The Badass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts introduces readers to a mild mannered historian and librarian from Timbuktu, who morphed into one of the world’s greatest smugglers and pulled off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven. Joshua Hammer was Bureau Chief for Newsweek and correspondent at large on five continents. He is now a contributing editor to the Smithsonian and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.
Originally aired April 2016.