humans and animals to cross the seemingly unbridgeable gap between their radically different worlds. Especially now, at a time when the sanctity of the wild and its inhabitants is increasingly threatened by human development and natural disaster, Adamson's remarkable tale is an idyll, and a model, to return to again and again.

Illustrated with the same beautiful, evocative photographs that first enchanted the world forty years ago and updated with a new introduction by George Page, former host and executive editor of the PBS series "Nature" and author of "Inside the Animal Mind, " this anniversary edition introduces to a new generation one of the most heartwarming associations between man and animal.

Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds (Story of Elsa, #1)

"A fast-paced political thriller.... Wrong's gripping, thoughtful book stands as both a tribute to Githongo's courage and a cautionary tale." —"New York Times Book Review"

“On one level, "It’s Our Turn to Eat" reads like a John Le Carré novel.... On a deeper and much richer level, the book is an analysis of how and why Kenya descended into political violence.” — "Washington Post"

Called "urgent and important” by "Harper's "magazine, "It’s Our Turn to Eat" is a nonfiction political thriller of modern Kenya—an eye-opening account of tribal rivalries, pervasive graft, and the rising anger of a prospect-less youth that exemplifies an African dilemma.

It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower

In an open cart Elspeth Huxley set off with her parents to travel to Thika in Kenya. As pioneering settlers, they built a house of grass, ate off a damask cloth spread over packing cases, and discovered—the hard way—the world of the African. With an extraordinary gift for detail and a keen sense of humor, Huxley recalls her childhood on the small farm at a time when Europeans waged their fortunes on a land that was as harsh as it was beautiful. For a young girl, it was a time of adventure and freedom, and Huxley paints an unforgettable portrait of growing up among the Masai and Kikuyu people, discovering both the beauty and the terrors of the jungle, and enduring the rugged realities of the pioneer life.

The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

In "a gripping narrative that is all but impossible to put down" (Joseph C. Miller), "Histories of the Hanged" exposes the long-hidden colonial crimes of the British in Kenya. This groundbreaking work tells how the brutal war between the colonial government and the insurrectionist Mau Mau between 1952 and 1960 dominated the final bloody decade of imperialism in East Africa. Using extraordinary new evidence, David Anderson puts the colonial government on trial with eyewitness testimony from over 800 court cases and previously unseen archives. His research exonerates the Kikuyu rebels; hardly the terrorists they were thought to be; and reveals the British to be brutal aggressors in a "dirty war" that involved leaders at the highest ranks of the British government. This astonishing piece of scholarship portrays a teetering colonial empire in its final phase; employing whatever military and propaganda methods it could to preserve an order that could no longer hold.

Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire

In "Unbowed," Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country. Infused with her unique luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai’s remarkable story of courage, faith, and the power of persistence is destined to inspire generations to come.

Kenya

Kenya Kenya: A Country in the Making, 1880-1940

Nigel Pavitt

Out of Africa

Isak Dinesen

A Grain of Wheat

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

West with the Night

Beryl Markham

Red Strangers

Elspeth Huxley

One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir

Binyavanga Wainaina

Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds (Story of Elsa, #1)

Joy Adamson

It's Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle-Blower

Michela Wrong

The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood

Elspeth Huxley

Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire

David Anderson

Unbowed: A Memoir

Wangari Maathai