Description
Herald Press, Published 1970. Hardcover, 184 pp.; 21 cm; illustrated with eight full-page black-and-white brush and ink drawings by James Ponter.
Rare, out-of-print & unusual books · Since 1997
111
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Catalog notes
Condition & notes
In Good condition with a Good dust jacket. Brown cloth boards with gold lettering on spine and the Herald Press device in gold at foot. Mild shelf wear. Binding tight. Mild toning to edges of text block. Notable spotting and staining to pp. 20-25, mostly in the margins. Otherwise unmarked. Illustrated dust jacket carries a Ponter brush drawing of a Somali man and a European riding together in a car. One inch chip at top corner of front panel, with smaller nicks, short tears and creasing along the edges, and chipping along the flap folds at the fore-edges. Mild to moderate overall scuffing and soiling, some color loss and staining to front and back panels including brown spotting at upper right of front, and heavier toning to spine. Now in an archival quality (removable) Brodart cover. Eight stories out of Eby's years teaching in Mennonite mission schools in Somalia, prefaced by an account of his return to Mogadishu. The Eastern Mennonite Board had entered the country in 1953, the first Protestant mission there since the Swedish Lutherans were expelled in 1935; this collection appeared months after the October 1969 military coup and two years before the government nationalized every mission property. Eby writes missionaries without romance, their failures and self-deceptions set beside the Somalis they came to serve. The preface catches Mogadishu at a hinge: donkey carts among the taxis, students arguing late over a Greater Somali Republic, a broken road Mussolini had meant to run to Addis Ababa. Omar Eby (1935-2021) taught in Mogadishu, Musoma and Kitwe before nearly thirty years as professor of English at Eastern Mennonite University. He published thirteen books, and returned to this subject at the end of his career with Fifty Years, Fifty Stories: The Mennonite Mission in Somalia, 1953-2003. Contents: Preface, Somalia Revisited; The Sons of Adam; The Short Happy Illusion of Alice Waters; Let Darkness Cover Me; One Night in Harar Hills; A Long Ride; Show Us the Straight Path; The Word Became Flesh; You Can't Go Home.