my daughter (age 4) enjoys having this book read to her. I think it makes her feel proud of the braids she wears in her hair (which Bintou wants so desperately). Plus it's interesting because it takes place in Africa. And Bintou's pride in her own hair in the end is wonderful too. A great book.

Baquaqua has the distinction of being the first African-born slave to write a narrative that is credible, being heavily footnoted and very detailed. His biography makes for interesting and informative reading.

Your price on this book ~ The Birds of Africa (Vol 5) ~ is no better than buying it anyplace else including from the publisher.

Regards, Wayne

I've used this book as a resource for teaching about slavery in an elementary school class. The thoughts conveyed are not the usual rhetoric presented in most lower level school social studies texts. Until recently children have not been exposed to the idea that slavery existed in parts of the world other than the USA. The long history of slavery - in the world and especially in Africa itself is new to many people. We learn much about slavery that has not before been related to school children, if not adults. The children in my classroom have been very absorbed by the thoughts presented in these pages. This is a must-read for Middle or High School students studying Aftican American history. As a teacher I would be sure to use it in my class.

A most up-to-date-source on modern African cinema. Selects several films for critiques and gives personal insights on the filmmaker. We couldn't do without it! The Atlanta African Film Society

I first read this book seven years ago as part of an African Literature class in college. I came to Amazon today to order it for a business associate who expressed beautiful memories of hearing stories and legends as a child. Each story in this book represents a moral lesson, often about trust and the nature of people. Like the American Indian stories about the adventures of "Coyote" these stories feature a mischievous spider and all the trouble he gets into by being lazy and greedy .

Originally published in 1937 as Black Hamlet: The Mind of an African Negro Revealed by Psychoanalysis, the book was written between 1933 and 1936 by the South Africa psychoanalyst and physician Wulf Sachs, and was the result of Sachs' meeting and subsequent "analysis", of John Chavafambira ("Black Hamlet" of the book), a Manyika (present day eastern Zimbabwe) nganga (healer-diviner). The book Black Hamlet - whose genre is difficult to define, being part case history (but more like a psychoanalytic biography), part narrative, part projection, part anthropological research, part historical account - concerns Sachs' account of the life story of John Chavafambira the Manyika healer-diviner who moves from Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to Johannesburg in the early 1920s. The narrative account attempts to parallel the life of John with Shakespeare's Hamlet, recounting John's birth into family of well-known Manyika diviner-herbalists (ngangas), his father's untimely death, and his mother Nesta's marriage to his uncle, Charlie (also an nganga), according to tribal tradition, and John's attempt to deal with his oedipally based neuroses. This is set against the background of migrant labor in 1930s Johannesburg, and the emergence of both legalized racial segregation and African resistance. As both the authors of the two introductions, Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose point out, Black Hamlet is also an important document of South African pre-Apartheid discourse about Africans and their political and economic circumstances before 1948 and raises important questions about cultural difference and psychological intervention. The book is also a rich document in the medical and psychological history of Southern Africa, and can be situated in the larger debates about the "medicalisation of the African body", as well as the relationship between medical and psychological discourse and the discourses of racism and colonialism. The book is in essence Sachs' attempt to argue against racially based classifications of psychic difference by resorting to the "Hamlet" narrative and the universalist assumptions of Freudian psychoanalysis. These concerns make the book an important text for current debates about cultural difference and psychology. Reading Black Hamlet is like reading a detective story, a case history and an epic. It's also like reading a travelogue, or an anthropological work, intermingled with an account of a mythic journey into the exotic and archaic past of "tribal" existence. But finally perhaps Black Hamlet strikes one as a uniquely South African Bildingsroman, one which both captures the uniqueness of the particular colonial configuration and an interestingly modern tale of one man's search for his identity.

The book was written by a European scholar which happnes to understand the pulse of Africa and it's people. The book explores the rich cultural heritage that Western Africa has. The book is great because it avoids the biased of most europeans when they are looking at Africa. The book also mentions that connection of the ashanti to that of ancient Egypt. The book takes you from the ancient kingdom of Benin to the great tooboktu.

This book captures the struggles of some of the real heroes of the anti-apartheid movement, the black lawyers of South Africa. From those who went from the cells of Robben Island to corporate boardrooms, to those who stood side by side with Nelson Mandela in court and now are judges, these amazing individuals used their smarts and savvy to tear down a corrupt system. These courageous individuals often used the very laws the apartheid government had devised to argue that the system was fundamentally corrupt. Although Professor Broun primarily let's his subjects tell their stories, using an oral history approach to their lives, the commentary he adds allows the reader to understand the background of these men and women and how they fit into the South African legal system. As an added bonus, the book contains a message from Nelson Mandela, South Africa's most famous lawyer. A must read for anyone interested in South Africa and for anyone who needs evidence that lawyers aren't always the bad guys.