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    Djibouti
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    Djibouti
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    Djibouti
    Audiobook8 hours

    Djibouti

    Written by Elmore Leonard

    Narrated by Nick Landrum

    3/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

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    About this audiobook

    Dara Barr, documentary filmmaker, is at the top of her game. She's covered everything from Neo-Nazis to post-Katrina New Orleans (for which she won an Oscar), but now she's looking for an even bigger challenge. So she and her right-hand-man - a six-foot-six African-American called Xavier - head to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa to tackle modern-day pirates. As hijacked tankers line up like floating bombs, Dara and Xavier know it's time for a showdown. But which guy is going to get the prize - and what will he have to do to get it?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateJan 1, 2012
    ISBN9781407497198
    Unavailable
    Djibouti
    Author

    Elmore Leonard

    Elmore Leonard wrote more than forty books during his long career, including the bestsellers Raylan, Tishomingo Blues, Be Cool, Get Shorty, and Rum Punch, as well as the acclaimed collection When the Women Come Out to Dance, which was a New York Times Notable Book. Many of his books have been made into movies, including Get Shorty and Out of Sight. The short story "Fire in the Hole," and three books, including Raylan, were the basis for the FX hit show Justified. Leonard received the Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN USA and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. He died in 2013.

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    Reviews for Djibouti

    3/5

    190 ratings37 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I had hopes of enjoying this book based on some of the other Dutch Leonard books I had read. I must have read seven other books in the midst of finishing Djibouti. There didn't seem to be characters that I could empathize with. The assorted cast of pirates, mercenaries, terrorists just didn't hold my interest.Dara Barr, a filmmaker, is in Djibouti to make a documentary on Somali pirates and the Horn of Africa. She is accompanied by Xavier Lebo her 72-year-old gaffer and right hand man. I'm not sure if Leonard thinks of the pirates as victims or criminals. I found myself not caring.
    • 3/5
      I never thought I would be glad when an Elmore Leonard book finally ended, but "Djibouti" was hard to get through. Unintersting (to me) plot and characters, either not well defined OR I just didn't care for the characters.
    • 3/5
      “Djibouti” (2010), written by Elmore Leonard when he was in his mid-80s near the end of a long and productive life (he died in 2013), may not be his most compelling novel, yet it is still a marvel. Leonard always carefully researched his novels, and he seems to know Djibouti as well as he knows Detroit, Miami Beach and Hollywood in so many other books. This story is about a documentary filmmaker in Djibouti, and it has the realism of a good documentary film with the pace and tension of a thriller.Dara Barr plans to make a film about the pirates preying on merchant ships around the Horn of Africa and holding them for huge ransoms. But to get the footage she needs for her film, she must get close to the action and to the pirates themselves. Yet the pirates seem almost tame in comparison with some of the other characters in the novel.There's Harry, for instance, a wealthy American auditioning Helene to become his next wife. His objective, other than Helene, heavy drinking and shooting guns, is to blow up a ship laden with liquified natural gas just to see what happens.Then there's James Russell, an American who changed his name to Jama Raisuli and became a terrorist because he likes killing people. Now he's out to kill anyone who knows his real name, including Dara. Sometimes he tells people his name just to have an excuse to kill them. And he, too, wants to blow up that ship just for the fun of it.This is wild stuff, sometimes confusing, told by Leonard in brief and vivid scenes. sort of like the cuts in a film.
    • 1/5
      If you are new to Elmore Leonard's work, please don't begin with this one. You may not read another and that would be unfortunate.
    • 3/5
      Elmore Leonard is hit or miss. And this was a miss. Shallow characters, nor sense of place, and very little in way of a story line. Like he saw it on a map one day and decised to write a story. This wasn't Raylon Givens or the Hombre for sure.
    • 2/5
      Pretty boring and not really about Somali pirates. Liars!
    • 3/5
      I've heard good things about this author in the past but I truly had no idea what to expect from this particular book. The plot involving a documentary film making duo in Djibouti, out to get the low-down on the modern-day pirates of the region, really piqued my interest. Although the pacing zipped right along, it took me a while to get used to Elmore Leonard's writing style. I couldn't quite find my footing. I was never one hundred percent sure if what I was reading happened in real-time or was just a scene from the documentary being filmed in Djibouti. I found the transitions between the documentary footage and the character's experiences behind the camera jarring, somewhat frustrating. In the end, I'm glad I stuck with it.

      This definitely wasn't a knockout for me but I enjoyed all the twists and turns in the story. It has pirates, gun fights, explosions, exotic locations, booze, sex, and terrorists. At the very least I was entertained. The ending really secured that third star. That ending....I rolled my eyes but dammit I could not deny how perfect it was for this story. Doesn't matter how contrived and ridiculous that scenario was. It still managed to work.

      **I received this book via the Goodreads giveaway program.
    • 3/5
      Not the best Elmore Leonard I've ever read (and poor in comparison to "Road Dogs") but as usual had a number of wry and witty moments.
    • 4/5
      A quick read; OK; not one of Elmore's best.
    • 2/5
      Not one of his better books. Starts out boring and doesn't really captures the attention. For the most part it reads like a cut rate tv movie. Not really believable.
    • 3/5
      Young, Oscar-winning documentary film-maker Dara Barr and her 70-something assistant / protector Xavier LeBo set out to make a movie about modern day pirates on the Horn of Africa. Dara is fearless and she and Xavier go after the story like war journalists.They hang out with successful pirates. They meet a billionare who is sailing around the world to test his new girlfriend Helene. Helene is pretending like a champ that she likes sailing so she can marry a rich man. Then there is James Russell, who reinvents himself in a Miami jail to become Jamal Raisuli, al-Queda bomb-thrower when he is released. Somehow all of these characters intersect.The story is told as Dara and Xavier review their footage and because I was listening to a playaway as I was doing other things, I sometimes got lost, not easily following if the plot was being told as a "Hey, remember when this happened and how do we use it in the film?" or if it was a flashback and being told in real time. Leonard doesn't really make judgments on the people in the book. Everybody is out for self. It all gets tied together in the end, but it's pretty over-the-top unbelievable. I'm not sure if I liked it or not, but it was odd enough that it was worth the read.
    • 4/5
      I thought this was a little weak for Elmore Leonard, but I hold him in pretty high esteem. Much of the story is told from the perspective a a documentary movie maker, and it was interesting seeing her mind at work constantly thinking about how to frame shots and intercut scenes. The characters were gripping, and the dialog totally believable. (NOBODY is better at dialog than Elmore is.) And the plot and the setting was gripping. But for some reason, the book just didn't grab me the way his books usually do.Still, it was well worth reading.
    • 1/5
      It took me 5 months to get through this one. I started reading just before I began a new job - a new job with very long hours. I've been too exhausted to do much reading, but I did finally make it to the end of Djibouti by Elmore Leonard. I've read a few of his previous works (a long time ago) and enjoyed them all. But Djibouti was completely lost on me. Was there a plot in there somewhere? I found this book to be a long ramble about nothing very much. I hate to say this about a book that I got in exchange for a review. But I just did not like it.
    • 3/5
      I received this First Edition signed novel as a fiftieth birthday present, having never read any of the author’s previous work. It is a relatively short 270 sparsely populated pages, set on the horn of Africa’s piracy trade.The novel follows documentary film maker Dara Barr and her cameraman Xavier DeBo from their New Orleans home to Djibouti and Somalia. From there, the film maker meets various characters, from a billionaire yachtsman and his Parisian model girlfriend (is this REALLY where a billionaire needs to be yachting?), a United Nations diplomat and various figures involved in the rampant piracy of the region.The book is moderately entertaining, and consumable in 4-6 hours barely exceeds the standards of a novella. In a literary device that doesn’t really work for me, the novel begins in real time, then skips a period of several days, the gap being then filled through flashbacks as the filmmaker edits the film taken during the period before returning to real time.Not a bad read, but unexceptional in virtually every respect.
    • 2/5
      The African, ocean side town of Djibouti is a rough and tumble hideout for all sorts of criminals and terrorists. Dara, a seasoned documentary filmmaker, travels there hoping to catch up with some real life pirates. As she begins to infiltrate the network, capturing film on her super secret spy pen, she is surprised by what she finds. Soon she, and Xavier, her right hand man, are hobnobbing with eccentric millionaires, active pirates, and some seriously scary terrorists. When a ship filled with liquid natural gas arrives on the scene anything could happen. The only sure bet is that Dara will be there filming it.The plot of Djibouti is a complicated one with pirates and terrorists interacting with millionaires and filmmakers, everyone with a different, intricate purpose. Sometimes I found the story difficult to follow, especially the motivations of everyone involved. I listened to Djibouti on audio and that may have made it harder to keep track of all the subplots and sideways meandering. The premise was really interesting, I'd love to learn more about the modern day pirates, but this book just confused me. In the end, it felt like the story was all about a rogue terrorist, and had nothing to do with the pirates anymore. The narrator for the audio book was perfect. Tim Cain has a lovely, deep voice and he knows how to use it well. I will be searching out more audio books read by him!
    • 4/5
      A curious melange of the plot of a thriller with the delivery of reportage. It is years since I last read a Leonard novel and those that I read were so paced as to suck me in like a venturi. Here the pace has gone as we follow a documentary film maker around the piracy of the Horn of Africa. Leornard's flat clipped dialoge is as tight as ever but there is more distance from the characters. Everything is seen though glass; through the camera's lense. The film maker expresses no judgements of the pirates, terrorists, police, politicians, or playboys that she meets. She simply observes, records, and dithers about her work: is it to be a documentary or notes for a feature film? I imagine that this moral indecision is a conscious stance of the author — a refusal to judge complex circumstances — but it alienates the reader from the character and the story; we are observing observers. Once I appreciated that is literary fiction rather than a thriller, I began to appreciate its nuances and I would recommend it to anyone who can accept its agnomic amorality about such controversial subjects.
    • 2/5
      The first half of this book consists of a large cast of characters sailing about the horn of Africa searching for a plot. As the cast of American filmmakers, Somali pirates, Texas millionaires, British sheiks, international models and al Qaeda terrorists mill about, a plot does emerge, albeit a flimsy one, much blood is spilled, explosions occur and the cast disperses. I was not amused, edified, puzzled, aroused, or inspired. So what is the point, anyway? An airplane time-killer if you can’t find anything better in the airport book stall.
    • 3/5
      In a topic ripped from the headlines, Djibouti, Elmore Leonard’s most recent release focuses on modern day pirates holding hostages and controlling the international shipping lanes off the Horn of Africa. Bold as brass, award-winning documentary film maker, Dara Barr arrives in Djibouti with her cinematographer and protector, Xavier Lebo, to capture the Somalian pirates point of view. Is this the story of the downtrodden little guy just trying to survive in a situation without a whole lot of financial options, or a case of international terrorism?Much of the backstory, of Dara and Xavier’s attempts to make nice with the pirates while out at sea, is revealed in the film editing process back on dry land. The cast of movie characters includes Mercedes driving pirates, a crooked diplomat, al-Qaeda operatives, a filthy rich sailor playing at being an intelligence agent and his model girlfriend, as well as a group of desperately poor, young, unseaworthy Somalis with guns.Slow to get started the book ramps up at the end to Leonard’s cooler and meaner style. Probably not for those being introduced to Elmore Leonard for the first time.
    • 3/5
      I'm a big fan of Elmore Leonard so I always look forward to his new books. I wish I could say that this was a great book but it was just so-so (I can't give one of my favorite authors only two stars). Maybe it was the story location or characters but I found I was easily distracted while reading. However, the dialogue makes his books and I would have finished this one whether it was 300 or 800 pages - easy, enjoyable reading but not memorable.
    • 3/5
      Somali pirates and al Qaeda terrorists don't at first seem to fit into an Elmore Leonard novel, and it takes a while for the feeling of disconnect to wear off. Add to that the weird plot construction of the first 100 pages--involving the two main characters reviewing video on a computer screen while they deliver entirely clunky exposition, each telling the other facts of which they're both aware, just for the benefit of the reader--and this book seems to sag at first. Even the biggest fans of Elmore Leonard dialogue will find that the characters--black, white, African, American, male, female, rich, poor, the third-person narrator--all seem to sound the same, all dropping the same pronouns and conjunctions ("The Foreign Legion checking out the passengers, seeing could they tell a terrorist they saw one.") At the halfway point, the book's narration becomes straightforwardly chronological, the death count amps up, and it turns into an Elmore Leonard tale like any other we love.
    • 4/5
      "Djibouti" has all the element Elmore Leonard is famous for: snappy dialogue, interesting characters, smart tough guys & gals, along with complicated villains. They all display fatal and semi-fatal flaws as well as charms.Dara Barr is an award winning cinema verite documentarian, not unlike Errol Morris. She has linked up with sailor of fortune Xavier DeBo with local smarts, to film the coastal piracy scene along the African Coast. The Republic of Dgibouti is made to be the Casablanca of the piracy world.There is a multi-layered plot. It brings together Dara and Xavier with Billy, a zillionaire would be meglomaniacal anti-terrorist agent-without-portlolio and his girlfriend Helene They are sailing around the coast in Billy's luxury sailboat. Helene, a tough-minded, wise cracking broad who could be played by a your Lauren Bacall, is under Billy's test for a future wife. Can she follow Billy's orders, sail, fire an elephant gun, provide the right kind of sex? There are elements of "Key Largo" here.I won't go into the intriguing local, police, US Embassy and CIA types or the two Al Qaeda guys bent in blowing up an LNG Tanker.The point of view switches from real action to Dara & Xavier commenting on the video they have shot.Leonared artfully but not perfectly pulls these lines together for a conclusion which is satisfying but a little rushed.I agree with some of the other reviewers, not Elmore Leonard's best, but well worth reading.
    • 4/5
      I tried not to like this story, filled as it is with pretty low class profanity, but I did anyway. He is just too good a writer.
    • 4/5
      I like Elmore Leonard. He has a way with dialogue and settings that put me right into his story in a way not quite like any other writer. That's why the beginning of this book threw me for a loop. Everything seemed a bit off. Having read previous Leonard books, though, I cut him more slack than I might have for another, and was ultimately rewarded for it.Djibouti of the title is the setting, along with the Somali coast, where a bright young documentary maker and her assistant plan to make a film about the Somali pirates, the men and their prizes. To tell this story, they meet with pirates, rent a boat and sail for a month amongst the pirate-held ships, and meet a couple of al Quaeda terrorists, in addition to a curious billionaire who may not be what he seems. The movie quest soon stands aside for a threat big enough to rival 9/11, and the plot wraps up in typical Leonard fashion.My problem, interestingly enough, had much to do with the way the dialogue was handled, a sort of broken patois, confusing at times. A fair part of the story was told in retrospect, switching from watching footage of an event to the event itself, and it was a bit jarring for me at times. Still, while I wouldn't call this one of Leonard's best, by far, it turned into an enjoyable read.
    • 2/5
      Djibouti follows documentary filmmaker, Dara Barr, and her right-hand man, Xavier LeBo, in a quest to make a documentary about Somali pirates. They travel to Djibouti and spend several weeks at sea gathering footage. The book begins with Dara's arrival in Djibouti, but once they set off on their rented boat, Leonard cuts back to their return to Djibouti. Through the majority of the novel, Dara and Xavier's view points are conveyed through a review of this footage. The reader isn't reading the events firsthand, but reads them through the lenses of Dara and Xavier's hindsight. The reader does, however, get to know what happens outside of the film footage. After hearing from Dara and Xavier, the reader is taken back to the action to see the roles of the other characters play out.I know, this is sounding really complicated and hard to follow. While I may not be explaining it well, this narrative device isn't hard to follow as a reader. It's really an interesting concept and succeeds in conveying the story. At the end, I felt like I'd just read the rough cut of a film. Leonard is extremely clever in his execution.That being said, I did have trouble getting into Djibouti at first. From the opening page, I found Xavier's dialect jarring. I had to re-read the first page a few times to get the rhythm of his speech, which does not pay much attention, if any, to sentence structure. I kept getting confused by words missing from sentences. I did get used to it after awhile, but never felt completely comfortable with it. My other nit-picky complaint is the lack of a map. I'm not very familiar, okay, not at all familiar, with the geography of the region in which the story takes place. I finally used my smartphone to pull up a map so I could see where the heck Djibouti is (just north of Somalia in the Horn of Africa).Despite these complaints, I found myself continuing to read. I think I was fascinated by the subject matter and the way in which the story was being told. This is the first book by Elmore Leonard I've ever read, and I'd be willing to read another in future. I've seen some mixed reviews out there, but I think Djibouti is well-executed despites its oddities. If you are a true Leonard fan or are intrigued by the rough cut film narrative device, you should read Djibouti. Otherwise, you can probably move it to the bottom of your TBR pile.
    • 2/5
      The Middle East is the setting for the latest Elmore Leonard romp. Dara Barr wants to film a documentary about pirate hijacking. There are a number of colorful characters from a Texas billionaire, a fashion model, terrorists, and Dara Barr’s cameraman, Xavier LeBo. What starts out as a serious undertaking ends up as a possible big screen movie and Dara realizes that there are too many delicious things going on for a documentary to be taken seriously. Helene, the model girlfriend of the Texas billionaire, is along for the ride and a lot smarter than people think and much more entertaining. It’s hard to keep track of who’s doing what to whom and whom to trust. Unlike previous Leonard books, Djibouti is long on characters but short on laughs. Helene is about the only one that brings out a few chuckles. Not quite Leonard’s best.
    • 3/5
      Dara Barr, an award winning filmmaker decides to do a documentary about the Somalia pirates.She's accompanied by her cameraman and confidante, Xavier LeBo, who stands six-foot-six inches tall and is a vigorous age seventy-two.They travel to Djibouti, in Northeast Africa, a country bordering Somalia. Dara views the pirates as the underdogs. The people have little income and high mortaility and malnutrition and yet are brave enough to attempt to stop the massive tankers crossing their waters.In their search, they meet various people, most of whom are not what them seem to be, at first glance. There is wealthy Texan, Billy Wynn. He lives on his yacht with his companion, Helene. She is a former model who Billy promises to marry if she proves acceptable by not becoming seasick or restless on his yacht. Billy seems like a playboy but has another side to him when dealing with the pirates or al Queda terrorists.Xavier introduced Dara to her first pirate, a likable man named Idris. Idris is now retired and drives his Mercedes as a status symbol. He tells Dara that he can introduce her to other pirates. One of his friends is Jama, an African American al Queda Muslim who becomes a cold hearted killer and wants to make a statement by blowing up something.The story is interesting and the characters certainly different. It was bothersome that Dara had such an accepting attitude toward the people who were killing others. She took everything without much emotion as she sipped champagne in her hotel or on her boat.Xavier is an interesting character and will be someone that the reader remembers.Readers will enjoy this story that tells a different part of the Somalia philosophy. The pacing was well done and the dialogue masterful.
    • 3/5
      Will the real Elmore Leonard please stand up? "Djibouti," Mr. Leonard’s latest offering, reads as if it has been written by two separate authors. The first 130 pages of the novel are some of the dullest I have read this year, bar none; the last 150 comprise one of the most interesting thrillers I have come across in 2010. The premise of the book is a good one. Award-winning documentary maker Dara Barr has come to Djibouti with her trusted cameraman to film Somalian pirates in the act of hijacking western ships and holding them for ransom. Xavier, her 72-year-old cameraman, secures a boat and the two set out on the open sea in search of a few pirates they can call their own. Dara believes, rightly, as it turns out, that even Somalian pirates want to be in the movies, and she is confident that she and Xavier can talk their way out of any trouble they might find themselves in.But here comes the problem. Rather than show all of this lead-in action in real time, Leonard chooses to have Dara and Xavier discuss it as they think about how they will edit all the raw film footage they have accumulated. The resulting pages make for some excruciatingly dull reading - surprisingly, even to the dialogue between the two main characters. I say “surprisingly” because, as he reminds the reader in the second half of the book, well written dialogue is consistently one of the best things about an Elmore Leonard novel. When the pair of filmmakers stumbles onto an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a huge liquid natural gas tanker at an LNG terminal in the U.S., and Leonard finally shifts to a real-time narrative, the book takes off and becomes the thriller I expected it would be. As he so often does, Leonard surrounds his main characters with others that are so cleverly rendered that they begin to outshine the characters on which the book is centered (Dara and Xavier). Readers will definitely be entertained by this cast of characters: Billy Wynn, a rich Texan who seems to have some unusually close ties to American intelligence agencies; Helene, high fashion model and Billy’s girlfriend who is on an around-the-world cruise with Billy to see if she can qualify as marriage-material; James Russell, a black ex-con from America, and one of al-Qaeda’s finest bombers and assassins; and two rather ineptly comical pirate leaders just trying to make a dishonest buck for themselves before they get shot by someone.The second half of "Djibouti" makes its first half worth the effort. I did come very close to missing it, but I am happy that I did not give up on the book too soon to get there.
    • 3/5
      I haven't read Elmore Leonard in a while so was excited to get this as a member review book. I enjoyed parts and yet not the whole. The subject was interesting - Somali pirates - and the characters were in the vein of Get Shorty in their absurdity. But to me it seemed the flow of the story was jerky and none of the myriad subplots were completely realized. I wish I could say I liked it more.
    • 3/5
      While I didn't completely hate this book, I was disappointed in it and had to force myself to finish. Somehow, the author takes what sounds like a really exciting plot (pirates! terrorists! boats that could explode any time!) and makes it really boring. I didn't really like any of the characters, and was fairly grossed out when quite a bit of time was spent on the relatively young filmmaker having sex with her much older assistant. It didn't add anything to the story and just creeped me out. While I have enjoyed other Elmore Leonard books, this one just did not do it for me.
    • 2/5
      I usually enjoy Elmore Leonard's works, but his latest, Djibouti, did not meet my expectations. It wasn't until page 130 or so (out of 279) that things started to pick up a little, only to slow down again. I don't know whether it was the lack of character development, the constant change of point of view (both character- and time-wise), or simply the subject matter, all I can say is that I sincerely hope this is not the best that Leonard has left to offer.