This book is best read as an homage to the rich and creative Mande tradition of oral history that has made the epic of Sunjata a canonical text in the study of both oral literature and oral history. It offers a contemporary vision of that tradition, as propounded through the modern interaction of the jali, the griot or performer, and the intellectual in Mali. This process of interpreting the past to accommodate new questions and concerns as they arise can be inconsistent. For example, slavery – banned under the thirteenth-century Charter of Kurukan Fugan but still practised, has been tactfully concealed by the griots (p. 243).

Nubia Kai regularly cites Bakari Soumano, identified as the ‘chief griot of Mali’; however, other intellectuals such as Sory Camara, Gaoussou Diawara, and the Senegalese Pathé Diagne are also important sources. Most important of these in framing the book is the late Youssouf Tata Cissé; his lifelong involvement with the French study of Mali, particularly through his collaborations with the late Germaine Dieterlen, bridges the gap between the colonial-era studies of the Griaule school of ethnography and more modern reinterpretations or rediscoveries of lost themes. Cissé worked closely with the griot Wa Kamissoko, producing two influential books in question-and-answer format about Malian history. Kai does not address problems of researcher influence and bias in those texts.

The book under review begins with from a personal account of inquiry and discovery, and then provides an overview of Mande history, followed by a discussion of Mande myths and of the origins of Mande griots. Kai accepts without question the Dieterlen account of Mande myth, and the historiographic section largely simply reviews truisms of Mande social organization. Her discussion of the story of Sunjata, the ‘Revelation of the Secret Word’, reviews the contributions of the late Wa Kamissoko as mediated by Y. T. Cissé. She does address some topics not actually recognized in the documented oral tradition: the celebrated pilgrim king Mansa Musa, who is depicted holding a gold nugget in the Catalan atlas of 1375; and the legendary ruler usually identified as Aboubakri II (but here named Manding Bokary) who is said to have set sail across the Atlantic. The book concludes with an envoi.

Absent from the discussion are any critical views of the material presented. The question of the name ‘Manding Bokary’ may serve as an example: the name is generally reported in the oral tradition as that of the brother of Sundiata who was barred from kingship because of violence against his sister. He is often considered the ancestral figure for hunters’ cults. Somehow, his name is here transposed to that of Aboubakri, the lost and legendary sailor. No explanation for the discrepancy is given; no awareness is shown of the innovation in naming. Other silences may reflect distaste for polemics; nevertheless doubts raised by other scholars about Marcel Griaule's description of Dogon mythology deserve acknowledgement. The author's acceptance of the claims about the Dogon understanding of the Sirius constellation requires justification, as does the use of a book about the lost continent of Mu (p. 267).

The book also shows a lack of awareness of the available transcribed material from the Mande oral tradition: the Soninke texts collected by Oudiary Dantioko on Wagadu; the multiple versions of the epic of Sunjata and other Mande histories; and, for a more recent figure, the magisterial three-volume study of Samory Touré by Yves Person, based on interviews with hundreds of informants.

The uncritical acceptance of claims advanced in the name of Malinke tradition, without consideration of available evidence or concern for consistency, in the end produces a book that reflects the current tenets about the oral tradition as encountered in Bamako, without enough consideration of the narrative's past. In any case the book will need to be broadened and updated: one source not considered in the volume is the Mande historiography of the Guinean Sulemana Kante, who invented the N'ko alphabet and authored numerous works of history whose influence is only now emerging.