A Man of Good Hope
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$21.00
Published on Dec 08, 2015 | 336 Pages
Published on Dec 08, 2015 | 336 Pages
When civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, in January 1991, two-thirds of the city’s population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militia, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world.
This extraordinary book tells Asad’s story. Tossed from one catastrophe to another, Asad’s journey covers countries and continents, from the cosmopolitan streets of inner-city Nairobi to the Ethiopian hinterland; and the promises and pitfalls of Johannesburg, South Africa, whose streets he believed would be lined with gold. Thus begins a shocking adventure in a country richer and more violent than he could possibly have imagined, leading to the final coda of America. Throughout, A Man of Good Hope is a complex, affecting, ultimately hopeful portrait of Asad’s search for salvation, suffused with dreams and desires and a need to leave something permanent on this earth.
Author
Jonny Steinberg
JONNY STEINBERG is the author of several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy. A two-time winner of South Africa’s premier nonfiction award and an inaugural winner of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, Steinberg was professor of African Studies at Oxford University and currently teaches part-time at Yale and at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) in Johannesburg.
Learn More about Jonny Steinberg