“From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers,and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell meits story.”
—Alberto Manguel
In an age where we're inundated with words, it's easy to takethem for granted; to forget how precious they can be. JoshuaHammer's book, “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu,” details thestory of Abdel Kader Haidara, a collector and scholar who spentmuch of the 1980s gathering and salvaging tens of thousands ofancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were disappearing intoobscurity and decay. In 2012, when Al Qaeda militants seized thearea and threatened to destroy the irreplaceable collection,Haidara and a network of brave librarians conducted a “brazen heistworthy of 'Ocean's Eleven'” and snuck all 350,000 volumes out ofthe city.
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Paul Wilson
Paul Wilson is the editor-in-chief of BenefitsPRO Magazine and BenefitsPRO.com. He has covered the insurance industry for more than a decade, including stints at Retirement Advisor Magazine and ProducersWeb.
