Book Fair @ AAU

How about making some time in our busy lives for literary pleasures?

The Addis Ababa University is hosting a book fair in the main campus starting from Monday, March 10.The week-long fair would be offerring acess to books published by the university press and others.

The event is expected to bring together vendors, authors, librarians, publishers, book sellers, and booklovers.The outdoor event would also include readings, book displays and panel discussions.

Fire on the Mountain Translated

Addis’s bookshops have now an addition to thier children’s sections.A book “Fire On the Mountain” rendered into Amharic as “Yeteraraw Lay Esat” by a young writer, Selam Negussie went on sale last week.

The book, retold by the renowned American children’s author Jane Kurtz, is about a shepherd boy who lived in the mountains of Ethiopia.According to the publisher’s note, the boy and his sister lived as servants in the house of a bad-tempered and boastful rich man.Challenged by his master to spend a night alone inthe bitter-cold air of the mountains, Alemayehu courageously wagers his future.But when thier master claims a fasle victory, Alemayehu and his sister must outfox the rich man at his own game.

It is a well-writeen retelling with believable situations and handling of characters with the utmost sympathy.

The translator, Selam says she is giving away thousands of copies of the books to children in the countryside to encourage them to read.She said this became possible because the book was published under the sponsorship of individual donors fromTripperary in Ireland that she described as an amazing support.She says it was all done with the help of an English national, Piers Elrington.

Selam says she has put lots of efforts in transforming the dream into reality, including securing permission from the publisher, Simon & Schuster.

At 32 pages and filled with rich illusrations, the translation has short sentences and simple Amharic.It should be on your children’s list of books.

Related story-  the Reporter

Minutes of an Ethiopian Century

Reading and reviewing a 686 pages book is no easy task but this what a Fortune columnist managed to do superbly. A review from a paper I want to read a lot more from.

If you would like to see what the reviewer has to say about the book, click here.Otherwise, hit the road for the Book World and own the book.Of course, make sure that you have 250 Birr, Jack!
A sign that good books don’t come cheap.

Gondar-Town in Decline

 A History of The City of Gondar

By  Solomon Getahun,The Red Sea Press, Inc 2006 . Pp 298 .

 This book is a chronological survey of the history, genesis and evolution of Gondar town, strarting from its foundation in 1620 Ethiopian calender to the present.It is a revised M.A dissertation the author completed in 1994. It is the first major study  of its kind written by an Ethiopian, and furnishes an important synthesis of the processes of political and social change the town has gone through the centuries. 

Held at a Distance

Here is Prof. Ayele Bekerie’s review of Held at a Distance from the Ethiopian American website. 

Rebecca Haile’s Held at a Distance:My Rediscovery of Ethiopia is a well-crafted and captivating autobiographical, historical, and diasporic narrative.It is also a memoir of dislocation, migration, and rediscovery, primarily inspired by and based on her four weeks trip to Ethiopia after twenty-five years of absence.Rebecca meticulously narrates how she and her family succeeded in overcoming traumatic experience and rebuilt thier immensely productive lives.Her narrative is indeed therapeutic and, hopefully, it will encourage thousands of silenced Ethiopians to voice thier sufferings from the state sponsored violence of the Derg period.

Zara Yakob: Rationality of the Human Heart, Book Review

Zara Yakob:Rationality of the Human Heart (Red Sea Press, 2005);

156 pp.Author: Teodros Kiros, PhD.

Reviewed by Veritas

The book under review is a slim volume yet it contains lots of insightful ideas on one of the few Ethiopian philosophers we’ever had, Zara Yacob.Teodros Kiros has done a tremendous service by writing this book, which, I’d like to think, could well be a source of inspiration for more works on Ethiopian philosophy to be done by a new generation of Ethiopians in the years to come.That is my hope.In this review, I’ll highlight some of the key points in the book and share, at the end, a few points by way of refelection on the book.

Held at a Distance

 I’ve been wondering lately on the number of works of memoir and fiction coming from the Diaspora.You can hardly keep up with all the writing that is pouring out of America!A fascination with the idea of homeland, a desire to discover and even create events like the Red Terror, thier Ethiopia that embraces thier root and thier parent’s past.

Judge Dismisses Copyright Infrigenemnt Suit

At last, a ruling comes for a book that was an object of court trials for almost two years.

Now, it is back to bookshops and libraries. 

A judge in Addis Ababa ruled in favor of  Centre Francais des Etudes Ethiopiennes and Zamra Publishers on Tuesday when he dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the two publishers.

The book in question was Mers’e Hazen Wolde Qirqos’s Of what I Saw and Heard which was published in 2004, that chronicles  the last years of Emperor Menelik and the brief rule of Iyassu.

Some two years before, attorneys representing Merse’e Hazen Wolde Qirqos’s son filed suit against the publishers and the translator, Dr. Hailu Habtu alleging that they had stolen the manuscript from him. The judge ruled that the work is not subject to copyright protection as it was written 62 years ago and it was found out that ,the type written version of the manuscript was found in public library.

An Ethiopian Odyssey

After reading one of the posts in this blog, a review of ‘Gift of Incense, A Story of Love and Revolution in Ethiopia ’, a British author, Annette Allen wrote in the comment section to tell about her life in Ethiopia in the 1960’s and the book resulted from that experience.Hearing from an established writer is a rare thing.So I’ve brought it here.

Women and children first

Have you ever imagined what a primitive, all-female world might have been like?

 Doris Lessing’s latest novel explores that.Read this.