Something Of Value
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Condition remarks: Binding: faded boards.
Set against the turbulent backdrop of 1950s Kenya, Something of Value by Robert Ruark is a gripping and unflinching chronicle of two childhood friends — one white, one Kikuyu — whose bond is shattered by the violent upheaval of the Mau Mau uprising. Ruark immerses the reader in the raw, untamed landscape of colonial Africa, where tribal loyalties, colonial injustice, and the primal struggle for land converge in a conflict that tears communities and friendships apart. The novel's title is drawn from a Basuto proverb printed on its title page: If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them. Ruark, drawing on his extensive experience as a hunter and journalist in Africa, presents a visceral and morally complex portrait of a continent at a crossroads, rendered with journalistic precision and novelistic depth. Something of Value stands as a landmark work of 20th-century fiction about Africa — controversial upon its 1955 release for its unsparing depictions of violence on all sides — and remains a powerful meditation on colonialism, identity, and the devastating human cost of political change. Readers who begin this novel will find themselves unable to look away from its haunting final question: what is truly lost when a world is unmade?
Author: Robert Ruark
Format: Hardback
Published: 1955, Hamish Hamilton
Genre: Historical fiction
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Fair
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Tanning and foxing
Condition remarks: Binding: faded boards.
Set against the turbulent backdrop of 1950s Kenya, Something of Value by Robert Ruark is a gripping and unflinching chronicle of two childhood friends — one white, one Kikuyu — whose bond is shattered by the violent upheaval of the Mau Mau uprising. Ruark immerses the reader in the raw, untamed landscape of colonial Africa, where tribal loyalties, colonial injustice, and the primal struggle for land converge in a conflict that tears communities and friendships apart. The novel's title is drawn from a Basuto proverb printed on its title page: If a man does away with his traditional way of living and throws away his good customs, he had better first make certain that he has something of value to replace them. Ruark, drawing on his extensive experience as a hunter and journalist in Africa, presents a visceral and morally complex portrait of a continent at a crossroads, rendered with journalistic precision and novelistic depth. Something of Value stands as a landmark work of 20th-century fiction about Africa — controversial upon its 1955 release for its unsparing depictions of violence on all sides — and remains a powerful meditation on colonialism, identity, and the devastating human cost of political change. Readers who begin this novel will find themselves unable to look away from its haunting final question: what is truly lost when a world is unmade?