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Joshua Hammer

Goodreads Author

Born

in New Rochelle, The United States

Genre

Nonfiction

Member Since

March 2020

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/joshua57

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Joshua Hammer was born in New York and educated at Horace Mann and Princeton University, graduating with a BA in English literature. In 1988 he joined Newsweek Magazine as a business and media writer, transitioning to the magazine's foreign correspondent corps in 1992. Hammer served, successively, as bureau chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Cape Town, and also was the magazine's Correspondent at Large in 2005 and 2006. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the 2004-2005 academic year.

Since leaving Newsweek in 2006 Hammer has been an independent foreign correspondent, a contributing editor at Smithsonian Magazine and Outside, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, GQ, the New Y ...more

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Joshua Hammer’s books

Average rating: 3.56 · 15,515 ratings · 2,956 reviews · 27 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts 3.50 avg rating — 11,902 ratings — published 2016 — 27 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird 3.83 avg rating — 2,980 ratings — published 2020 — 9 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Kalinka Affair: A Father's Hunt for His Daughter's Killer by Joshua Hammer (Goodreads Author), The Atavist (Editor) 3.40 avg rating — 204 ratings — published 2012 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Honeymoon Murder 3.26 avg rating — 186 ratings — published 2013 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II 3.74 avg rating — 108 ratings — published 2006 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Chosen By God: A Brother's Journey 3.83 avg rating — 46 ratings — published 1999 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place 4.05 avg rating — 20 ratings — published 2003 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Desert Blues 3.82 avg rating — 17 ratings — published 2015 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing 4.43 avg rating — 14 ratings — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	In Search of the Last Czar 3.75 avg rating — 12 ratings — published 2011 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Joshua Hammer answered a question about The Mesopotamian Riddle: Does the book talk about Ea-Nasir at all? Great question. No it doesn’t. The story is largely about the deciphering of Akkadian cuneiform, with just a small bit devoted to Sumerian. I write about the discovery of a few Sumerian tablets, but not this one.
Jan 24, 2025 10:40PM · 1 like · like
Joshua Hammer entered a giveaway The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer (Goodreads Author) 25 copies available, ends on February 21, 2025 Enter to win »
Jan 22, 2025 04:06PM · like · see giveaway
Joshua Hammer wants to read The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jan 22, 2025 03:42PM · like
Joshua Hammer and 2 other people liked David's review of The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing: "The information at the top of this Goodreads page (as well as the promotional blurb (neither probably, I know, not written by the author) at the front of the free electronic review copy of this book that I received) describes the book’s plot, in part" Read more of this review »
Sep 27, 2024 06:32PM · see review
Joshua Hammer is now following Dean Collins's reviews
Sep 20, 2024 08:22AM · like
Joshua Hammer rated a book it was amazing The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing by Joshua Hammer (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Sep 18, 2024 09:24AM · 1 like · like
Joshua Hammer has read Hollywood Con Queen: The Hunt for an Evil Genius by Scott C. Johnson	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Aug 02, 2023 07:19PM · like

More of Joshua's books…

Quotes by Joshua Hammer (?)

“The extremists had declared jihad against anyone and anything that challenged their vision of a pure Islamic society, and these artifacts - treatises about logic, astrology, and medicine, paeans to music, poems idealizing romantic love - represented five hundred years of human joy. They celebrated the sensual and the secular, and they bore the explicit message that humanity, as well as God, was capable of creating beauty. They were monumentally subversive.”
― Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

tags: non-fiction

7 likes

“We are a city that has had Islam for one thousand years. We had the greatest teachers and universities. And now these Bedouins, these illiterates, these ignoramuses, tell us how to wear our pants, and how to say our prayers, and how our wives should dress, as if they were the ones who invented the way?”
― Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

tags: africa, education, islam, literacy, mali, prayer, religion, timbuktu

4 likes

“...(T)he last rebels of the Tuareg uprising that had devastated the north for half a decade agreed to lay down their weapons, and the nomadic warriors surrendered thousands of Kalashnikov rifles to the government. The weapons were buried tin the concrete pedestal f a "monument of Peace" that sits on a rise on Timbuktu's outskirts- an assemblage of interlocking archways surrounded by colorful murals of Malian government soldiers and Tuareg rebels shaking hands and burning their weapons.”
― Joshua Hammer, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu and Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts

2 likes

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