Review When he was 4 years old, spurred by insatiable curiosity and the beat of a marching drum, Wole Soyinka slipped silently through the gate of his parents' yard and followed a police band to a distant village. This was his first journey beyond Aké, Nigeria, and reading his account is akin to witnessing a child's epiphany: The parsonage wall had vanished forever but it no longer mattered. Those token bits and pieces of Aké which had entered our home on occasions, or which gave off hints of their nature in those Sunday encounters at church, were beginning to emerge…

What do you pack for the rest of your life? The explosive new novel from the Orange Prize-winning author of We Need to Talk About Kevin  Shepherd Knacker has been saving all his working life for a one way ticket away from the daily grind. When he sells his handyman business for $1million, 'The Afterlife' seems tantalisingly within reach. Yet his wife has concocted one reason after another why now isn't the time to go. Determined to take the plunge, Shep announces that he is leaving for an island off the coast of Tanzania: with or without her. However, Glynis…

Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries. These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul. Editorial Reviews…

Crowned the king of Afrobeat and dubbed the Black President, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was a master performer, composer and voice of the oppressed. The Nigerian musician and activist invented an infectious new musical genre called Afrobeat, combining American funk and jazz with traditional Yoruba and highlife music to end up with a sound that doubled as a weapon for justice. Troubled by the state of Nigerian society, he assembled and built his Kalakuta Republic and created his own political party, actions which saw him arrested, imprisoned and beaten by the police and military--but Fela was so influential in Nigerian cultural and…

Overview Olaudah Equiano was a former slave who became an outspoken opponent of the slave trade. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African is an exciting and terrifying adventure story Equiano's accounts of his kidnapping in Africa at the age of ten, his service as the slave of an officer in the British Navy, his ten years of labor on slave ships until he was able to purchase his freedom in 1766, and his life afterward as a leading and respected figure in the antislavery movement in England. It is a treatise on…

The Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s was one of the first occasions when Western consciences were awakened and deeply affronted by the level of the suffering and the scale of the atrocity being played out in the African Continent. This book which marked Frederick Forsyth's transition from journalist to author is a record of one of the most brutal conflicts the Third World has ever suffered, it has become a classic of modern war reporting. But it is more than that. It voices one man's outrage not only at the extremes of human violence, but also at the…

The Gram Code of African Adam: 450,000 Years of Africa's Lost Civilizations (Book One on Acholonu's African Adam Trilogy), Revised Edition with Ajay Prabhakar. (Catherine Acholonu's Adam Trilogy, Vol 1 in the African Adam Series) Catherine Acholonu (Author), Dr. Ajay Prabhakar (Author) Book Description Publication Date: 2009 The First in the Series of Research Discoveries dealing with Africa as the origin of civilizations. The book unlocks the Pre-Deluge stone inscriptions (Garammante Codes) of the First People.   Publisher: CARC; 2nd edition (2009) ISBN-10: 9783199781 ISBN-13: 978-9783199781 ASIN: B002IG1DAA

As first lord of the admiralty and minister for war and air, Churchill stood resolute at the center of international affairs. In this classic account, he dramatically details how the tides of despair and triumph flowed and ebbed as the political and military leaders of the time navigated the dangerous currents of world conflict. Churchill vividly recounts the major campaigns that shaped the war: the furious attacks of the Marne, the naval maneuvers off Jutland, Verdun's "soul-stirring frenzy," and the surprising victory of Chemins des Dames. Here, too, he re-creates the dawn of modern warfare: the buzz of airplanes overhead,…

The Origin of Speeches begins by recapping the history of our views about the source of language. It then debunks the errors that infuse your dictionary, like those about how words in "unrelated" languages could only have identical sound and sense by "coincidence." It does so with both quality and quantity of data. The next chapters give anyone the skills to sleuth out the Edenic origin of any human word. One learns about letters that shift in sound and location, and letters that drop in and drop out. We discover how Edenics works much like other natural sciences, such as…