The importance of the pen, the brush and the voice of the artist as a social critic and as an interpretive lens to focus on the intricacies as well as the banalities of inter-human conflict may or may not carry less weight than they did in distant and not so distant past. This of course is a question of perspective; but even in the age of the saturation coverage of wars and insurrections by the apparatus of the mass media, the nuanced touches provided by the evocative poet and the erudite writer can give new dimensions of insight into the…

Fred Alan Wolf, Taking The Quantum Leap. (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 282 Pages.  In this book, Professor Fred Alan Wolf (San Diego State University, California) reviewed the march of Western science, from early Greeks to the loss of reason during the Catholic Church induced dark ages and the return to science that began with Copernicus. He told us what Copernicus did, and then proceeded to telling us a bit about Galileo (demonstrated that the sun is the center of the solar system), Newton (three laws of motion, law of gravity, and with Leibnitz, calculus), Kepler, Tyco Brahe and…

At last, the world is hearing from Professor Chinua Achebe, Africa’s foremost novelist, distinguished intellectual and author of the classic, Things Fall Apart, on the Nigeria-Biafra war. In a new book (There Was a Country – A Personal History of Biafra, New York: Penguin, 2012),  Achebe presents a detailed account of what is widely regarded as the ‘genocidal Biafran war’ prosecuted forty-two years ago in which about 3 million people (mostly, unarmed civilians, including women and children) were brutally killed. When you talk about genocide in Africa, most people would eagerly prefer we all look towards Rwanda or Darfur, or…