Here are 100 books that The Hand on My Scalpel fans have personally recommended if you like
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My passion for Africa came from my college days at Tennessee Temple University. Each year, the university would sponsor a missionary conference, and I always found myself drawn to the African exhibits. I am particularly passionate about missionary work in Africa and the challenges that it presents. Africa is a vast and splendid place with cultures as diverse as the climates in which they live. My research has only deepened my great love for this continent and the precious people who live there.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Too Small to Ignore. Dr. Wes Stafford, the son of missionaries, wrote amusing anecdotes of his boyhood adventures in a West African village. Also in the book, Dr. Stafford, head of Compassion International, writes of the challenges that children in Africa often face. This book is inspiring and captivating to read and will leave the reader with a greater understanding not only of the beautiful country of Africa but also of the compelling need to champion all the children of the world.
The time has come, argues Dr. Wess Stafford, for a major paradigm shift: Children are too important and too intensely loved by God to be left behind or left to chance. Children belong to all of us and we are compelled to intervene on their behalf. We must invest in children–all across the world. There are strategic, persuasive reasons–beyond love and kindness–to invest in children. Today they may snuggle into your lap, if you let them. But tomorrow you may not have access to them in the corridors of power they might occupy. Now is the time to shape the…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
My passion for Africa came from my college days at Tennessee Temple University. Each year, the university would sponsor a missionary conference, and I always found myself drawn to the African exhibits. I am particularly passionate about missionary work in Africa and the challenges that it presents. Africa is a vast and splendid place with cultures as diverse as the climates in which they live. My research has only deepened my great love for this continent and the precious people who live there.
I loved this book! It is an engaging inspirational novel of two people who love God and answer His call to go to Africa as missionaries. The author does a wonderful job of putting the reader right there in the scene. I especially loved the way the characters at times struggled in their faith but always sought God's will. This is a really great book that will help to strengthen the reader's faith and walk with God. Harriet Michael was born in Nigeria, West Africa. The Whisper of the Palms, based on the love story of her parents, offers an authentic insight into a missionary’s life in Africa.
Africa beckoned ... but would she have to go alone? Growing up in the foothills of North Carolina, Ali Blackwell dreamed of going places she had only seen in books and magazines. She lived in a small farmhouse that her farmer father had built with his own hands, and the prospects of ever leaving her little town of Union Mills appeared unlikely. Her family barely scraped by on the sale of produce grown by her dad and brothers and the supplemental income they earned working at the nearby textile mill. Kyle Edmonds, a few years her elder, lived in a…
My passion for Africa came from my college days at Tennessee Temple University. Each year, the university would sponsor a missionary conference, and I always found myself drawn to the African exhibits. I am particularly passionate about missionary work in Africa and the challenges that it presents. Africa is a vast and splendid place with cultures as diverse as the climates in which they live. My research has only deepened my great love for this continent and the precious people who live there.
I found Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glorya compelling and interesting book about Dr. Gess and his work as a doctor in Africa. Although he treated various medical conditions, his work focused on the plight of the blind in Africa. This dedicated Christian doctor brought not only physical healing to his patients, but also spiritual help and guidance to his patients and their families. The book includes many photographs of the events being described. By end of the book, I had a new awareness of the physical and spiritual needs of the people in this vast continent.
The problem is not with the actions young women take but with the toxic, sexist conditions they are responding to.
Tanenbaum found, based on six years of interviews with young people ages 14-30, that young women are navigating a culture littered with gendered dress codes, revenge porn, and sexually explicit…
My passion for Africa came from my college days at Tennessee Temple University. Each year, the university would sponsor a missionary conference, and I always found myself drawn to the African exhibits. I am particularly passionate about missionary work in Africa and the challenges that it presents. Africa is a vast and splendid place with cultures as diverse as the climates in which they live. My research has only deepened my great love for this continent and the precious people who live there.
I found this book helpful because my books are set in Angola. This travel guide gave specific details about the terrain, climate, and geographic challenges of life in Angola. A travel guide such as this one is invaluable to anyone considering a short-term trip to Africa. This particular book even offered help with conversational language terms and gave thorough and interesting information that helped give my books the authenticity I wanted.
Angola is changing at a rapid pace. This new edition reflects the continued resurgence of tourism following years of conflict. While no city comes close to matching Luanda for sheer size, venture outside the capital and you will find everything from frontier diamond towns to relaxed beach resorts. The country offers over 1,000km of unspoilt beaches, excellent fishing and some of the best surfing waves in the world. Rain forests and bird spotting opportunities abound. Whether business traveller or pioneering adventurer, Angola provides all the practical and background information you'll need to tackle this vast country. It also acts as…
Becoming immersed in oral cultures was a massive wake-up call for me! Taught to privilege the written over the spoken word, as most literate people are, it took me years of living in the Pacific Islands, travelling regularly to their remoter parts, to appreciate that people who could neither read nor write could retain huge amounts of information in their heads – and explain it effortlessly. We undervalue orality because we are literate, but that is an irrational prejudice. And as I have discovered from encounters with oral traditions throughout Australia and the Pacific, India, and northwest Europe, not only are oral traditions extensive but may be thousands of years old.
The second edition of this book is the one I read, more than thirty years ago, and it taught me a respect for oral traditions that I had not then fully rationalized. Literate people often disparage those who can neither read nor write, suggesting they could not possibly have any useful knowledge to contribute to a literate world. This is what I have termed ‘the arrogance of literacy’ and is something Vansina, following decades of familiarity with African oral traditions, shows to be baseless. Orally communicated knowledge was key to survival and to understanding one’s place in the world. This is a pioneering study that should never be forgotten.
Jan Vansina's 1961 book, Oral Tradition, was hailed internationally as a pioneering work in the field of ethno-history. Originally published in French, it was translated into English, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Hungarian. Reviewers were unanimous in their praise of Vansina's success in subjecting oral traditions to intense functional analysis.
Now, Vansina-with the benefit of two decades of additional thought and research-has revised his original work substantially, completely rewriting some sections and adding much new material. The result is an essentially new work, indispensable to all students and scholars of history, anthropology, folklore, and ethno-history who are concerned with the transmission…
I’m a closet historian who’s always been fascinated by the power of novels to enable readers to travel in time and space and stand in the shoes of historical characters–blending imagination and enlightenment. As a scholar, I’ve worked to uncover women’s unknown and secret histories–histories of subversion, disruption, and humor. As a South African who grew up under apartheid, I passionately believe that if we don’t confront history, we’re doomed to repeat its nastier passages. As a writer, I’ve published a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice that showed me how immersion in another historical era can enable us to grapple with truths about our current societies.
One of the best examples of “history from below” I’ve read.
It tells the well-known story of David Livingstone’s last journey–how after he died in tropical Africa, his servants marched his body across the continent to the port of Dar es Salaam, so that it could be shipped back to England and buried there with appropriate pomp and reverence. This forms the framework for an utterly original novel that presents this epic trek from the perspective of two of Livingstone’s slave servants: his feisty Muslim cook, Halima, who brings her gossipy sardonic perspective to the enterprise, and his devout and pompous body servant Joseph, a Christian determined to do right by his master.
This work sparkles with energy and humor, as well as presenting a fresh perspective on a well-trodden path.
ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 2020 FICTION HIGHLIGHTS: Petina Gappah's epic journey through nineteenth-century Africa is 'engrossing, beautiful and deeply imaginative.' (Yaa Gyasi)
This is the story of the body of Bwana Daudi, the Doctor, the explorer David Livingstone - and the sixty-nine men and women who carried his remains for 1,500 miles so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own country.
The wise men of his age say Livingstone blazed into the darkness of their native land leaving a track of light behind where white men who followed him could tread in perfect safety.…
Crossing is a vividly human re-imagining of the love, sacrifices, and accomplishments that two Chinese brothers - American Immigrants - experience as they travel to California to build the Transcontinental Railroad.
Having been born in Fiji and lived in Cyprus, Austria, and Nigeria, I have always had a strong sense of wanderlust and a keen eye for my surroundings – both natural and man-made. I’ve always been open to "what might happen next," which makes sense as to why I became a professional storyteller – an actor, writer, and director. I am thrilled by not knowing what lies ahead, and I’ve always felt there is possible adventure at every turn in life, which is why I am so fond of the evocative and thrilling books I have listed.
Set in the fictitious West African country of Kinjanja, the hapless exploits of an ill-fated British High Commission delegate in the wrong place at the wrong time left me exhausted from laughing out loud so hard.
It’s a sliding-door adventure thriller about the comic yet tragic downfall of a good man trying to do his best in the face of unrelenting adversity. I read it while living in Nigeria (Kinjanja is a cross between Ghana and Nigeria) and found it to be the perfect fusion of exotic location and sense of place, combined with a headlong descent into mayhem and madness.
A funny first novel about the misadventures surrounding Morgan Leafy, a young, overweight, oversexed British diplomat in West Africa. The book won the 1981 Whitbread Literary Award and the 1982 Somerset Maugham Award.
Once upon a time, I didn’t know any stories from Africa. I found one, and it stirred me to my core. I found others and read them to my children. These were oral stories that had been trapped between the covers of books. One day, I discovered the oral tradition – stories told as they were originally heard. They had been liberated from the page and flew into my heart. A storyteller was born in me. I went on my own journey to collect stories in Ghana. I now tell stories from traditions around the world.
I found this book moving. On one level it is the mythology of the planet we know as Venus, from the perspective of the Maasai people. On another level it speaks to the condition of age and loneliness. And I love the illustrations, which take the reader into the landscape of East Africa and show us the humanity of the old man. Like all the best tales, it can be enjoyed by both children and adults.
Seaching the sky for a familiar star, an old man encounters a mysterious boy, Kileken. As he comes to love the boy as a son, he agrees to let him keep the one thing he owns: a secret.
I write about unusual places, unusual people, and unusual stories. Places, people, and stories that are rough, different, authentic, often forgotten, full of troubled history and a magical present.
Set in an unnamed and quintessential African country that after independence is descending into chaos, this is one of the most unforgettable books about Africa, but also often classified as one of the best novels of the English language of the last 40 years. A portrait that will never be dated, written in a Conrad type of dry yet very rich style, the Africa of Nobel laureate Naipaul is not for those who want to see things through rose-tinted lenses, but is a profoundly human portrait where the there is no space for clichés.
Set in an unnamed African country, V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River is narrated by Salim, a young man from an Indian family of traders long resident on the coast. He believes The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it. So he has taken the initiative; left the coast; acquired his own shop in a small, growing city in the continent's remote interior and is selling sundries - little more than this and that, really - to the natives.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
I'm a world-class underwater explorer, writer, photographer, speaker,
and filmmaker. A pioneer of technical rebreather diving, I have led expeditions
into icebergs in Antarctica, volcanic lava tubes, and submerged caves
worldwide. As a child, these fanciful places were just a part of my wildest
dreams. The Aquanaut tells the story of how I turned my imaginative journeys
into reality and became a celebrated underwater explorer.
When Anne Innis Dagg was a little girl, she longed to study giraffes in Africa. Many obstacles including gender discrimination stood in her way, so she hide her female identity to get a job and then traveled to Africa on her own. Anne fulfilled her dream and became the world's leading scientific expert on giraffes, inspiring the next generation of women scientists to pursue their dreams.
When Anne Innis Dagg saw her first giraffe in a zoo she was entranced. So much so that a love for giraffes shaped her whole life. She decided at a young age that she would one day travel from her home in Canada to study giraffes in their natural environment in Africa.
After overcoming obstacles based on her gender, Anne succeeded in fulfilling her dream in 1956 and became the world's leading scientific expert on giraffes.
In The Girl Who Loved Giraffes, Kathy Stinson and Francois Thisdale have created a beautiful picture book that captures the dramatic story of Anne's…
