You have to forgive me for this one. I listened to Joshua Hammer’s The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu as an audiobook. I didn’t read it. It took place in Africa – Mali, to be specific. Timbuktu, to be more specific. Because of this, many of the names of the people involved I am not familiar with and consequently don’t remember.

That said, I enjoyed this a lot. Throughout the centuries, Timbuktu was a center of learning and knowledge, and in the 1980s, a man whose name was, IIRC, Abdel, traveled across Africa collecting ancient manuscripts of all types for a government and grant funded central library, preserving hundreds and thousands of years of cultural knowledge and learning.

But then, Al-Qaeda showed up.

The rest of the book follows Abdel and his compatriots on their quest to preserve these precious manuscripts and keep them out of the dangerous, destructive hands of religious fundamentalists who would think nothing of destroying these thousands of years of human scholarship and history.

It was amazing listening to these guys smuggle these fragile writings through the desert to keep them from being destroyed by any means Al-Qaeda could come up with – fire, in particular.

Also, in an age where public education and public libraries are being defunded and looked past, where teachers and librarians and keepers of knowledge are being vilified for any number of reasons, it was nice to read a book about how important LIBRARIANS are. Guys, LIBRARIANS.

These librarians could have been tortured. Killed. Brutally. By TERRORISTS. That’s how important their work is. Knowledge is what is going to save people from fundamentalist lunatics like Al Qaeda. And the lunatics know it.

I enjoyed this book immensely, and again, I apologize for not knowing the names of the people involved better.

Abdel did eventually save his library, along with hundreds of thousands of years of human thought and study. We all owe him and his fellows a debt that can never be repaid.

Tagged: authors: joshua hammer, books: the badass librarians of timbuktu, genre: history