Jeff Pearce

“The West will begin to understand Africa when it realizes it’s not talking to a child—it’s talking to its mother.”

So writes Jeff Pearce in the introduction to his fascinating, groundbreaking work, The Gifts of Africa: How a Continent and Its People Changed the ...

In the summer of 1839, Henry Layard—just twenty-two years old—left England for eastern Europe and distant lands of the Ottoman Empire. He had never set foot in these regions before and wasn’t fluent in their languages. But he would experience one dramatic adventure after another, narrowly escapin...