
**New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice** To save ancient Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean's Eleven in this "fast-paced narrative that is...part intellectual history, part geopolitical tract, and...

To save precious centuries-old Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians in Timbuktu pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean's Eleven. In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and...
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The story starts in '80s-era Timbuktu, when bookseller, historian, and librarian Abdel Kader Haidara received an order to search for and rescue tens of thousands of lost ancient manuscripts. He is derailed from this formidable task when, in 2012, thousands of Al Qaeda militants...

