Reading this week:

• Steve Martin Writes the Written Word by Steve Martin

As promised, here I am writing about the book Vistas of the Heritage of Sierra Leone. It is surprisingly hard to get one’s hands on and it was a veritable obsession of mine for a while. Being hard to get one’s hands on is not a universal trait of Sierra Leonean books, for example I found a copy of the (I think) relatively obscure Sierra Leonean Heroes: Fifty Great Men and Women Who Helped Build Our Nation for sale as soon as I looked for it. Though for Vistas large chunks of it are actually not that hard to get your hands on. For example there are many pages on SierraLeoneHeritage.com have excerpts from Vistas, like here’s the page for Old City Boundary Guns. That website is where I first found out about the book, but the taste of the excerpted morsels just left me hungry for more.

There are places I wish I looked more carefully but just never got around to, like the Sierra Leone Library Board. I have been led to believe that they should have a copy, but I only managed to get there once as they were about to close and I just never made it back. At one point I paid a guy on Craigslist $20 to go to the University of Indiana library and scan their copy of the book for me, which worked pretty great except he didn’t get all the pages leaving me thoroughly unsatisfied. Google Books refused to help. Where did I eventually find it? That’s right, the good ole’ Library of Congress. Which, you know, is sad, the lengths I had to go to find the book while I was sitting in the country where it was written and which it is about.

But why were those lengths worth going? Because it is a pretty remarkable book. First off, its really the only convenient source of information for a lot of the sites therein described (that’s why Sierra Leone Heritage is running around excerpting it). You just wish they described more of them. Many of the sites are the national monuments of Sierra Leone, though the book has more than just the monuments, and there are several monuments that aren’t in the book.

For the second off, it is a very particular snapshot. The book was written in 2002 as Sierra Leone was coming out of the civil war. Some of the buildings described in the book as burned-out husks are back in business today, though likewise some of the sites show their age even more than then. The book was written to preserve the history of these sites and to preserve the sites themselves, both as a textual exercise and in reality by promoting them as places to go and places worthy of the effort of conservation. Also worthy is to ponder though how much the list reflects the list of sites that were declared monuments in 1948 under a colonial regime, and then enshrined in a book written in the wake of an even bloodier struggle. A new edition would surely be a good thing in this day and age; there is so much more history to write about.