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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: 3.57 · 16,579 ratings · 3,140 reviews · 26 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 — 12,331 ratings — published 2016 — 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 Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird 3.83 avg rating — 3,197 ratings — published 2020 — 10 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 3.96 avg rating — 419 ratings — published 2025 — 5 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 — 206 ratings — published 2012 — 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 Honeymoon Murder 3.25 avg rating — 188 ratings — published 2013 — 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
	Yokohama Burning: The Deadly 1923 Earthquake and Fire that Helped Forge the Path to World War II 3.73 avg rating — 112 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 3.85 avg rating — 48 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 really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 21 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
	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 and 2 other people liked Jenia's review of The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing: "Absolutely loved it. Covers the archaeological adventures of the 19th century (without shying away from pointing out the imperialistic mindset of the people, mostly men, involved). Also details the decipherment itself, explaining how the various cune" Read more of this review »
Sep 15, 2025 02:51AM · see review
Joshua Hammer liked Tami's review of The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing: "What a great book! More like a 4.5, deducting .5 for excessive length. I really enjoy narrative non-fiction (my favorite genre) and this work of scholarship really didn’t disappoint. It details the quest to unravel the meaning of cuneiform writing fr" Read more of this review »
Aug 27, 2025 04:04AM · see review
Joshua Hammer liked Emg's review of The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing: "Three genres in one book - biography(ies), history, archeology the threads of which did not blend seamlessly for smooth reading but contains much interesting information, some of which was a little hard to digest because I'm basically ignorant of Mes" Read more of this review »
Aug 27, 2025 04:03AM · see review
Joshua Hammer liked Steve's review of The Mesopotamian Riddle: An Archaeologist, a Soldier, a Clergyman, and the Race to Decipher the World's Oldest Writing: "Entertaining story of the looting of Mesopotamian artifacts in the 19th century by British and French imperialists, and the rivalries of eccentric Victorians to decipher them."
Aug 27, 2025 04:03AM · see review
Joshua Hammer finished reading The Honeymoon Murder 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
May 31, 2025 11:50AM · like
Joshua Hammer finished reading The Kalinka Affair: A Father's Hunt for His Daughter's Killer 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
May 31, 2025 11:50AM · like
Joshua Hammer finished reading 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
May 31, 2025 11:50AM · like
Joshua Hammer finished reading The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird 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
May 31, 2025 11:50AM · like
Joshua Hammer entered a giveaway Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons by Phil Witte (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
Apr 12, 2025 08:14PM · like · see giveaway
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 01:40PM · 1 like · like

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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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