The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

In the arid reaches of Mali, a quiet archivist named Abdel Kader Haidara embarked on a monumental quest in the 1980s: to salvage tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts from crumbling desert trunks, preserving Timbuktu's priceless intellectual heritage. He meticulously collected these invaluable texts, aiming to house them in a magnificent library. However, this crucial mission took a perilous turn when Al Qaeda militants seized control of Timbuktu, threatening to destroy the very history Haidara had dedicated his life to protecting. What followed was an audacious, covert operation, likened to Ocean's Eleven, as Haidara, against all odds, organized a network of ordinary citizens to smuggle over 350,000 volumes out of the city. This gripping non-fiction narrative by Joshua Hammer chronicles Haidara's transformation from a mild-mannered scholar into one of the world's most unlikely and heroic smugglers, demonstrating the extraordinary lengths to which individuals will go to safeguard culture and knowledge in the face of extremism.