Tayler's haunting travel adventure follows his 1,100-mile trip up the Congo River on a barge teeming with merchants, deckhands, prostitutes, mothers, spiritual followers, fishermen, and children. Readers feel the oppressive heat hanging wet in the night air over the floating marketplace, and shudder at the slither and crunch of the stir-fried worms that Tayler reluctantly injests. On his trek downriver, Tayler is met with even greater challenges as he battles for survival, paddling through the adverse elements on a tiny pirogue. At times lost in the fog-covered backwaters, at others faced by tribes of people whose ancestors were murdered by those with white skin, Tayler's level of comfort is pushed to its limits, transforming his adventure into a journey of discovery.Praise for Jeffrey Tayler:"The establishment media is full of official half-truths that ultimately get exposed, whether of Russia's fledgling democratic success or sub-saharan Africa's economic renaissance. Jeffrey Tayler goes off the beaten path to give us a much deeper version of the truth, whether along the Congo River or in Siberian flophouses. And unlike so many other gonzo travel writers, he is not politically naive."-Robert D. Kaplan, correspondent for the Atlantic Montly, and author of An Empire Wilderness and Balkan Ghosts"Tayler is a skilled craftsman who could become a significant new voice in travel literature. Compelling and deeply unsettling reading."-BooklistJeffrey Tayler is the author of Siberian Dawn. He has published numerous articles in such publications as Atlantic Monthly, Spin, and Cond Nast Traveler, and is a regular commentator on NPR's All Things Considered.

FACING THE CONGO

Reference

Tayler, Jeffrey

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Little,Brown

The four-hundred-and-fifty-mile long Draa River Valley in the Moroccan Sahara contains some of the most sumptuous oases and searing desert of the Arab world, starting in the moonscape gorges of the Anti Atlas Mountains through to a green sea of date palms over which rise the many-towered casbahs of ochre coloured clay, medieval in aspect and sheltering a life medieval in character. It is a region richer historically and ethnically than anywhere else in North Africa. The river stretches to the mosaic of dunes and parched land known as hammada - the domain of Bedouin and Blue Men and isolated Berber tribes - and pours through the desert into the Atlantic, where it ends its course. Jeffrey Tayler follows the Draa by foot and on camel, recounting stays in casbah homes, weddings, visits to mosques and marabouts and nights in hashish dens. It is a journey marked with extremes - of weather, as Tayler survives intense heat and sandstorms and potentially lethal local tribesmen - and one which he only narrowly escapes to tell this tale.

Valley of the Casbahs : A Journey Across the Moroccan Sahara

Jeffrey Tayler follows the Draa by foot and on camel, recounting stays in casbah homes, visits to mosques and marabouts, and nights in hashish dens. It is a journey marked with extremes - of weather, as Tayler survives intense heat and sandstorms and potentially lethal local tribesmen - and one which he only narrowly escapes to tell this tale.

Valley Of The Casbahs

Travel

Africa

Abacus Non-Fiction

Faced with an identity crisis in his work and his life, seasoned traveler and journalist Jeffrey Tayler made a bold decision. He would leave behind his mundane existence in Moscow to re-create the legendary British explorer Henry Stanley’s trip down the Congo in a dugout canoe, stocked with food, medicine, and even a gun-toting guide. But once his tiny boat pushed off the banks of this mysterious river, Tayler realized he was in a place where maps and supplies would have no bearing on his survival. As Tayler navigates this immense waterway, he encounters a land of smothering heat and intense rains, wary villagers, corrupt officials and dead-eyed soldiers demanding bribes, jungle animals, mosquitoes, and, surprisingly, breathtaking natural beauty. Filled with honesty and rich description, Facing the Congo is a sophisticated depiction of today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country brought to its knees by a succession of despotic leaders. But most mportant, Tayler’s stunning narrative is a deeply satisfying personal journey of fear and awakening, with a message that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt compelled, whether in life or in fantasy, to truly explore and experience our world.

Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness

History

Crown

Jeffrey Tayler describes his journey through the Moroccan Sahara on camel and foot, describing extremely harsh conditions because of unprecedented drought, and offering a glimpse into the Arab world.

Glory in a Camel's Eye: Trekking Through the Moroccan Sahara

Houghton/Mifflin

Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as a rising star among travel writers, Jeffrey Tayler penetrates one of the most isolated, forbidding regions on earth--the Sahel. This lower expanse of the Sahara, which marks the southern limit of Islam’s reach in West and Central Africa, boasts such mythologized places as Mopti and Timbuktu, as well as Africa’s poorest countries, Chad and Niger. In parts of the Sahel, hard-line Sharia law rules and slaves are still traded. Racked by lethal harmattan winds, chronic civil wars, and grim Islamic fundamentalism, it is not the ideal place for a traveler with a U.S. passport. Tayler finds genuine danger in many guises, from drunken soldiers to a thieving teenage mob. But he also encounters patience and generosity of a sort found only in Africa. Traveling overland by the same rickety means used by the local people--tottering, overfilled buses, bush taxis with holes in the floor, disgruntled camels--he uses his fluency in French and Arabic (the region’s lingua francas) to connect with them. Tayler is able to illuminate the roiling, enigmatic cultures of the Sahel as no other Western writer could.

Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel

Houghton, mifflin, harcourt

Marvelously entertaining and frequently harrowing, Glory in a Camel's Eye recounts the American travel writer Jeffrey Tayler's dangerous three-month journey across the Moroccan Sahara in the company of Arab nomads. Glory in a Camel's Eye gives us an intimate, often surprising portrait of Saharan Africa: the cultural conflicts between native Berbers and Arabs, the clashes between devout desert-dwelling nomads and their city-dwelling counterparts. Fluent in Arabic, Tayler assembles an image of modern life very much at odds with our Western assumptions. He observes and reports "with eloquence and an eye for the improbable" (Outside).

Glory In A Camel’s Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert

World

Harper Paperbacks

One of today's most intrepid writers chronicles a deadly trek through the legendary region that gave birth to the gulag and gave Siberia its outsize reputation for perilous isolation. In a custom-built boat, Jeffrey Tayler travels some 2,400 miles down the Lena River from near Lake Baikal to high above the Arctic Circle, recreating a journey first made by Cossack forces more than three hundred years ago. He is searching for primeval beauty and a respite from the corruption, violence, and self-destructive urges that typify modern Russian culture, but instead he finds the roots of that culture―in Cossack villages unchanged for centuries, in Soviet outposts full of listless drunks, in stark ruins of the gulag, and in grand forests hundreds of miles from the nearest hamlet. That’s how far Tayler is from help when he realizes that his guide, Vadim, a burly Soviet army veteran embittered by his experiences in Afghanistan, detests all humanity, including Tayler. Yet he needs Vadim’s superb skills if he is to survive a voyage that quickly turns hellish. They must navigate roiling whitewater in howling storms, but they eschew life jackets because, as Vadim explains, the frigid water would kill them before they could swim to shore. Though Tayler has trekked by camel through the Sahara and canoed down the Congo during the revolt against Mobutu, he has never felt so threatened as he does now.

River of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny

Europe

A gripping journey through some of the planet’s most remote and challenging terrain and its peoples, in search of why democracy has yet to thrive in lands it seemed so recently ready to overtake Across the largest landmass on earth, in lands once conquered by Genghis Khan and exploited by ruthless Communist regimes, autocratic and dictatorial states are again arising, growing wealthy on petrodollars and low-cost manufacturing. More and more, they are challenging theWest. Media reports focus on developments in Moscow and Beijing, but the peoples inhabiting the vast expanses in between remain mostly unseen and unheard, their daily lives and aspirations scarcely better known to us now than they were in ColdWar days.Tayler finds, among many others, a dissident Cossack advocating mass beheadings, a Muslim in Kashgar calling on the United States to bomb Beijing, and Chinese youths in Urumqi desiring nothing more than sex, booze, and rock ’n’ roll—all while confronting over and over again the contradiction of people who value liberty and the free market but idealize tyrants who oppose both. From the steppes of southern Russia to the conflict-ridden Caucasus Mountains to the deserts of central Asia and northern China,Tayler shows that our maps have gone blank at the worst possible time.

Murderers In Mausoleums: Riding the Back Roads of Empire Between Moscow and Beijing

Asia

In a custom-built boat, Jeffrey Tayler traveled some 2,400 miles down the Lena River, from near Lake Baikal to high above the Arctic Circle, re-creating a journey first made by Cossack forces more than three hundred years ago. He was searching for primeval beauty and a respite from the corruption, violence, and self-destructive urges that typify modern Russian culture. His only companion on this hellish journey detests all humanity, including Tayler. Vadim, Tayler’s guide, is a burly Soviet army veteran whose superb skills Tayler needs to survive. As the two navigate roiling white water in howling storms, they eschew lifejackets because the frigid water would kill them before they could swim to shore. Though Tayler has trekked by camel through the Sahara and canoed down the Congo during the revolt against Mobutu, he has never felt as threatened as he does on this trip.

River Of No Reprieve: Descending Siberia's Waterway of Exile, Death, and Destiny

Self-Help

Death & Grief

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