Hailed by Bill Bryson and the New York Times Book Review as a rising star among travel writers, Jeffrey Tayler penetrates one of the most isolated, forbidding regions on earth—the Sahel. This lower expanse of the Sahara, which marks the southern limit of Islam’s reach in West and Central Africa, boasts such mythologized places as Mopti and Timbuktu, as well as Africa’s poorest countries, Chad and Niger. In parts of the Sahel, hard-line Sharia law rules and slaves are still traded. Racked by lethal harmattan winds, chronic civil wars, and grim Islamic fundamentalism, it is not the ideal place for a traveler with a U.S. passport. Tayler finds genuine danger in many guises, from drunken soldiers to a thieving teenage mob. But he also encounters patience and generosity of a sort found only in Africa. Traveling overland by the same rickety means used by the local people—tottering, overfilled buses, bush taxis with holes in the floor, disgruntled camels—he uses his fluency in French and Arabic (the region’s lingua francas) to connect with them. Tayler is able to illuminate the roiling, enigmatic cultures of the Sahel as no other Western writer could.