A side effect of having a baby on the way is the sudden need to declutter and make space for a nursery. Our box room is over-run with books and I've been taking a long hard look at them - for instance, do I really need a copy of Aristotle's THE POLITICS from an undergraduate philosophy course sixteen years ago?! And so on...

This has also reminded me just how many books I still want to read that are lurking quietly on the shelves. I've just pulled out ten this morning that I'd like to prioritize over the next few months (all descriptions taken from dustjackets):

THE POLITICS OF MEMORY: TRUTH, HEALING & SOCIAL JUSTICE - edited by Ifi Amadiume & Abdullahi An-Na'im
"This book brings together a distinguished group of scholars, policy-makers, justice workers and social activists...in a creative engagement with issues of human rights in relation to truth, healing and social justice, they look at how people rebuild broken communities and the tensions between reconciliation and social justice in post-conflict situations."

MIMI AND TOUTOU GO FORTH - Giles Foden
"At the start of World War One, German warships controlled Lake Tanganyika in Central Africa. The British had no naval craft at all upon 'Tanganjikasee', as the Germans called it. This mattered: it was the longest lake in the world and of great strategic advantage. In June 1915, a force of 28 men was despatched from Britain on a vast journey. Their orders were to take control of the lake. To reach it, they had to haul two motorboats with the unlikely names of Mimi and Toutou through the wilds of the Congo..."

THE SOCCER WAR - Ryszard Kapuscinski
"In 1964, renowned reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski was appointed by the Polish Press Agency as its only foreign correspondent, and for the next ten years he was 'responsible' for fifty countries. He befriended Che Guevara in Bolivia, Salvador Allende in Chile and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. He reported on the fighting that broke out between Honduras and El Salvador in 1969 after their matches to determine which one of them would qualify for the 1970 World Cup. By the time he returned to Poland he had witnessed twenty-seven revolutions and coups and been sentenced to death four times. The Soccer War is Kapuscinski's story, his eyewitness account of the emergence of the Third World."

FACING MT. KENYA - Jomo Kenyatta
"Jomo Kenyatta, the grandson of a Kikuyu medicine man, was among the foremost leaders of African nationalism and one of the great men of the modern world. In the 1930's he studied at the London School of Economics and took his degree in anthropology...one result of which is this now famous account of his own Kikuyu tribe."

HOUSE OF STONE - Christina Lamb
"One bright morning Nigel Hough, one of the few remaining white farmers in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, received the news he was dreading – a crowd were at the gate demanding he surrender his home and land. To his horror, his family's much-loved nanny Aqui was at the head of the violent mob that then stole his homestead and imprisoned him in an outhouse..."

WEST WITH THE NIGHT - Beryl Markham

"Did you read Beryl Markham's book, West with the Night? I knew her fairly well in Africa and never would have suspected that she could and would put pen to paper except to write in her flyer's log book. As it is, she has written so well, and marvelously well, that I was completely ashamed of myself as a writer. I felt that I was simply a carpenter with words, picking up whatever was furnished on the job and nailing them together and sometimes making an okay pig pen. But [she] can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves writers. The only parts of it that I know about personally, on account of having been there at the time and heard the other people's stories, are absolutely true . . . I wish you would get it and read it because it is really a bloody wonderful book."--Ernest Hemingway

SERETSE & RUTH - Wilf & Trish Mbanga
"When the young Seretse Khama, heir to the kingdom of the Bamangwato, was sent by his uncles to read law at Oxford in 1945, no one could foresee that he would fall in love with an English woman - and plunge Bechuanaland (now Botswana) into deep crisis."

THE KANGA & THE KANGAROO COURT: REFLECTIONS ON THE RAPE TRIAL OF JACOB ZUMA - Mmatshilo Motsei
"This book is inspired by the courage of a young woman, known variously as ‘Khwezi’ and ‘the complainant’, who took a principled decision to lay a charge of rape against Jacob Zuma, a man who was to her a father-figure, a family friend, a comrade, and the Deputy President of South Africa."

A MONTH AND A DAY: A DETENTION DIARY - Ken Saro-Wiwa
"Ken Saro-Wiwa was an outspoken critic of the Nigerian government - he accuses them of genocide - and of the international oil companies, notably Shell, which he holds responsible for the ecological destruction and terrible industrial pollution of his homelands. Yet, despite a brutal government campaign against the Ogoni, he always advocated peaceful and non-violent protest. Eventually Ken Saro-Wiwa was released as a result of intense international pressure, But in May 1994 he was arrested again and remained in prison until his death."

KINSHIP: A FAMILY'S JOURNEY IN AFRICA & AMERICA - Philippe Wamba
"As Wamba illustrates with poignant, sometimes amusing detail, American blacks and black Africans are on very different wavelengths, and their views of each other are often as romanticized, stereotyped, and culturally misapprehended as those on the better documented spectrum of white American and European perceptions of Africa."--Alex Shoumatoff

It should take me a while to read those in between the mounds of fiction, but I'm looking forward to them all. In the meantime, anyone like a copy of Aristotle's THE POLITICS?!