In the middle of the night on April 14, 2014, terrorist group, Boko Haram, abducted 276 girls from their secondary school's dormitory in the town of Chibok, Northeast Nigeria. Over the following days, 57 girls managed to escape. For two years, 219 girls remained missing. During the last four months of 2015, in the heat of the worst of the insurgency, Aisha Muhammed-Oyebode, the CEO of the Murtala Muhammed Foundation (MMF) in Nigeria embarked on a project to interview, photograph, and document the accounts of the parents of each of the missing girls. The MMF's team managed to meet the relatives of 201 of them. In May 2016, the first of the missing students, Aisha Nkeki Ali, was found by the Nigerian military. In the intervening years, 107 more have made it home: four by Nigerian military/ para-military intervention, twenty-one by negotiated release in October 2016, and eighty-two more in May 2017; with both deals brokered by Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Increasingly complicated negotiations between the Nigerian Government and Boko Haram continue for the 112 girls who remain captive. For the families of the girls, and for the Chibok community, the trauma of this experience remains a daily reality. Words have a power that numbers can never have. The Stolen Daughters of Chibok is a collection of supplemental essays by acclaimed experts and interviews and photographs of 152 of the 210 Chibok families that were interviewed and photographed. It is a tribute to the girls, which aims to capture their lives before the abduction and to highlight how their families have struggled to cope afterward.

A 2021 Daily Telegraph Book of the Year Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award "Everyone should read the testimonies of the Chibok girls who survived the capture. We need to help with efforts to liberate all of them and become more responsible for women and girls' protection in conflicts." -- Malala Yousafzai What happens after you click Tweet? The heart-stopping definitive account of the mission to rescue hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls whose abduction ignited a global social media campaign and a dramatic worldwide intervention. In the spring of 2014, millions of Twitter users, including some of the world's most famous people, unwittingly helped turn a group of 276 schoolgirls abducted by a little-known Islamist sect into a central prize in the global War on Terror by retweeting a call for their release: #BringBackOurGirls. With just four words, their tweets launched an army of would-be liberators. Soldiers and drones, spies, mercenaries, and glory hunters descended into an obscure conflict that few understood, in a remote part of Nigeria that had barely begun to use the internet. When hostage talks and military intervention failed, the schoolgirls were forced to take survival into their own hands. As their days in captivity dragged into years, the young women learned to withstand hunger, disease, and torment, and became witnesses and victims of unspeakable brutality. Many of the girls were Christians who refused to take the one path offered them--converting to their captors' fundamentalist creed. In secret, they sang hymns, and kept a diary, relying on their faith and friendships to stay alive. Bring Back Our Girls unfolds across four continents, from the remote forests of northern Nigeria to the White House; from clandestine meetings in Khartoum safe houses to century-old luxury hotels on picturesque lakes in the Swiss Alps. A twenty-first century story that plumbs the promise and peril of an era whose politics are fueled by the power of hashtag advocacy, this urgent and engrossing work of investigative journalism reveals the unpredictable interconnectedness of our butterfly-wings world, where a few days of online activism can bring years of offline consequences for people continents away.

“It is no accident that the places in the world where we see the most instability are those in which the rights of women and girls are denied. Isha Sesay’s indispensable and gripping account of the brutal abduction of Nigerian schoolgirls by Boko Haram terrorists provides a stark reminder of the great unfinished business of the 21st century: equality for girls and women around the world.”— Hillary Rodham Clinton The first definitive account of the lost girls of Boko Haram and why their story still matters—by celebrated international journalist Isha Sesay. In the early morning of April 14, 2014, the militant Islamic group Boko Haram violently burst into the small town of Chibok, Nigeria, and abducted 276 girls from their school dorm rooms. From poor families, these girls were determined to make better lives for themselves, but pursuing an education made them targets, resulting in one of the most high-profile abductions in modern history. While the Chibok kidnapping made international headlines, and prompted the #BringBackOurGirls movement, many unanswered questions surrounding that fateful night remain about the girls’ experiences in captivity, and where many of them are today. In Beneath the Tamarind Tree, Isha Sesay tells this story as no one else can. Originally from Sierra Leone, Sesay led CNN’s Africa reporting for more than a decade, and she was on the front lines when this story broke. With unprecedented access to a group of girls who made it home, she follows the journeys of Priscilla, Saa, and Dorcas in an uplifting tale of sisterhood and survival. Sesay delves into the Nigerian government’s inadequate response to the kidnapping, exposes the hierarchy of how the news gets covered, and synthesizes crucial lessons about global national security. She also reminds us of the personal sacrifice required of journalists to bring us the truth at a time of growing mistrust of the media. Beneath the Tamarind Tree is a gripping read and a story of resilience with a soaring message of hope at its core, reminding us of the ever-present truth that progress for all of us hinges on unleashing the potential of women.

Former Boko Haram captives tell their terrifying and heartbreaking stories to a leading European journalist One night in April 2014, members of the terrorist organization Boko Haram raided the small town of Chibok in northeast Nigeria and abducted 276 young girls from the local boarding school. The event caused massive, international outrage. Using the hashtag “Bring Back Our Girls,” politicians, activists, and celebrities from all around the world—among them First Lady Michelle Obama and Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai—protested. Some of the girls were able to escape and award-winning journalist Wolfgang Bauer spent several weeks with them as they recounted their ordeal. In Stolen Girls, he gives voice to these girls, allowing them to speak for themselves—about their lives before the abduction, about the horrors during their captivity, and their dreams of a better future. Bauer's reportage is complemented by over a dozen stunning portraits by award-winning photographer Andy Spyra. Bauer also examines the historical and political background of the Islamist terror in the heart of Africa, showing how Boko Haram works and describing the damage it has done to the fragile balance of ethnicities and cultures in one of the world's most diverse regions. His book tells a story of violence, fear, and uncertainty; it is also a story of hope, strength, and courage.

An urgent Penguin Special investigating the 2014 mass-kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls by the world's deadliest terrorists On 14th April 2014, 276 girls disappeared from a secondary school in northern Nigeria, kidnapped by the world's deadliest terror group. A tiny number have escaped back to their families but many remain missing. Reporting from inside the traumatised and blockaded community of Chibok, Helon Habila tracks down the survivors and the bereaved. Two years after the attack, he bears witness to their stories and to their grief. And moving from the personal to the political, he presents a comprehensive indictment of Boko Haram, tracing the circumstances of their ascent and the terrible fallout of their ongoing presence in Nigeria.

When a reporter for The New York Times uproots her family to move to West Africa, she manages her new role as breadwinner while finding women cleverly navigating extraordinary circumstances in a forgotten place for much of the Western world. “A story you will not soon forget.”—Kathryn Bigelow, Academy Award–winning director of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty In 2015, Dionne Searcey was covering the economy for The New York Times, living in Brooklyn with her husband and three young children. Saddled with the demands of a dual-career household and motherhood in an urban setting, her life was in a rut. She decided to pursue a job as the paper’s West Africa bureau chief, an amazing but daunting opportunity to cover a swath of territory encompassing two dozen countries and 500 million people. Landing with her family in Dakar, Senegal, she quickly found their lives turned upside down as they struggled to figure out their place in this new region, along with a new family dynamic where she was the main breadwinner flying off to work while her husband stayed behind to manage the home front. In Pursuit of Disobedient Women follows Searcey’s sometimes harrowing, sometimes rollicking experiences of her work in the field, the most powerful of which, for her, center on the extraordinary lives and struggles of the women she encounters. As she tries to get an American audience subsumed by the age of Trump and inspired by a feminist revival to pay attention, she is gone from her family for sometimes weeks at a time, covering stories like Boko Haram–conscripted teen-girl suicide bombers or young women in small villages shaking up social norms by getting out of bad marriages. Ultimately, Searcey returns home to reconcile with skinned knees and school plays that happen without her and a begrudging husband thrown into the role of primary parent. Life, for Searcey, as with most of us, is a balancing act. She weaves a tapestry of women living at the crossroads of old-fashioned patriarchy and an increasingly globalized and connected world. The result is a deeply personal and highly compelling look into a modern-day marriage and a world most of us have barely considered. Readers will find Searcey’s struggles, both with her family and those of the women she meets along the way, familiar and relatable in this smart and moving memoir.

Interview by Louise Neri and Edited by Diego Cortez '...delivers of the private moments and personal signifiers of the professional snowboarder's life with the inventiveness of a freestyler and the silent stillness of a mountain's virgin snow' - Paper magazine Following the seasons to keep up with the 21st century's newest tribe of nomads, Marcopoulous here captures the snowboarding lifestyle, from the excitement and awesome tricks to the injuries and bad-weather boredom. With 230 full-colour photos.

Girl, Edna O’Brien’s hotly anticipated new novel, envisages the lives of the Boko Haram girls in a masterpiece of violence and tenderness. I was a girl once, but not anymore. So begins Girl, Edna O’Brien’s harrowing portrayal of the young women abducted by Boko Haram. Set in the deep countryside of northeast Nigeria, this is a brutal story of incarceration, horror, and hunger; a hair-raising escape into the manifold terrors of the forest; and a descent into the labyrinthine bureaucracy and hostility awaiting a victim who returns home with a child blighted by enemy blood. From one of the century's greatest living authors, Girl is an unforgettable story of one victim’s astonishing survival, and her unflinching faith in the redemption of the human heart.

The best country-by-country assessment of human rights. The human rights records of more than ninety countries and territories are put into perspective in Human Rights Watch's signature yearly report. Reflecting extensive investigative work undertaken by Human Rights Watch staff, in close partnership with domestic human rights activists, the annual World Report is an invaluable resource for journalists, diplomats, and citizens, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the fight to protect human rights in every corner of the globe.

Lesley Arfin kept a diary during the apocalypse that was her adolescence, chronicling her depression from being bullied in the 10th grade and her discovery of heroin. Lesley told her diary everything. Now in her 20s, Lesley has returned to her journal and added new comments that only an adult looking back on their own life can perceive. Most of these are in the vein of What the hell was I talking about?' Lesley's hilarious updates remind readers how heavy it all seemed back then and how irrelevant it all really is in the face of adulthood.'