Review: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

Title: The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And their race to save the world's most precious manuscripts

Author: Joshua Hammer

Date Completed: 20 August 2016

This book has a very misleading title and I considered not even finishing it but held on hoping for something more about the librarians. 97% of the book was about jihadist and terrorist groups in Mali with a smattering of info on the librarian(s) and manuscripts. It was very obvious the author was not a historian or librarian/archivist, but a journalist. Each chapter felt like a newspaper article that could stand alone and they often overlapped in content. Some of it felt memoir-ish as the author described personal visits to Mali in an investigative journalist style. If you're interested in Al Qaeda in Northern Africa, this this book might be worth checking out. But don't read this book if you want to learn about African librarians.