Thank you so much for the opportunity to read this book. The photography is gorgeous. I particularly liked the portraits and black and white photography.

These stunning photographs take you on a armchair adventure through West Africa a place where few of us have traveled. I really enjoyed reading this book too but the photographs are the stars. Enjoy the journey

Very nice book. The authors traveled quite a large area (countries). Thanks for the ARC.

A few things that I feel are missing from the picture book:

Dahomey kings palaces (mentioned in a rich historical background to the place but not shown) even though they were in the area.
Excision / circumcision practices of Dogon (frightening to me) but only the place for boys is shown, not the one reserved for girls (or the tools used).
A structure similar to the mosque structure of Djenne is shown in Timbuktu,: Sankore, Tiebele , Segou, Mopoti, Burkina Faso, without explanation of what these buildings are: are they also mosques or are they houses or restaurants? And if they are mosques then how come the same look and style got adapted in such a vast space in different countries / villages?

The authors / photogs are consumed with capturing the colorful clothes, utensils, laborers at work, women doing chores next to a river, sellers / merchants, and the kinds of houses they live in or all that capture the authors' fancy along the way to the next point. No attempt is made to go inside any of the houses, see how they live indoors, how many live per hut (!), how they assemble at lunch or dinner, and what the place looks like at night, what did they use for light, (I was curious about the washroom / outdoor open area reserved for toilet etc.), capture any of their cultural / religious practices. In a house in a remote village dead tigers hung on the wall outside - it would have been nice if a word was added to explain why they were there. This also reminds me, that the authors did not come across any wildlife in their travel, other than a goat. A river people are shown, but I could not understand how they lived or what they did because the authors just showed a person on a boat and huts in the middle of water.

The number of women who were either holding a baby (behind their back or in front) or who were pregnant was extremely high. (how many were wives of the same man?) As per the pics, not a single man was seen playing, carrying or being with a child. With so much poverty, how do these women and their men make ends meet!

I found it immensely irritating and fairly naive and grossly unprofessional of the authors to travel from one area to another without using proper official papers. It can come across as some form of entitlement / white privilege, which I'm sure is not the case. But it's too lazy a spell, when they travel from Burkina Faso to Niamay the capital of Niger and stop at Djaguouro, small village of Tera - they didn’t have proper immigration papers, didn’t know how to get them, and no one knew where to guide them either.

This is an excellent book of beautiful pictures of the Villages, people, architecture, and more of the West Africa. I love to travel and as much as I would love to travel the world in person I cannot. So I am a armchair traveler. I will probably never make it to West Africa in person but with this book I can see so much about this country.

The pictures are clear and beautiful. They show more then what you would see in a travel brochure. This book gets into the the true West Africa. It shows the good, the beautiful, the bad and the ugly. I really love that the pictures are not a sanitized version of the true country like in a travel brochure. Steven and Cathi House have done an amazing job with this book.

I received this book from the Author or Publisher via Netgalley.com to read and review.

Thank to Steven House, Cathi House, Schiffer Publishing Ltd., and Netgalley for the advanced reader copy of “Villages of West Africa
An Intimate Journey across Time” for an honest review.

My third foray into Schiffer Publishing’s gorgeous art books, this treatise on the gorgeousness of the West African Villages by Steven & Cathi House can not help but capture your heart and stop your breath so many times as you turn the pages.

You will find yourself many times pausing to delight in the brilliant joy shining out from the faces of the pictures, but even more you feel drawn into the very marrow of the bones of these villages. As much as we are witness culture, there’s a decided study in these shots about the architecture of how things work, from the simplest to the deceptively complex.

This book will find itself easily welcome on any coffee table or in any photographers’ collection. The depictions of the villages, from small and quiet to loud bustling cities will captivate everyone who happens to open it.

This photo book gives readers a glimpse of the history, traditions, crafts, architecture, and people of various West African locales, from tranquil villages to bustling cities.