1999, Sudan Canterbury Tales by Donald Hawley, HBw/dj, 1st, RARE AFRICAN TALES

Description: FIRST EDITION, published by Michael Russell of the UK in 1999. Overall in EXCELLENT CONDITION. Light edge wear on clean burgundy dust jacket, which is price-clipped. Clean burgundy cloth boards with very light corner wear, little to no edge wear, clear gilt spine titling and decoration. A nice gift inscription on front endpaper - discussed shortly. No further marks in 271 clean and solidly bound pages. The book was found in the estate of Constantine William Kontos, the "Bill" in the inscription. Here is pieces from his obituary in the Washington Post in 2000: "C. William Kontos, 77, a State Department officer from 1949 to 1987 who did significant work with the Agency for International Development, was an ambassador to Sudan and served on the policy planning staff, died of cancer June 28 at the Washington Home. He lived in Washington. After leaving State, where he was an authority on Middle Eastern and African political and developmental issues, Mr. Kontos became a consultant. He spent the late 1980s as a senior vice president of the Executive Council of Foreign Diplomats and the last decade as a vice president of Global Business Access Ltd... ... Mr. Kontos was ambassador to Sudan from 1980 to 1983 and held two positions when he retired, senior adviser to the policy planning staff and executive director to the secretary of State's advisory committee on South Africa." A portion of a review online: "What was I in for, I wondered, when I agreed to review a book with this title? A sassy edition of Arabian Nights Entertainments, based on a newly discovered manuscript of Sir Richard Burton. A collection of Nuer or Baggara folktales sung to the pampered cattle at full moon? Or of stories told to themselves by DC's to pass the lonely hours as they swayed on the camel's back in Darfur or plodded through "The Bog"? In the event, Sudan Canterbury Tales is none of these things. It is, quite simply, a new and valuable contribution, imaginatively designed and admirably executed, to that important genre of Service history introduced twenty-five years ago in Charles Allen's sparkling trilogy of Tales: The memories of a once-upon-a-time career in imperial service overseas, recorded as an unpretentious but essentially persuasive part of eyewitness history before it is too late to retrieve and preserve it. What Donald Hawley has done is to bring together a score of personal narrative accounts by British men and women who served in the Sudan. "I had in mind", he explains, "a sort of Canterbury Tales, with individuals telling their stories against the general background of their work in the Sudan". How "haphazardly and opportunistically" (the description is his own) the collection was assembled is made charmingly plain in the way some of them were commissioned: from a lady sitting in the row at a concert in Bath, from a guest at a wedding, or simply offered out of the blue. Unlike many of the composite collections of reminiscences to date, Hawley has deliberately eschewed the common context of the Administrative cadre alone. Instead he has carefully sought his contributors from among the Sudan Civil Service's departmental offices - the agriculturist, the veterinary inspector and the surveyor, the doctor and the nursing sister, the soldier, the judge and the missionary and the university lecturer - as well as several from the Sudan Political Service. The Zoologist's Tale, apparently a production hiccup, is available as an 8 page separate, thanks to a truly noble gesture by the publisher. Some of the stories have echoes of Blackwood's revisited or read like diaries rewritten in extenso. Others read like exciting narrative job descriptions or the best of letters home. All are full of experiences, facts and - so important for Service cameos - names: for this is history, not creative literature. All amply fulfil the Kiplingesque criterion of recounting, with exactitude and with passion. The Day's Work'. Most of the tales are a comfortable five to ten pages in length; only two nudge fifty. There are three brief appendices and a good working bibliography." B37

Price: 37.5 USD

Location: Burtonsville, Maryland

End Time: 2025-01-30T10:59:30.000Z

Shipping Cost: 6 USD