Book Club 2 –> The Actual True Story of Ahmed & Zarga by Mohamedou Salahi
Wed, Jun 2, 2021 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4)
Tickets ($10-$25) here.
Friendly guided discussion about The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga followed by a conversation with Mohamedou Ould Salahi.
About this event
Featuring Mohamedou Ould Salahi’s THE ACTUAL TRUE STORY OF AHMED AND ZARGA
Conversation and book club will be hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure.
Book Club
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- On the ground in Gaza, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and more
- Our program trained more than 100 journalists
- Calling out fake news and reporting real facts
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June 2nd Wednesday
11am New York | 3pm Nouakchott | 5pm Paris
The author will join the subscribers for the final half hour to chat with members of the book club.
[later] Conversation with Mohamedou Ould Salahi
June 2nd Wednesday – 12.30pm New York |4.30pm Nouakchott | 6.30pm Paris
About the Book
An epic story of a Bedouin family’s survival and legacy amid their changing world in the unforgiving Sahara Desert.
Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. The days of Ahmed and the other families in their nomadic freeg are ruled by the rhythms of changing seasons, the needs of his beloved camel herd, and the rich legends and stories that link his life to centuries of tradition.
But Ahmed’s world is threatened—by the French colonizers just beyond the horizon, the urbanization of the modern world, and a drought more deadly than any his people have known. At first, Ahmed attempts to ignore these forces by concentrating on the ancient routines of herding life. But these routines are broken when a precious camel named Zarga goes missing. Saddling his trusted Laamesh, praying at the appointed hours, and singing the songs of his fathers for strength, Ahmed sets off to recover Zarga on a perilous journey that will bring him face to face with the best and the worst of humanity and test every facet of his Bedouin desert survival skills.
About the Author
Mohamedou Ould Salahi is the son of a Mauritanian camel herder. Known internationally for his bestselling Guantánamo Diary, a searing memoir of the neocolonial hell of the United States’s War on Terror, he returns to the world of his childhood in this poetic, intimate tale woven from the life and the stories of a culture on the brink of disappearing.
