Here are 71 books that The Kebra Nagast fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve worked in many places worldwide, including Native (Amerindian) communities, West Africa, and Jamaica. Each of these experiences has enriched my life and exposed me to the fact that our society is only one of many and, similarly, that all do not share our understanding of reality. Whether visiting Adongo, a Ghanaian shaman who lived on the Burkina Faso border, and watching him go into a trance and describe my spirit, or being in the sweltering dark of a sweat lodge transported by the chanting to another place, to merging with an ancient oak tree, I have been touched by magic. It’s out there.
Over the years, I’ve read hundreds, maybe thousands of books. Many of them have moved, stretched, and entertained me, but there are only a few I wandered into and realized early on that I would not get out of this one unchanged.
The author's inventiveness is astonishing, managing to create not one new world we inhabit but three, all deftly interconnected by the unlikely thread of a simple fable passed from generation to generation. Perhaps most striking to me is the sheer power of the book, its capacity to take us places and share lives we would otherwise never dreamed of.
While the mysterious document—itself a fascinating story within a story—wends its way through a narrative that spans a thousand years, its message is less important than the lives it touches.
And what lives. Each character is drawn so vividly and infused with such essential, defining human traits that we…
On the New York Times bestseller list for over 20 weeks * A New York Times Notable Book * A National Book Award Finalist * Named a Best Book of the Year by Fresh Air, Time, Entertainment Weekly, Associated Press, and many more
“If you’re looking for a superb novel, look no further.” —The Washington Post
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of All the Light We Cannot See, comes the instant New York Times bestseller that is a “wildly inventive, a humane and uplifting book for adults that’s infused with the magic of childhood reading experiences” (The New York Times…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’ve always been driven by curiosity about other cultures. I grew up in Germany but became restless and studied in Italy before moving to the United States. Some of the texts I recommend here I discovered while working on the Norton Anthology of World Literature. When I began this work, I realized just how narrow my own education had been and spent the next several years reading world literature and world culture. Ever since, I’ve been on a mission to expand how culture is taught. This is why I became an academic: to excite students about world culture.
The Chauvet Cave in Southern France is a unique time capsule that gives us a glimpse into the imaginary world of humans living 30,000 years ago.
Dawn of Art is written by those who discovered the cave and recognized it as the earliest masterpiece of human-made art.
What I found most fascinating about the cave as described in this book is the fact that humans decorated it over a period of thousands of years, perhaps as many as two hundred generations.
This is a remarkable achievement of collective artmaking, with one generation passing down the required artistry to the next generation. It made me wonder whether we have lost the reverence for the past that our distant ancestors must have possessed.
An intriguing study of the early evolution of human artistic endeavors focuses on recent discoveries in the Chauvet cave, Stone Age paintings and engravings of animals that are more than thirty thousand years old. BOMC Div. Natural Science Main.
I’ve always been driven by curiosity about other cultures. I grew up in Germany but became restless and studied in Italy before moving to the United States. Some of the texts I recommend here I discovered while working on the Norton Anthology of World Literature. When I began this work, I realized just how narrow my own education had been and spent the next several years reading world literature and world culture. Ever since, I’ve been on a mission to expand how culture is taught. This is why I became an academic: to excite students about world culture.
Ever since her rediscovery in 1912, the statue of Nefertiti has become the best-known face from antiquity—after having been buried for over three thousand years.
But more remarkable than the statue is what it stands for.
The historical queen Nefertiti, along with her husband Akhenaten, built a new city, worshipped a new god, and introduced a new style of art. This experiment, which anticipated monotheism, was so radical that it was subsequently erased from history.
Archeologists had to piece together what Nefertiti did through excavations such as the one that unearthed the world’s most beautiful statue.
Little is known about Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen whose name means "a beautiful woman has come." She was the wife of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who ushered in the dramatic Amarna Age, and she bore him at least six children. She played a prominent role in political and religious affairs, but after Akhenaten's death she apparently vanished and was soon forgotten.
Yet Nefertiti remains one of the most famous and enigmatic women who ever lived. Her instantly recognizable face adorns a variety of modern artifacts, from expensive jewelry to cheap postcards, t-shirts, and bags, all over the world. She has appeared…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I’ve always been driven by curiosity about other cultures. I grew up in Germany but became restless and studied in Italy before moving to the United States. Some of the texts I recommend here I discovered while working on the Norton Anthology of World Literature. When I began this work, I realized just how narrow my own education had been and spent the next several years reading world literature and world culture. Ever since, I’ve been on a mission to expand how culture is taught. This is why I became an academic: to excite students about world culture.
Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize laureate from Nigeria, was steeped in both Yoruba traditions and Greek tragedy as well as Shakespeare.
This combination of influences shaped his adaptation of The Bacchae, by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides.
He brings this play into the modern world of slavery, using White and Black actors. At the same time, he captures the original’s blend of ritual and performance.
This explosive mixture is the most compelling study I know in what theater can do: mobilize bodies in front of an audience. It also shows how theater can bridge vast historical and cultural differences.
Wole Soyinka has translated-in both language and spirit-a great classic of ancient Greek theater. He does so with a poet's ear for the cadences and rhythms of chorus and solo verse as well as a commanding dramatic use of the central social and religious myth. In his hands The Bacchae becomes a communal feast, a tumultuous celebration of life, and a robust ritual of the human and social psyche. "The Bacchae is the rites of an extravagant banquet, a monstrous feast," Soyinka writes. "Man reaffirms his indebtedness to earth, dedicates himself to the demands of continuity, and invokes the energies…
Growing up in the nineties I was a Buffy fan, although that is probably understating things. I have all the Buffy novels, which I read over when waiting for the next series to come out (this was in the days before Netflix!). For me, Buffy had the exact right mix of humour, horror, and deeper complexity, dealing with issues that really impacted me, but in a way that made them accessible. I loved the characters, I loved Buffy herself, I loved her strength and humanity. When I decided to write Raising Hell, I was influenced by Buffy, but there are differences – Ivy is no chosen one, she chose herself.
Sarwat is another brilliant British writer, whose debut novel Devil’s Kiss remains my favourite of his. Its teen heroine, Billi Sangreal is the last of the knight’s templar and lives her life kicking ass and killing monsters, Buffy style. There is a great level of complexity in this novel, with a bad guy that has really remained with me over the years.
Grade Level: 7-9 Age Level: 12-14 Listening Level: Grades 7-9 As the youngest and only female member of the Knights Templar, Bilqis SanGreal grew up knowing she wasn’t normal. Instead of hanging out at the mall or going on dates, she spends her time training as a warrior in her order’s ancient battle against the Unholy. Billi’s cloistered life is blasted apart when her childhood friend, Kay, returns from Jerusalem, gorgeous and with a dangerous chip on his shoulder. He’s ready to slide back into Billi’s life, but she’s met someone new: amber-eyed Mike, who seems to understand her like…
I am a Scottish writer who enjoys travelling and meeting people of different cultures and beliefs. I have always been a fan of adventure stories, particularly those with a strange or supernatural bent. My travels to The Ivory Coast and North Africa, hearing accounts of various witch stories, and encountering strange events and practices firsthand inspired me to write The Witch’s List Trilogy: the first two books published and the third in progress.
If you haven’t discovered Tahir Shah’s work yet, then this is a great place to start. It is about a quest the writer sets himself to discover the lost Solomon’s Mines in Ethiopia after purchasing an old map in a bazaar in Jerusalem. Shah goes off the beaten track venturing to a cliff-face monastery where the monks pull visitors up on a leather rope, to the ruined castles of Gondar, and to the rock-hewn churches at Lalibela. Most striking of all are his descriptions of an illegal gold mine that he visits where the miners dig with their bare hands. The people he meets, the strange circumstances he finds himself in, and the interesting historical and geographical background he provides all contribute to a rich and compelling account.
King Solomon, the Bible’s wisest king, possessed extraordinary wealth. The grand temple he built in Jerusalem was covered in gold from the porch to the inner sanctum, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. Long before H. Rider Haggard’s classic adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines unleashed gold fever more than a century ago, many had sought to find the source of the great king’s wealth. In this new adventure—“a hybrid of Indiana Jones and Herodotus” (Sunday Times, London)—Tahir Shah tries his hand at the quest. Intrigued by a map he finds in a shop not far from the site…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
As a historian with expertise in the early church, Middle Ages, and Reformation, I am obsessed with finding the writings and stories of women of the past. Whenever we discover works written by an unknown or forgotten woman in an archive or historical record, my co-author Marion Taylor and I excitedly email one another: “We rescued another woman!” I study the history of biblical interpretation and the history of women in religion. In most of my books, these two interests intersect—as I write about men throughout history who viewed stories of biblical women through patriarchal lenses and how women themselves have been biblical interpreters, often challenging men’s prevailing views.
Drawing upon her expertise in African American literature, Katherine Clay Bassard writes about the ways Black women poets, novelists, preachers, and orators from the 1700s through the 1900s used biblical themes and images to challenge the dominant culture’s oppression of women and people of color. African American women used a variety of scriptural images, including the Queen of Sheba and the “black but comely” female speaker in the Song of Songs, to argue for Black women’s dignity. Bassard celebrates African American women’s creativity and their shrewd employment of scriptural passages to engage in resistance to racism and sexism.
Black women writers reclaim the sacred text. ""Transforming Scriptures"" is the first sustained treatment of African American women writers' intellectual, even theological, engagements with the book ""Northrup Frye"" referred to as the 'great code' of Western civilization. Katherine Clay Bassard looks at poetry, novels, speeches, sermons, and prayers by Maria W. Stewart, Frances Harper, Hannah Crafts, Harriet E. Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Sherley Anne Williams and discusses how such texts respond as a collective 'literary witness' to the use of the Bible for purposes of social domination. Black women's historic encounters with the Bible were,…
To research her 30 books, dozens of scripts, and hundreds of articles, Sy Montgomery has been deftly undressed by an orangutan in Borneo, worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba, and swum with piranhas, electric eels, pink dolphins, great white sharks and octopuses in various rivers and oceans. She writes for both adults and children, for print and broadcast, in North America and abroad, in an effort to reach as wide an audience as possible at a critical time in human history. “Now is an exciting time to be alive,” she says. “We all have an opportunity, at this critical juncture in human history, to be part of the movement to save our sweet green Earth and all the wonderful creatures who bless our world by sharing it with us.”
This is a classic account of animal behavior by the man who founded the modern field of ethology. His careful and detailed accounts of his time living with graylag geese, crow-like jackdaws, and even cichlid fish are not only scientifically fascinating but filled with wonder and love for each animal as an individual—a creature who loves his or her life as much as we love ours.
2020 Reprint of the 1952 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. The book's title refers to the legendary Seal of Solomon, a ring that supposedly gave King Solomon the power to speak to animals. Lorenz claims that he likewise achieved this feat of communication with several species. He accomplished this by raising them in and around his home and observing their behavior. King Solomon's Ring describes the methods of his investigation, and his resulting findings about animal psychology. Lorenz's findings include the surprisingly refined social system of the common Eurasian jackdaw, the…
I’m a food writer and photographer, and my area of expertise is Jewish cuisine. I'm pretty much a nerd when it comes to cookbooks and I think I own all of the available literature on kosher/Jewish cuisine. I was born in Milan, but I live and work in Santa Monica, California, where I also own a tiny business, Café Lovi. In 2009, I co-founded a website called Labna, the only Jewish/Kosher cooking blog in Italy, specializing in Italian and Jewish cuisine. Since then, I have been spreading the word about the marvels of Jewish food, and Italian Jewish food in particular, in Italy and abroad. Cooking alla Giudia is my English-language debut.
Joan Nathan is really an authority on Jewish cooking and her latest book, King Solomon's Table, is a wonderful compendium of Jewish recipes from all around the world and across the ages. The book manages to be both culturally informative and mouth-watering, thorough to a T, and at the same time approachable also for the less experienced home cooks.
This book makes a great gift for friends – newlyweds in particular - and is an amazing conversation starter as well: it fits equally well on a coffee table as in the kitchen.
A definitive compendium of Jewish recipes from around the globe and across the ages, from the James Beard Award-winning, much-loved cookbook author and “the queen of American Jewish cooking” (Houston Chronicle)
Driven by a passion for discovery, the biblical King Solomon is said to have sent emissaries on land and sea to all corners of the ancient world, initiating a mass cross-pollination of culinary cultures that continues to bear fruit today. With Solomon’s appetites and explorations in mind, in these pages Joan Nathan gathers together more than 170 recipes, from Israel to Italy to India and beyond.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
When I was a child, my father and older brother read Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge comic books. I received them as hand-me-downs and was enchanted by the astonishing adventures of Uncle Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. These illustrated tales of lost civilizations touched a special chord in me that transcended mere enjoyment. Later, I learned that Scrooge’s creator was Carl Barks, a comic artist who was heavily inspired by H. Rider Haggard. It is now clear that Carl Barks inculcated in me, when I was eight years old, my Victorian/Edwardian adventure literary tastes. But it was twenty years later that my literary tastes finally became dedicated to turn-of-the-19th-century literary styles and themes.
I flat-out love Michael Crichton’s 1980 jungle-adventure novel Congo, which uses for inspiration H. Rider Haggard’s 1885 breakout adventure King Solomon’s Mines, the protagonist of which is hunter/trader Allan Quatermain. King Solomon’s Mines was about seeking diamonds in central Africa, as is Congo.
The main character in the book is Karen Ross who is asked by her high-tech company to learn why the previous diamond-seeking expedition vanished. Beyond that, the book perfectly exemplifies the technical thriller Crichton invented in the 1960s with Andromeda Strain, written on two levels at once, the action and adventure layer meshing seamlessly with the layer explaining the world’s most up-to-the-minute sophisticated technology.
Note that the last sentence of Congo reads: “The projected intersection point now marked a field of black quatermain lava with an average depth of eight hundred meters.” The name “Quatermain” is sufficiently close to the geological term “quaternary”…
The search for diamonds, a crucial scientific breakthrough and a mythical ruined city set off this adventure into the heart of the Congolese jungle.
The American expedition is led by Karen Ross, desperate to find her husband and recover the data he found before he disappeared. But there are other teams trying to get there first, and the way is strewn with life-threatening dangers -- plane crashes, civil wars and a dormant volcano awoken by dormant explosives.
In the tradition of Arthur Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard, Congo is a novel of high adventure from the master of the…
