"There is more to war than the macabre --- the white-orange muzzle flashes during a midnight ambush; the men high on adrenaline scanning the desert through the scopes of their machine guns as their forefingers caress the triggers; the scythes of razor-sharp shrapnel whirling through the air like lawnmower blades spun loose; the tortured and the dead. There are also the myriad brazen, congenial, persistent ways in which life in the most forlorn and violent places on earth shamelessly reasserts itself."

Anna Badkhen writes about people in extremis. She is the author of THE WORLD IS A CARPET, AFGHANISTAN BY DONKEY, WAITING FOR THE TALIBAN, PEACE MEALS, and WALKING WITH ABEL: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah. Badkhen's reporting from four continents, including the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Chechnya, has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Foreign Policy and other publications.

Books by Anna Badkhen

Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah

by Anna Badkhen - Culture, Current Affairs, Memoir, Nonfiction, Travel

Anna Badkhen has forged a career chronicling life in extremis around the world, from war-torn Afghanistan to the border regions of the American Southwest. In WALKING WITH ABEL, she embeds herself with a family of Fulani cowboys --- nomadic herders in Mali’s Sahel grasslands --- as they embark on their annual migration across the savanna. Badkhen transports us from the Neolithic Sahara crisscrossed by rivers and abundant with wildlife to obelisk forests where the Fulani’s Stone Age ancestors painted tributes to cattle.