Churchill-by Ashley Jackson

From the Land of Pashtuns to the Land of Maa: Memoir (2013) Kenyan-born Khan traces his father’s journey from his village in India (now within Pakistan) to Kenya in 1929, alone, at the age of 18 after a family dispute.

Here is the story of migration, of Khan’s father and other Pashtuns (mainly from the Punjab Province of Pakistan), to the Maasai tribal lands in rural Kenya. His father, Juma Khan, raised 18 children from two wives: the first was a Maasai woman who assumed a Muslim name after marriage, and the second was the daughter of a Pakistani father and Maasai mother. It was a time of colonial rule when mixed marriages – and children from them – were regarded with discrimination.

Now restored to print with a new Foreword by Philip Gourevitch and an Afterword by the author, The Village of Waiting is a frank, moving, and vivid account of contemporary life in West Africa. Stationed as a Peace Corps instructor in the village of Lavié (the name means “wait a little more”) in tiny and underdeveloped Togo, George Packer reveals his own schooling at the hands of an unforgettable array of townspeople―peasants, chiefs, charlatans, children, market women, cripples, crazies, and those who, having lost or given up much of their traditional identity and fastened their hopes on “development,” find themselves trapped between the familiar repetitions of rural life and the chafing monotony of waiting for change.

If the story that struck the Grand Banks off Newfoundland in October 1991 was “The Perfect Storm”, the fire that destroyed London in September 1666 was “The Perfect Fire”. A fire needs only three things: a spark to ignite it, and the fuel and oxygen to feed it. In 1666, a ten-month drought had turned London into a tinderbox. The older parts of the city were almost entirely composed of wood-frame buildings and shanties. The riverside wharves were stack with wood, coal, oil, tallow, hemp, pitch, brandy, and almost every other combustible material known to seventeenth century man. On 2 September 1666, London ignited. Over the next five days the gale blew without interruption and the resulting firestorm destroyed the whole city. “The Dreadful Judgement” tells the true, human story of the Great Fire of London through the eyes of the individuals caught up in it. It is a historical story combining modern knowledge of the physics of fire, forensics and arson investigation with the moving eye-witness accounts to produce a searing depiction of the terrible reality of the Great Fire of London and its impact on those who lived through it.