Drought is a natural disaster; starvation is a man-made tragedy. Preventing the first can go a long way to alleviating the second, but not without the political will, as Ian Mathie makes clear in this gripping memoir of the 1974 humanitarian crisis in Ethiopia. Dust of the Danakil is a true story of an ill-conceived project in the violent, drought-stricken Danakil region of Ethiopia. The author, sent by UK government pen-pushers to harness seasonal flood water and turn the notoriously aggr...

West Africa in the 1970s: volatile years immediately following independence brought the author in contact with a number of Presidents, five Kings, two Emperors, dozens of village and tribal chiefs and a succession of extraordinary people. Circumstances contrived to place him at dinner with four heads of state whose rule had immense impact, positive and negative, on their countries and on West Africa: Mobutu of Zaire, Traoré of Mali, Senghor of Senegal and Eyadema of Togo. The insights into...

Sorcery is a fact of life in many African societies; the supernatural is taken for granted. When Ian Mathie came across an elderly couple, sick and abandoned in an inhospitable part of West Africa, he ignored the warning signs of witchcraft and frightening encounters with an apparition to coax them back to health. Thus began a remarkable association with one small and remote village whose subsistence living Ian was able to help boost with the unlikely intervention of a Paris parfumier, a V...

An uninvited 'ferret' from Whitehall, dark deeds in the 'heart of darkness', escape from bloody terror and black magic - a true story that shocks the sensibilities and staggers the imagination... West Africa is the setting for Man in a Mud Hut, an intriguing story of witchcraft, wizardry, water resources and Whitehall bureaucracy. It is the gripping true account of a clash of cultures and what can happen when preconceived western ideas collide with the raw reality that is rural Africa. Man...

Sent to the tropical jungle of central Africa to teach villagers how to get clean drinking water, Ian Mathie lived for some time in a village deep in the forest. The village elders and witch doctor, together with the local political agent, persuaded him to foster Abélé, an orphan from the community who had been ostracized because her parents were considered sorcerers. In tribal societies such as the one where Ian was living, girls marry young and men are expected to pay a dowry, or bride p...

A Vintage Shorts Travel Selection"I arrived to find that this was a war of walkers."So writes Anjan Sundaram about his journey into the heart of the war-torn Central African Republic in 2013. As soon as he arrived in the city of Gaga, he witnessed hundreds of people fleeing their homes for parts unknown, afraid to be one of the many victims of the Seleka rebel force that had taken over the country that year, or the anti-balaka militias that had sprung up in retalia...

Due to the sheer number of Wicca 101 books on the market, many newcomers to the Craft find themselves piecing together their Wiccan education by reading a chapter from one book, a few pages from another. Rather than depending on snippets of wisdom to build a new faith, Wicca for Beginners provides a solid foundation to Wicca without limiting the reader to one tradition or path.Embracing both the spiritual and the practical, Wicca for Beginners is a primer on the p...

A “meticulously researched and comprehensive” (Financial Times) history of the devastating war in the heart of Africa’s CongoAt the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of western Europe. It borders nine other nations, and since 1996 it has been racked by a brutal war in which millions have died. In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, renowned political activist and researcher Jason K. Stearns has written a compelling and deeply reported...

“There are two problems for our species’ survival—nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, ” says Noam Chomsky in this new book on the two existential threats of our time and their points of intersection since World War II.While a nuclear strike would require action, environmental catastrophe is partially defined by willful inaction in response to human-induced climate change. Denial of the facts is only half the equation. Other contributing factors include extreme techniques for...

Hope lives in Africa. Twenty years after the genocide that left Rwanda in ruins, Giller Prize-winning author Will Ferguson travels deep into the once-mysterious "Land of a Thousand Hills" with his friend and cohort Jean-Claude Munyezamu, a man who escaped Rwanda just months before the killings began.From the legendary Source of the Nile to Dian Fossey's famed "gorillas in the mist," from innovative refugee camps along the Congolese border to the world's most escapable priso...

A first-rate team of experts offers compelling documentation on the pervasive influence global warming alarmism now has on almost every aspect of our society-from national defense, law, trade, and politics to health, education, and international development.

In Faery Seership the truths we seek can only be found within ourselves, within nature, and within our relationships to nature. At the center of the Faery Tradition lies the Tree of Enchantment: the symbol for these relationships and for the threefold life of humanity. At each level of the tree, there are attending spirit forces that vary from beings of light to beings of shadow, from the ancestors of humanity to the architects of form and nature, from the destiny of our planet to the crea...