Their Heads are Green and their Hands are Blue is an engaging collection of eight travel essays. Except for one essay on Central America, all of these pieces are concerned with locations in the Hindu, Buddhist, or Islamic worlds. A superb and observant traveler, Paul Bowles was a born wanderer who found pleasure in the inaccessible and who cheerfully endures the concomitant hardships with a matter-of-fact humor.

These essays provide us with Paul Bowles' characteristic insightfulness and bring us closer to a world we frequently hear about, but often find difficult to...

This is an engrossing account of ethnographic field work carried out in Lupupa Ngye, a Basongye village of central Zaire. The author's general aim was to know Basongye society and culture, and also to study music and the other arts. This volume provides a vivid descriptive sketch of the daily lives of the villagers and an understanding of their belief system. Professor Merriam's field-work in Lupupa Ngye was intensive and capable; his report on it is illuminating.

In the 1860s, as America waged civil war, several thousand African Americans sought greater freedom by emigrating to the fledgling nation of Liberia. While some argued that the new black republic represented disposal rather than emancipation, a few intrepid men set out to explore their African home. African-American Exploration in West Africa collects the travel diaries of James L. Sims, George L. Seymour, and Benjamin J. K. Anderson, who explored the territory that is now Liberia and Guinea between 1858 and 1874. These remarkable diaries reveal the wealth and beauty of Africa in striking...

An American Library Association Notable Book

When he proposed to his girlfriend, Tom Zoellner gave what is expected of every American man--a diamond engagement ring. But when the relationship broke apart, he was left with a used diamond that began to haunt him. His obsession carried him around the globe; from the "blood diamond" rings of Africa; to the sweltering polishing factories of India; to mines above the Arctic Circle; to illegal diggings in Brazil; to the London headquarters of De Beers, the secretive global colossus that has dominated the industry for more than a...

The village of Nambonkaha in the Ivory Coast is a place where electricity hasn't yet arrived, where sorcerers still conjure magic, where the tok-tok sound of women pounding corn fills the morning air like a drumbeat. As Sarah Erdman enters the social fold of the village as a Peace Corps volunteer, she finds that Nambonkaha is also a place where AIDS threatens and poverty is constant, where women suffer the indignities of patriarchal customs, and where children work like adults while still managing to dream. Lyrical and topical, Erdman's beautiful debut captures the astonishing spirit of an...

Join Steven Keenan on three separate West African journeys. Catch a ride on a four-thousand-mile hitchhiking trek across West Africa at the peak of the cold war. Return in 1998 with a refugee boy who, following medical treatment in the United States, is returning to his family in Ivory Coast. Visit a post-war Liberia that westerners rarely encounter and the village Keenan served years earlier as a Peace Corps teacher.

Witness...

In 1947, after four years with the Navy in the South Pacific, Tom Larson returned to the University of California at Berkeley just in time to become a member of the University's Africa Expedition. He was to collect mammal and reptile specimens for The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology of the University.

With Professor Charles Camp, the paleontologist leader of the expedition, they explored Doris Crater in the remote Kaokoveld of Nambia. Then Tom joined Professor Edwin Loeb in Ovamboland where he filmed 115 Kung Bushmen. From there he traveled alone, hunting for specimens...