Algeria Books

Algeria (Country Guide)

Anthony Ham, Anthony Sattin, Nana Luckham

Amazon Price: $16.31 List Price: $23.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Lonely Planet Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $12.50

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Editorial Review:

Discover Algeria

Shiver as the sun rises over Assekrem, the mountains at the 'End of the World,' p188
Rock the Casbah in Algiers, one of the finest coastal sites on the Mediterranean, p92
Explore the best Roman ruins in Africa, and the oldest rock art in the world, p132, p80
Tie your turban like a Yuareg and be swept up in the magic of the world's greatest desert, p68

In This Guide:

The only English-language guidebook to the Sahara's most beautiful nation.
Special chapter on Traveling in the Sahara, taking you into the depths of the desert.
Visit lonelyplanet.com for up-to-the-minute reviews, updates and traveler suggestions.

The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

Isabelle Eberhardt

Amazon Price: $10.36 List Price: $12.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Interlink Books Amazon Marketplace: 29 new & used starting at $6.25

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

An amazing life, a one-of-a-kind diary 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

The unusual life and bizarre death of Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) remains a mystery. Dressing as a man, she traveled through Saharan Africa and drowned -- in the desert -- at age 27, which only emphasizes the uniqueness of the written record she left behind. Unlike the works of other desert adventurers such as Sir Richard Burton and T. E. Lawrence, Eberhardt's diary never clarifies why she endured these hardships, or why her life was such a complex tangle that there was an attempt on her life shortly before she drowned. Her unsettling story of gender deception, unaccompanied travel in Islamic society, and unresolved death is so far out of cultural norms that her story is seldom told, and makes this diary all the more intriguing.

Editorial Review:

In her short life Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) came to be known as the ultimate enigma and representative of everything that seemed dangerous in nineteenth century society. Born the illegitimate daughter of an aristocratic Russian emigree she was a cross-dresser and sensualist, an experienced drug-taker and a transgressor of boundaries: a European reborn in the desert as an Arab and Muslim, a woman who reinvented herself as a man, wandering the Sahara on horseback. A profoundly lonely individual for all her numerous sexual adventures, she roused controversy and was loved and hated in equal measure. A mysterious attempt was made on her life and even her eventual death was ambiguous: she drowned in the desert at the age of twenty-seven.

Algeria (Bradt Travel Guide)

Johathan Oakes

Amazon Price: $20.51 List Price: $26.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Bradt Travel Guides Amazon Marketplace: 36 new & used starting at $15.26

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Interesting Edition 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

It's an interesting and informative edition and I will try some more Bradt travel book to see if I like them as well. I most use Lonely Planet but am open to new guide books.

Editorial Review:

This new Bradt guide will be the first to focus on the renascent Algeria and bring out the many features of this beguiling North African country. The attraction of Algeria lies in its fascinating mix of cultures. The towns ooze French charm with churches crowning vine-covered hills and cafés lining the streets; however, a short trip will bring you to a mud-brick town or Sahara oasis that echoes a muezzin’s call and where Europe feels a world away. The guide covers fascinating UNESCO World Heritage sites, Al Qata of Beni Hammad, Djemila, M’zab Vakkey and the Roman sites of Timgad and Tipasa, all free from thronging crowds.

The important legacy of the French colonial period, including Sidi Bel Abbes, home of the French Foreign Legion, is detailed for travelers to appreciate modern-day Algeria. Additionally, all the practical details expected from a Bradt guide are covered.

Algeria-Tunisia (Michelin National Maps)

Amazon Price: $7.30 List Price: $7.24 Usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks By: Michelin Maps Amazon Marketplace: 7 new & used starting at $2.90

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American Journals

Albert Camus

List Price: $12.95 By: Spear Marlowe & Company Amazon Marketplace: 6 new & used starting at $1.43

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Treasure for American Camus-philes 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Educated Americans share a self-consciousness, a painful awareness that we descendants of mere colonists are probably at best nouveau-riche; in short, that we are not Europeans. Indeed, we struggle to hide our secret gratitude when a European friend--particularly a Frenchman--even shows interest in us. Thus it is a great joy to open these pages and find that one of the greatest products of French letters took the time to set down his thoughts about us and our country. Camus wrote these notes during a lecture tour to this country while he was in his thirties, a time when he was first coming to international attention and when he was deep in preparation of some of his most important literary works. Camus reveals a critical but endearingly tender fascination with our country, with its often crass culture, with its sometimes seemingly naive optimism, and with its lack of awareness of its own inestimable riches. At the same time, serious students of his work will discover the first inklings of insights and ideas that would work their way into his major writings.

Camus kept an extensive literary journal during his life, a very large portion of which (including this small piece) is available in English translation. His journal is deeply insightful and often tender and personal, but written in an elegant and well organized narrative (suggesting his anticipation that his journal would someday be read by the masses). Anyone who loves Camus will be interested in this book, and any American Camus-phile will be enraptured and gratified by it.

Sahara Man: Travelling with the Tuareg

Jeremy Keenan

By: John Murray Publishers Ltd Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $5.84

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Editorial Review:

Jeremy Keenan travelled to Algeria in search of the Tuareg, the fearsome indigo-veiled nomads of the Central Sahara with whom he had lived as a young anthropologist. A chance meeting set him on his way to the Tuareg traditional fortress, the vast mountainous area of Ahaggar, in the tracks of bandits, his tent pitched beside caves decorated with pre-historic paintings. Here he discovered that the Tuareg, who had learned to survive as tourist guides after the horrors of Algeria's war of independence, were now being starved out of their livelihood by the violence in the north. This vivid and fascinating book takes us into the heart of the Sahara and into the lives of the Tuareg, into Keenan's own past and into the fearful history and present day experience of Algeria itself.

The Passionate Nomad: The Diary of Isabelle Eberhardt (Virago/Beacon Traveler Series)

Isabelle Eberhardt

List Price: $7.95 By: Beacon Pr Amazon Marketplace: 17 new & used starting at $3.83

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Inside Algeria

List Price: $45.00 By: Aperture Amazon Marketplace: 32 new & used starting at $1.82

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"These images, snatched by Graffenried without having been aimed, for to raise a camera to one's eye is to put one's life in danger, testify to a truth that no one is showing, that of daily fear and furor that you won't see on the six o'clock news."--Robert Delpire, Director of the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris, from his Foreword

Michael von Graffenried, an award-winning Swiss photographer, covertly photographed civil strife in Algeria from the early 1990s through 1998. In a land where Islamic terrorists have executed over sixty journalists and photographers in the last seven years, Graffenried's very survival is remarkable. His extraordinary accomplishment, however, is these photographs, which form a composite of Algeria that is more whole than the nation itself, fractured by one segment of the population in favor of democracy and another in favor of an Islamic state.

Graffenried makes his pictures secretly, using an antique Widelux panoramic camera with a hidden lens. He would risk his picture and his life were he to raise a camera to his eyes. Instead, he shoots from the hip, with his hands clasped over what looks like a pair of binoculars. In learning to frame his photographs without a viewfinder, he opens himself to a rich array of surprise and irony in his pictures, and reveals a society that has been concealed from the international community for nearly seven years.

Sahara Overland: A Route and Planning Guide

Chris Scott

List Price: $29.95 By: Trailblazer Publications Amazon Marketplace: 13 new & used starting at $9.98

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Sahara Overland is the first new guidebook to fully cover off-road travel in the Sahara for nearly 20 years. Information includes: where and when to go; documentation and route options; selecting, preparing and equipping the most suitable 4WDs, trucks and motorcycles - and even bicycles! Maintaining and repairing these vehicles in the field; desert driving and riding techniques are also covered. There are chapters on health, survival and navigation including the critical use of GPS; hiring of guides, climate, landforms, pre-historic art sites, peoples and languages. Sahara Overland also details, kilometre by kilometre, 30 off-road itineraries with hundreds of GPS waypoints in Mauritania, Morocco, Mali, Libya, Tunisia as well as outlining desert routes in less accessible or dangerous areas like the Western Desert of Egypt, Algeria, Niger and northern Chad. This book will also be the first to address undertaking organised tours in the Sahara: choosing a reliable operator, where is the best place for cameling in the dunes, trekking in the mountains, experiencing nomadic lifestyles, organising your own a la carte itineraries, what it costs and what to ask for. Visit the www.sahara-overland.com website from June 1999 for regularly updated Sahara travel information and further details of the book.

North African Villages: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia (World Folk Architecture Series)

Norman F. Carver

List Price: $27.95 By: Documan Press Ltd Amazon Marketplace: 4 new & used starting at $66.62

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Hard to find pictures 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This book illustrates northern African vernacular architecture well and explains it with a clear text. It is a picture book by an architectural photographer rather than a scholarly history or technical architectural analysis. The pictures are beautifully printed, but not as lush as in an art-photo book. The book's value is that pictures and explanations of this material are hard to find in other sources. I don't know why it is out of print, since it has no competition and the material does not date. The photographs are mostly black and white with some color.