Robert Worth writes a compelling and entertaining portrait of French spy novelist Gérard de Villiers in this week’s New York Times Magazine.

I was introduced to de Villiers’ SAS series when I lived in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. No. 76 in the series is “Putsch à Ouagadougou,” and as Worth explains in his story, the book contains undeniable verisimilitude.

“Putsch à Ouagadougou” was banned for many years in Burkina Faso when Capt. Thomas Sankara was president. The plot tells you why: SAS hero Malko Linge arrives in Ouagadougou to spearhead a coup d’état against a President Sankara. (I re-read large chunks of the book when I saw Worth’s article, and could not find the “camarade-president” to have a first name, but perhaps that just added to the believability of the story).

At the time, like anyone else in Ouagadougou who wanted to read it, I had to ask for a contraband copy from one of the city’s many street-side booksellers who would lay their wares on a table. If you were polite, a copy of “Putsch à Ouagadougou” wrapped in a sheet of newspaper would be quietly taken out of a box below the table. That had nothing to do with the requisite sex-scenes every 25 pages or so, and everything to do with perceived propaganda against the Sankara regime.

One of the remarkable things that Worth highlights in his profile of the author, and which is also true of “Putsch à Ouagadougou,” is de Villiers’ attention to detail.

I thought he had a research team that travels to these far-flung places around the globe to gather phone books, maps, photographs, anything that would make the narrative as realistic as possible. But in fact, de Villiers does the research himself, spending a couple of weeks in these places, and then returning to Paris to write.

Here’s a short list of a few of the accuracies de Villiers nails in “Putsch à Ouagadougou.”

• There is a Hotel Silmande, and it is the ritziest of the hotels in Ouagadougou.

• There is also a Hotel Indépendance. It exists, and so did the electrical short — described accurately by de Villiers — in the underwater light at the hotel pool that on certain days made people jump right out of the water.

• A certain Colonel Joseph Ouedraengo who will take the place of President Sankara when he is toppled is exiled in Ivory Coast. Okay, such a person did not exist, but if you were opposed to Sankara in the 80s, you were likely in Ivory Coast, or France.

• The real life Thomas Sankara had a bodyguard who was mixed race whose name was Gilbert Guengeré. De Villiers also describes in his book a mixed-race bodyguard who was like someone out of Haiti’s Tonton-Macoutes. This one’s name is Bangaré.

• And true to form, de Villiers gets the local beer correct (Flag), as well as various bars and nightclubs which existed at the time.

If you needed a manual on how to stage a coup in Burkina Faso, this book would have served quite well. Sadly, the coup against Thomas Sankara — when it happened on Oct. 15, 1987 — needed no instructions.

It happened simply, staged by the man who knew Sankara best, the army captain who was always by his side, Blaise Compaore. He’s the one who organized the 1983 coup that put Sankara in power. And he remains in power in Burkina Faso today.

But it’s hardly all bad news for European backers of green energy. Consider this:

In the three months ending January 31st, wind power was the single largest source of electricity in Spain for the first time ever, according to the Spanish Wind Energy Association. In January alone, the association says, Spanish windfarms produced more than 6 terawatt-hours of electricity.

That’s more than a quarter of the country’s power, according to BusinessGreen. That outranks coal and nuclear power and, according to the association, it’s enough to cover the electricity consumption of the majority of Spanish households.

Note: The above text has been corrected to reflect the correct units for the quantity of electricity produced in January, 2013. It is more than 6 terawatt-hours, not 6 terrawatts.

This past weekend in New York, I had the chance to speak with a Malian singer who had landed in the city from the capital Bamako just three days earlier.

Fatoumata Diawara, a 30-year-old singer, is the youngest emerging star from a nation of star-studded artists on the international music scene.

And like most of her musical colleagues back home right now, music takes a backseat to the daily concerns of war.

French troops and warplanes are pushing against Islamist fighters who are — it seems — trying to close in on the capital Bamako.

West African troops are also poised to get their boots on the ground in Mali to help out.

Fatoumata Diawara says Malian citizens are scared.

“We knew there was a new Islamist group in Mali, but I think that we’ve only realized how serious the situation is for a couple of days now,”Diawara says. “Things have really changed, the energy of people in Bamako has changed. And since in Africa, men always fare better than women, my worry was that men would let this situation unfold and let this new Islamist group get to the north and would collaborate with them, because what this group stands for wouldn’t impact men much, but it would affect women tremendously.”

Fatoumata Diawara at Global Fest 2013. (Photo: Marco Werman)

With their political system all but collapsed as well, Malians don’t even have non-military role models to boost their confidence.

Which is why many Malians are looking for some guidance from a group of people they respect: the country’s musicians.

“The Malian people look to us,” Diawara says. “They have lost hope in politics. But music has always brought hope in Mali. Music has always been strong and spiritual, and has had a very important role in the country, so when it comes to the current situation, people are looking up to musicians for a sense of direction.”

So, for a month prior to coming to New York, Diawara helped spearhead a project in Bamako with some of Mali’s greatest musicians.

The song “Maliko,” brought together artists like kora player Toumani Diabate, guitarist and singer-songwriter Habib Koite, and legendary female vocalist Oumou Sangare.

Diawara told me the song makes two requests: a plea for peace and a plea for the emancipation of women in Mali.

Because as she told me earlier, if there is jihad in their country, men will always be able to strike compromises with other men.

It will be a lot harder for women.

But Diawara says Malians are determined not to see their country conquered by jihadists.

We’ve seen songs for peace recorded before.

It’s hard to say what kind of impact they actually have.

But Diawara believes this song can help.

The song’s lyrics includes this line: “Never have I seen such desolation, They want to impose Sharia law on us. Tell the north that our Mali is one nation, indivisible.”

Ghana in West Africa for example is experiencing an economic upturn and one Ghanaian family in London is planning to go back.

We are talking about the family of Ozwald Boateng. If you are a clothes-horse you may have heard of him. The 45-year-old Boateng is a British-born men’s fashion designer. His parents emigrated from Ghana to England in the 1950s.

Boateng’s father was a dapper dresser and Ozwald followed in his footsteps, but went much further that just dressing well. He set his sights on London’s globally-revered street of men’s fashion: Savile Row.

Imagine the fine fabrics and bespoke lines of a crisp British suit and then plug it into a color wheel. That is Ozwald Boateng’s style.

When Boateng landed on Savile Row in 2002, many were unaware that he was an African, but as he became more established, his uniqueness seemed to accelerate his popularity.

Now, with the economy in Ghana is improving, Boateng’s parents and siblings are moving home and Boateng himself is aiming to bring his style to Ghana and the continent.

To help promote the song, the band reached out to a Stockholm ad agency which riffed off the title, “Blue Ice,” and the song’s theme of fading love to make ten press kits for select media and fans. The press kits consist of silicon mold and a bottle of distilled water, complete with instructions for how to create a working record… out of ice.

The ice record will only last one play, and the water is sure to ruin your turntable, but the group hopes that the unconventional marketing ploy will translate into sales for the band’s upcoming album “Optica.”

In the months and years that followed, my musical tastes became informed by an ever-eclectic mix of sounds: 70s Rolling Stones, early R&B and soul, jazz, and the glamorous funk of disco.

When I graduated from high school in 1979, there were two songs that had come to define disco for me: “Le Freak” by Chic and “Ring My Bell,” by Anita Ward.

After graduation, my buddy George and I headed up from North Carolina to New York for a week on vacation. Disco was the soundtrack because the city was in full disco-lockdown.

Wherever you went, it seemed like Anita Ward’s bell hook was streaming out of boomboxes, cars and taxis, and shops of all sorts.

The other thing that was on our minds was Studio 54. We had clubs in Raleigh, but nothing like the palace we had heard about in the lyrics to “Le Freak.” But George and I were southern preppies at the time, and because of our social rank, didn’t believe we had much of a chance of getting in.

Still, we headed down in our khakis, polo shirts, L.L. Bean moccasins. I recall throwing on a beat-up blue seersucker jacket just to appear slightly up-market.

George and I got in the scrum on the sidewalk in front of 54, pressing as close to the velvet rope as possible. I don’t know if it was owners Steve Rubell or Ian Schrager or someone else, but there was the “casting guy” in back of the rope scanning the crowd for the right people to let in.

We had been there a couple of minutes, halfheartedly waving our hands like everyone else trying to catch the gatekeeper’s attention. But he spotted us first, and then pointed. “You preppies over there, come on.”

And that was it. We were in. And it was a blast.

Fleeting, free-floating recollections: the dancers on stage in hot pants; a crescent moon that descended above the heads of the dancers, a giant spoon lowering to just below its nose, giving the moon a bump, and the moon’s eyes opening wide; hearing every great disco anthem ever made up to that point; the towel boys in the bathroom wearing only silver lame Speedos and high-tops; the Park Avenue women in white dresses looking as blasé Bianca Jagger, but ready to dance with anyone.

I don’t recall what time we stumbled out of there. We went back for a second dose the next night, and reveled in it again.

When my aunt heard that we got in, she figured she’d come with us for a third visit. But as a threesome, we did not make the cut. Maybe because we had a third wheel that didn’t quite look like us or fit in to our age cohort. Maybe it was a different gatekeeper who didn’t like us and our the preppy look. Who knows?

It just felt like that bit in “Seinfeld” where George returns to the beautiful people club, but it’s evaporated. There’s no club. It was a mirage.

Less than a year later, I was just starting college. And in February 1980, the disco-dancing mecca of Studio 54 closed. It had been raided, Rubell and Schrager later found guilty of tax evasion (even with Roy Cohn as their attorney), and it felt like its closing marked the end of disco in the way the Stones concert at Altamont marked the end of the 60s.

Studio 54 remained under lease to Rubell and Schrager, and it served as a live music venue in the 80s. But never again did it regain the cachet I got to witness in 1979.

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For a country where music is so central to life and entertainment, the crisis has quieted many musicians in a big way. But not balafon player Neba Solo.

If you look at a map of Mali, it’s basically two countries. The conflict zone is two-thirds of Mali, all in the north. Muslim extremists have imposed Sharia law there. In the south, it’s a different country.

Neba Solo’s home village of Nebadougou is in the south, and he says that where he’s from, there’s no violence.

“Things are calm,” he tells me. “There’s no problem in Nebadougou, even though the troubles in the north do concern us.”

Neba illustrates that concern with a proverb: the elephant — like Mali — is big, but even a problem in his foot will cause troubles for the whole body.

Some who know Neba Solo well would say that parable applies to Neba Solo too.

Ingrid Monson, an ethnomusicologist at Harvard Univesity, has been following Neba Solo’s career for years.

When Neba Solo arrived in Boston this week for a performance and discussion of his music in Mali, Monson knew right away that things with him were not OK.

“The first thing I noticed is that he’s lost weight,” Monson says. “He told me that it’s due to nervousness and fear for the future.”

Neba Solo, born Souleymane Traore, is 43-years old. His instrument, the balafon, is a wood xylophone whose sounds are amplified by resonating gourds. It’s played widely in Mali and across West Africa.

When his talents on the balafon became known, Traore took his stage name: “Neba,” from his hometown of Nebadougou, and “Solo” because he can…like no one else.

Professor Ingrid Monson had been planning earlier this year to visit Mali and continue her research on Neba Solo. But the coup last March, and ensuing violence there, changed her plans.

So instead, she got Neba Solo to come to Harvard. The hall was packed, offering many an introduction to this incredible musician.

Americans also seem to be waking up to Mali’s confusing and consequential situation, in part because Malian music appears under threat.

Ingrid Monson says right now though, music is one of the last concerns for the Malian government in the capital Bamako.

“The government is barely in control. They need to have an election, there are a lot of police on the streets in Bamako, there’s a great deal of uncertainty, the worst part for people who are poor already is the price of basic food stuffs for living has gone way up and it’s made life very difficult.”

Despite the depressing situation in the south and the north of Mali, Neba Solo says music is not dead. It’s the moment, the “right now” that is dead, he explains.

“There’s no activity, nothing’s happening in Mali,” Neba Solo says. “And if there’s no activity, there’s no art.”

He continues: “Me and other musicians, we’re trying to pull together through the crisis. But the crisis also means that the ceremonies and parties that musicians typically get gigs for, they’re not happening. So, we sit around with nothing to do.”

Well, that’s not entirely true.

Though he hasn’t recorded it yet, Neba Solo has written a song Jenkafo, which means “reunite us.”

In the track, Neba Solo sings to Malians to have confidence in the future of their country. Not just through talk, but through action.

He believes Jenkafo can make a difference.

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New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, put a ban on the sale of soda-cups over 16 ounces.

In France, there is a new proposed amendment to put a 300 percent tax on palm oil, which is high in saturated fat and deemed unhealthy.

It’s found in innumerable every day items and food products like baby-formula, cookies, chocolate bars, and margarine.

But the amendment has been nicknamed the “Nutella tax” because the chocolate-hazelnut spread contains no less than 20 percent palm oil.

Adrien Gontier, a Ph.D student in geochemistry in Strasbourg, France, is a big opponent of the use of palm oil.

He has spent a year living without any products containing this oil and blogs about it.

And he has a mixed reaction to the amendment.

“I was pleasantly surprised that senators looked into this issue,” he said, “but I think this amendment does not go far enough. They should have at least brought up the fact that using this oil also causes environmental problems.”

Gontier is referring to the fact that some palm oil plantations are responsible for deforestation and other environmental issues in countries that produce it such as Indonesia and Malaysia.

The palm oil industry complained that the tax was unfair and that it should be up to consumers to watch what they eat. Something Gontier says is hard to do when food labeling doesn’t have to specify which “vegetable oil” is being used.

The Malaysian Palm Oil Council also deplored the proposed tax, saying “palm oil is a healthy, natural and important product, which 240,000 small farmers in Malaysia are proud to produce.”

But Gontier said that is untrue. Far from running sustainable, family-owned businesses, he said, “those Malaysian farmers oversee small portions of what once were gigantic plantations owned by the government or the palm oil industry.”

Now, French consumers shouldn’t have to worry about paying a lot more for their beloved Nutella if this tax is adopted.

The extra cost will be less than a dime for a small jar of Nutella.

Now, regardless of what happens with the “Nutella tax,” Ferrero, the maker of Nutella, says after five decades in stores, the Nutella concoction just will not be altered.

Colonel David Richmond (Photo: Help For Heroes)

British Army Colonel David Richmond was wounded in Afghanistan.

Four years after surgery to save his leg, he’s serving his nation again by helping disabled war vets get support and respect back home.

Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian, is going to try to break the world height record for skydiving this coming Sunday or Monday.

He’ll rise up into the sky in a balloon…to 23 miles high. 23 miles!

That’s the edge of space. And then he’ll jump out of the gondola.

As you probably heard, Baumgartner was going to try earlier this week, but heavy winds made him scrub his mission.

So, earlier Friday I was looking at the Red Bull web site. Red Bull is sponsoring Baumgartner’s jump.

And they point out that Baumgartner and his team have gone over all the possibilities of what could go wrong.

What could go wrong? Well, plenty.

Another web site I was checking out had a story by an aerospace historian named Gregory Kennedy. And this tale will give you white knuckles.

It was about Joseph Kittinger. He’s the Air Force pilot who holds the current height record for skydiving.

102,800 feet, set in 1960.

But leading up to that record-setting jump, Kittinger attempted two other lower-altitude jumps. The first jump was a whole bowl of wrong.

When he jumped at 76,000 some odd feet, Kittinger accidentally released the pilot chute.

If you’ve seen a parachute, there’s a tiny chute — or pilot chute — that draws the larger parachute out of its pack. So with Kittinger, that pilot chute way up there in the thin air at 76,000 feet, all it does is flap around in the wind.

Then wraps around Kittinger’s neck, and starts spinning him around like mad.

Then he blacks out.

Yes, he falls unconscious at somewhere above 50,000 feet.

And doesn’t come to until he’s a 1,000 feet above the ground.

Shakes himself to, and gets out the main parachute just in time.

Felix Baumgartner knows that story well … Kittinger is an adviser on his team.

And if you want to see how Baumgartner’s upcoming jump goes, he’ll have cameras strapped all over his body so you can watch the 23 mile freefall.

But you know, in all this talk of Pussy Riot, we have never heard a good chunk of one of their songs.

The band’s first big notice, a tune whose title translates as “Loosen up the Paving Stones”. Its context: the female punk collective wrote and recorded this just after the Arab Spring.

They sing “Egyptian air is good for the lungs”. Then Pussy Riot calls for a “Tahrir Square on Red Square.”

It’s not a great tune. After all, if you like this, the internet says, you may like bands called Stereowoolf and Aunty Panty.

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The show on Friday will feature Icelandic pop stars Of Monsters and Men….

… plus Julie Fowlis and her musical advocacy for the disappearing language she speaks in Scotland;

PLUS — Youssou N’dour and his bid to become president of Senegal…

Watch Sound Tracks, Episode 2 on PBS. See more from Sound Tracks.

Sound Tracks is a musical adventure — a new series we are producing for PBS that roams America and the world in search of the most compelling music, musicians and singers. Produced by The Talbot Players and KQED, San Francisco, Sound Tracks tells the stories behind the music and profiles the artists who create it.

A new one-hour episode of Sound Tracks airs nationally on PBS on Friday, October 5, 2012 at 9 pm (check local listings).

The release of the Beatles-Fela Kuti mashup by DJ Rich Medina and producer Mark Hines worked both lyrically and musically, as Hines told us on The World Thursday.

For me, an avowed Beatles and Fela fan, this is like a musical Reese’s peanut butter cup: two great tastes that taste great together. Perhaps not as much as the originals listened to separately. But still great.

Paul McCartney in Lagos (Photo: YouTube screengrab)

I’ve even heard that the title came from the sense of constant motion while Wings was in Lagos.

And if you’re looking for anecdotes that serve as a metaphor for the colonial power meeting the colonized (Macca the British proxy, Fela the Nigerian), this is it. Wikipedia’s entry on “Band on the Run” tells the story quite well.

If you want to read more, this article in the Guardian fills in some of the background to Fela’s distaste for foreigners coming to Nigeria.

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Palestinian reaction has not been positive, as anchor Marco Werman explains.