“From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.”

—Alberto Manguel

In an age where we're inundated with words, it's easy to take them for granted; to forget how precious they can be. Joshua Hammer's book, “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu,” details the story of Abdel Kader Haidara, a collector and scholar who spent much of the 1980s gathering and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were disappearing into obscurity and decay. In 2012, when Al Qaeda militants seized the area and threatened to destroy the irreplaceable collection, Haidara and a network of brave librarians conducted a “brazen heist worthy of 'Ocean's Eleven'” and snuck all 350,000 volumes out of the city.