Ehirim Files Mind Power from the University Presses and other Publications

The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History With The President By Taylor Branch, Simon Schuster, New York: 707pp; $35.00

"Taylor Branch admires Clinton within reason, but when there are two sides to an argument he is apt to see things from Clinton's point of view. He conveys well the vituperative rage of the Republicsns at Clinton's theft of their 'small is better' programs and the anti-government rhetoric that had been their sole argument alive resource. The climatic episode here was the repeal of much of the welfare system and substitution of work requirements; a decision on which Branch comments too briefly.'"

-------David Bromwich, The New York Review of Books


Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the age of Jim Crow by Raymond W. Smock, Ivan R. Dee/Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

"The co-editor of the Booker T. Washington Papers reconsiders the man who rose from slavery to a position of power and influence that no black leader had achieved in American history. Mr Smock sees him as a field general in a war of racial survival, his 'compromise' a practical attempt to solve an immense problem. 'A masterwork of concision and compacted power.'"

-------Donald L. Miller, Library of African American Biography.


Boxing: A Cultural History by Kasia Boddy, The University of Chicago Press; 492pp, $29.95

"At nearly five hundred densely packed pages...boxing would seem to include everything that has ever been written, dipicted or in any way recorded about boxing... As Kasia Boddy's masterwork of bricolage sweeps on, there comes to be something wonderfully Joycean -- oceanic, indefatigable, slightly deranged -- in the very quantity of data she has amassed. To read Boddy's book is to confront dozens -- hundreds? -- of inspired mini-essays."

-------Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books.


Journalism's Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting by John Maxwell Hamilton; Louisiana State University Press, $45.00

"Hamilton, a former fereign correspondent and public servant who is currently dean at Louisiana State University's Manship School Mass Commubnication, spurns plodding narrative in favor of an intelligent tour, full of unexpected pleasures and plums. Where else might we stumble across a reporter's account of the Battle of New Orleans? Or the Senior James Gordon Bennett's sharp-edged view of the coronation of Queen Victoria?"

-------James Boylan, Founding Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and Professor Emeritus of Journalism and History at the University of Massachusetts, Armherst.


The Maudlin Impression: English Literary Images of Mary Magdalene, 1550-1700; by Patricia Badir, University of Notre Dame Press, 320ppm $40.00

"[Badir's] fascinating narrative traces the evolution of the Magdalene from the Reformation to the Restoration and raises provocative questions about the mnemonic function of religious art, the power of beautiful images in an iconoclastic culture, and the place of effect, longing, and embodiment in aProtestant poetics."

-------Huston Diehl, University of Iowa

D-Day: The Battle of Normandy by Anthony Beevor, Pengium, London, 608pp, $32.95

"With Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor reinvented grand narrative history for the late 20th Century, combining, as Orlando Figes put it in the Sunday Telegraph 'a soldiers understanding of war with the narrative of a novelist.' Now he brings that characteristic combination of skills to bear on the D-Day landings and the subsequent battle for Normandy, when the largest invasion fleet the world had ever known converged on Nazi-occupied France."

-------London Review of Books

My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times by Harold Evans, Little, Brown & Company; New York: 580pp, $27.99

"The 'Vanished Times' of the subtitle speak to an era when journalists made things, part of a complicated daily manufacturing apparatus of typesetting and printing that always ended in the satisfying plop of a physical object...No one was more satisfied than Evans, who saw in newspapers a route out of those humble, stout beginings that crop up again in narratives that hew to the Great Man theory of history. (It made sense that Evans would go on to write 'The American Century' and 'They Made America,' works that suggest history was made by those with their hands on the levers of wondrous machines).'"

"Harold Evans remains one of the great figures of modern journalism...His auto-biography is both gripping and timely."

-------The Economist

The Preacher and the Politician: Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama and Race in America by Clarence E. Walker and Gregory D. Smithers; University of Virginia Press, $22.95

"This stimulating discussion brings needed historical perspective to 2008's election season brouhaha over then candidate Obama's longtime minister, Wright, who was lambasted for making what we were widely considered to be racially divisive remarks from his pulpit after September 11."

-------Publishers Weekly

Ehirim Files Reads from Africa and other African-Related Publications

Constitutional Rights in Two Worlds: South Africa and the United States by Mark Kende; Cambridge University Press, 2009, 317 pp, $35.99

"A fascinating, original, and genuinely important book, illuminating not only the South Africa and American constitution, but constitutional theory and practice in general."

--------Cass Sunstein, Head of the White House/s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.


Becoming Zimbabwe: A History from the Pre-Colonial Period to 2008 by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo, Weaver Press; Harare, 296pp $30.95

"Becoming Zimbabwe is the first comprehensive history of Zimbabwe, spanning the years from 850 to 2008. In 1997, the Secretary General of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, Morgan Tsuangiral, expressed the need for more open and critical process of writing history in Zimbabwe... a profoundly new history of Zimbabwe that tears apart all of the old certainties."

-------David Monroe, Associate Professor of Development Studies, University of Johannesburg, and author of the World Bank: Development, Poverty, Hegemony


Genuine Intellectuals: Academic and Social Responsibilities in Africa by Bernard Nsokika Fonlon; Lang Ripcig, Cameroon: 172pp $27.99

"Bernard Fonlon... believed in public service with selfless dedication and unwavering integrity... He was educated in the classical mould of Europe, yet he remained close to home in his daily life."

-------Professor Aliko Songolo, UC Irvine


Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men by John A. Rich, MD; M.P.H. The Johns Hopkins University Press

"John Rich, who has devoted so much of his career to the study of violence -- especially in men of color -- challenges us to see beyond the injuries and the anger and to hear and appreciate the plight of these men and to understand that they, like us, seek a place of safety in their lives."

-------David Satcher, MD, Ph.D., 16th Surgeon General of the United States

Nairobi to Shenzhen By Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo

"As with the president's best-selling memoir, 'Dreams From My Father," Ndesanjo's book delves into growing up as a mixed-race child and into a psyche shaped by an erratic father. 'My father beat my mother and my father beat me,' Ndesandjo told the Associated Press...'I remember situations when I was growing up, and there would be a light coming from our living room, and I could hear thuds and screams, and my father's voice and my mother shouting.' Although strictly autobiographical, the novel skips over the part where the protagonists half brother is elected president of the Uniterd States. 'I didn't want to take on any strong political themes in this book,' Ndesandjo said. His mention of the president: 'I think my brother's team is doing an extraordinary job.' Barrack Obama Sr. died in 1982 and the half brothers did not know each other as children.'"

-------Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times

Terrorism: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy by Joseph Zulaika; The University of Chicago Press, $20.00

"This is by far the best book on terrorism I have read for many years. In its systematic deconstruction of counter-terrorism ideology and its call to take terrosrist subjectivity seriously, this is a book of tremendous importance. Terrorism is incredibly rich in analysis and insight - I have no doubt that readers will be mining it for new ideas for many years to come."

-------Richard Jackson, Abenystwyth

Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America byHilary J. Moss, The University of Chicago Press, $37.50

"I cannot think of any other book that is like Scooling Citizens, which makes an important contribution both to the historiography of African Americans and to the history of education in America. Well-written and well-argued, this book is an original contribution to scholarship."

-------Shane White, author of Stories of Freedom in Black New York

Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism by Muhammad Yurus, with Karl Weber; Public Affairs, 282pp, $14.95

"This has been the message for the past twenty-six years of Muhammad Yurus, the Bangladesh economics professor, Nobel Prize winner, and recent recipient of the United States Medal of Freedom, who founded the Grameen Bank. Gramir pioneered the concept of micrcredit, the granting of small loans to people who otherwise would have no access to money to run a business. These, historically, have been the poorest of the poor; in Bangladesh, Grameen now even loans money to street beggars."

-------Sue Halpern, a scholar in residence at Middlebury. Her most recent book is "Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research."

Race, Incarceration, and American Values by Glenn C. Loury, with Pamela S. Karlan, Temmie Shelby, and Loic Wacquant; Boston Review?MIT Press, 86pp, $14.95

"The most dramatic effects of this incarceration are concentrated on the most disadvantaged -- those who are not only African-Americans or Latino, but also poor, uneducated, and living in highly segregated ghettos. While roughly 60 percent of black high school dropouts have spent time in prison, only 5 percent of college-educated African-Americans have done so... The correlation of race and crime in the publics mind reinforces prejudice that affects every African-American."

-------David Cole, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center.

Highlife Music in West Africa by Sonny Oti, Matthouse Press, Nigeria, 288pp

Dancing With Life: Tales from the Township by Christopher Mlalazi, Amabooks Publishers, Zimbabwe, 2009, 88pp

"Christopher Mlalazi may well be the most promising young writer in Zimbabwe today."

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, by Terry Teachout, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 477pp, $30.00

"Armstrong's rise was not easy. He performed about 300 nights a year and lived out of a suitcase. In the early days, he bounced back and forth between Chicago and New York, endured Jim Crow humiliations during tours of the South and struggled to pursue music without getting overwhelmed by the details of running a jazzchestra. (Eventually, he turned the business side over to white managers.)

Still, after revolutionizing jazz of black 1920s, Armstrong was in the vanguard of black entertainers who crossed over to white mass culture, leading an integrated band, appearing in movies and becoming a regular first on radio and then on television."

-------Scott Martelle, an Irvine, California-based journalist and critic reports from New York for the Los Angeles Times Book Review

Chinua Achebe Still Got Game

The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
By Chinua Achebe
Alfred A. Knopf
208 pages. $24.95

Growing up and as youngsters dealing with academia at the secondary level, "we the boys" talked a whole lot about scholarship and applauded the works of our literary idols -- Chinua Achebe, John Munonye, Adiele Afigbo, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Agostinho Neto, Cyprien Ekwensi, Kofi Awoonor, Ali Mazrui, Meja Nwangi, Dominic Mulaisho, Elechi Amadi and uncountable others. We talked quite a bit as aspiring scholars to a point our mothers, whichever house we had convened would stuff our mouth with food to quiet us for the fact we talked too much on issues of the day as they did look forward to a developed youngish intellectuals. But time did fly, just like that.

And as a whole lot, too, has changed over the years based practically on generational thing that popped up with new era, anyone who thought Chinua Achebe was done writing his fascinating stories or had called it quits in using his pen to express his feelings about societal ills and "naked dictatorship" of colonialism, and at the same time educating our minds with his brilliant essays, storytelling and wit in literature, ought to stop by any bookstore and ask about the literary giant's newest entry on the bookshelves.

Or if you are too lazy to walk or drive to a good bookstore in your hood, just google "The Education of a British-Protected Child" and sample a few of the hundreds of thousands of entries found there on the subject matter. I was even baffled from what I saw wondering about a book just released in less than a week and how it has collected over six hundred and something thousand entries. And who are these people curious about Achebe's new book? Would it mean they have been waiting for his new release since he has not written a book in twenty years? Or would it be the master storyteller is back again and everybody is eager to check it out, known for who he is?

Well, I did stop by many of the bookstores in my neck of the wood upon hearing Achebe has written a new book which would be his first new book in twenty years. First, I had called Random House for a copy which was kind of late not knowing the protocol was something I should have taken care of earlier; that is, if I had intended to read the book. I'm quite sure I have gone through that before, with a different publishing house, though. In that quest,I had called Borders to find out if Achebe's book has arrived the shelves. The sales clerk at Borders, the one at Howard Hughes Center Promenade in Culver City, told me they've "sold out." She requested for an order immediately which would however take about a week to reach me. I had no nerves to wait. I called some other branches in the Southland. All that I called either sold out or haven't received shipment yet.

As it happened and coincidentally, I was heading to Long Beach when I bumped into Borders on Bellflower Blvd. I walked in and asked for Achebe's new entry. The sales clerk ran the author's name and found out they haven't received shipment yet. He placed a copy on hold for me. When the shipment arrived, I was called to "come and pick the book up."

And I did get the copy on time for early review. From the preface in which the author tells us about the fiftieth year anniversary of Things Fall Apart, the breaking news of his auto accident relayed to his wife, his family's reaction to that and sixteen well-written essays, Achebe literally wrote his memoirs in The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays." Achebe talked about his two daughters, Chinelo and Nwando; and his two boys, Ikechukwu and Chidi who gave him all the support he needed when he was involved in an automobile accident that nearly cost him his life.

In the first essay, The Education of a British-Protected Child, Achebe did not find colonialism funny, especially the result of lack of profound leadership in Nigeria, and even assuring his readers that he would not give "a discourse on colonialism," he could not "swallow" the fact that colonialism was damaging to the African continent pointing out briefly the evils of colonial rule:

"In my view, it is gross crime for anyone to impose himself on another, to seize his land and his history, and then to compound this by making out that the victim is some kind of ward or minor requiring protection. It is too disingenous. Even the aggressor seems to know this, which is why he will sometimescomouflage his brigandage with such brazen hypocrisy."

Achebe was born in Ogidi 78-years ago in what use to be a Southern Protectorate of British Empire, and then Eastern Region, now Anambra State of a fabricated nation-state ordained by the colonists. His father, an early convert was a teacher for the missionaries. Receiving his early education at Church Missionary Society Primary School, he attended Government College, Umuahia, and then proceeded to University College, Ibadan, for his first degree. He became a writer rather than "a clear-cut scholar," supposedly his dream when Trinity College, Cambridge, declined his application for admission. Being turned down for post-graduate studies at Trinity College, he found work as a producer at Nigeria Broadcasting Corporation.

On What is Nigeria to me? Achebe spoke very ill of a country that was just six years old with the sudden eruption of chaos leading to the pogrom and civil war. He applauds the country as a child that is "gifted, enormously talented, prodigiously endowed, and incredibly wayward." Writing with emotion, his tale of experience in Lagos during the crisis when alcohol-addled soldiers' crackdown on Igbos and their properties coupled with a telephone call alerting him "armed soldiers" who had been on the rampage came looking for him and in his own words because of the book that he wrote, A Man of the People.

Achebe wrote with anger and distress [my emphasis], a war that was deliberately programmed to wipe out the Igbo people from the face of this planet in retaliation to where a group of young military officers organized themselves in what would be Nigeria's first military coup and a topple of its First Republic. And just like the counter coup, J.T.U Aguiyi-Ironsi and his host Adekunle Fajuyi were kidnapped, flogged and murdered in the most brutal of circumstances on the orders of Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, while 4th Batallion commanding officer J Akahan kept himself busy rounding up Igbo millitary officers and killing them in an immense scale.

Or the six-year-old boy in Minna, at school and witnessing a band of northern nihilists and hoodlums walk into his classroom and stab his teacher with a machete, a native Yoruba who was mistaken for Igbo, bleeding from her wounds to death. That being emphasized by me, Achebe is totally disappointed with Nigeria not because of the hoodlums and nihilists but because of the federal government that stood by and allowed such horrific events to unfold.

Why the pogrom was going on in the north, Igbo people were also sought in Lagos by drunken "federal troops" who had launched a search and kill attack. Meanwhile, Achebe had whisked his wife and kids back to the East while he stayed-put to await the outcome of the carnage unleashed by the nihilists, hoodlums and "federal troops." In Lagos, Achebe hid from place to place until he luckily escaped the federal troops who had launched a manhunt for him. In that very situation, Achebe finds it difficult to forgive "Nigeria" for what it did to his kith and kin. The northerners and their collaborators had a masterplan since the revenge in the counter coup, allegedly, wasn't enough, and if the conflict had ended after the counter coup, Achebe had this to say:

If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the north and unleashed waves of brutal massacres, which Colin Legum of 'The Observer' was the first to describe as a pogrom. It was estimated that thirty thousand civilian men, women and children died in these massacres. Igbos were fleeing in hundreds of thousands from all parts of Nigeria to their homeland in the east I was one of the last to flee from Lagos. I simply could not bring myself quickly enough to accept that I could no longer live in my nation's capital, although the facts clearly said so. One Sunday morning I was telephoned from Broadcasting House and informed that armed soldiers who appeared drunk had come looking for me to test which was stronger, my pen or their gun!

The offense of my pen was that it had written a novel called A man of the People, a bitter satire on political corruption in an African country that resembled Nigeria. I wanted the novel to be a denunciation of the kind of independence we were experiencing in postcolonial Nigeria and many other countries in the 1960s, and I intended to scare my countrymen into good behavior with a frightening cautionary tale. The best monster I could come up with was a military coup d'etat, which every sane Nigeria at the time knew was rather far-fetched!...

As one reads on, Achebe tells us about his travels to many African countries in which he acknowledged "the chief problem was racism." He did go on to tell us about Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel Okara, Elechi Amadi, Chukwuemeka Ike, I.N.C. Aniebo and Ken Saro-Wiwa who were all products of Government College, Umuahia, and what they read in those days at the school library -- Treasure Island, Tom Brown School Days, The Prisoner of Zender, David Copperfield -- which had nothing to do with African literature.

In Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature, and as a founding editor of The African Writers Series, he told us about the gathering of African writers in 1962 at Makerere University , Kampala, Uganda, which included the poet Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi, and Obi Wali he said "was himself a teacher of literature and a close friend of the poet Christopher Okigbo, might have been expected to lead the way along the lines of his prescription; but what he did was abandon his acdemic career for politics and business." Achebe was disappointed in Wali's move.

Achebe wrote extensively on African Literature as Restoration of Celebration, Teaching Things Fall Apart, Martin Luther King Jr. and The University and the Leadership Factor in Nigerian Politics.

The book, a reflection of events takes us aback to take a look at Africa's past which literally has been a tragedy. Nobel Laureate, Tony Morrison simply put it thus: "African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe. For passion, intellect and crystalline prose, he is unsurpassed."

Without question, Chinua Achebe still got game.

EHIRIM FILES FALL BOOKS

COUNSELOR: A Life At The Edge Of History
By Ted Sorensen, Harper Publishers

"At a time when Americans are cynical about politics, this gripping, candid memoir illuminates a revered era in American history, stoking our idealism and rekindling our imagination about what this country can achieve when we're summoned to a common purpose."

------ President Barack Obama

Hitler's Beneficiaries: How The Nazis Bought The German People
By Gotz Aly, Translated by Jefferson Chase Verso, 448 pp; 19.99 British Pound Sterling

"Aly asks at the outset what drove ordinary Germans to tolerate and commit historically unprecedented crimes against humanity, in particular the murder of millions of European Jews?' His answer is that ordinary Germans cooperated in Genocide because they benefited from it in material terms. According to Aly, the Nazi dictatorship was built not on terror but on a mutual calculation of interest between leaders and people. This claim entails a further shift in our understanding of the regime; not only did it serve the welfare of the common people, but if there was fear, it was the fear the regime felt of the people, not the other way round. Top Nazi leaders worried that their regime would be toppled by popular unrest if the people's mood soared; their 'satisfaction had to be purchased everyday."

------ John Connelly, London Review of Books, 27 August 2009

Successful Societies: How Institutions and Culture Affect Health
Edited by Peter A. Hall and Michelle Lamont; Cambridge University Press

"...Forces us to challenge common modes of reasoning. This book is wonderful piece of collaborative public intellectuals.' It should be read all over the academy and by the general public."

------ Peter Gourevitch, UC, San Diego

Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life
By MJichael Greenberg, Other Press Publishers

"Michael Greenberg regales us with his take on the life of a writer trying to practice his craft or simply stay alive. He creates poignant subtexts involving fundamental human values and emotions like love, desire, honesty, and malice..."

------ Kirkus Review

Darfur and the Crisis of Governance in Sudan: A Critical Reader
Edited by Salah M. Hasan and Carina E. Ry. Foreward by Andrea Eshete; 522 pp $39.95, Cornell University Press

"Incorporating Sudanese voices, the book is a comprehensive discusiion of the many dimenssions of Darfur and will certainly challenge preconceived and oversimplified narratives about the war."

------ Ahmad Sikainga, The Ohio State University

Inventing The Job Of President: Leadership Style From George Washington To Andrew Jackson
By Fred Greenstein, Princeton University Press, $19.95

"Captivating, inventing the job of president teaches about the past so that old events take on a contemporary significance. It is a book that introduces readers to the wonders -- and good fortune -- of this nation's first decades. Greenstein is handsdown the best, most careful, and wisest presidential scholar."

------ William Ker Muir, Jr.

Transforming Toxic Leaders
By Alan Goldman; Stanford University Press, $24.95

"The swollen literature on good leadership is gradually being tempered by the growing literature on bad leadership. This correction is both necessary and long overdue -- which is why Alan Goldman's book constitutes a contribution to the cause. He explores some bad leaders in some considerable depth, and provides pragmatic possibilities to remediation."

------ Barbara Kellerman, Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School

Black Maverick: T.R.M. Howard's Fight For Civil Rights and Economic Power
By Dvid T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito; University of Illinois Press

"Civil rights crusader, surgeon enterpreneur, big game hunter, promoter of spectacles, self help champion. Without T.R.M. Howard, we may have never heard of Medgar Evans, Fnnie Lou Hamer, and Rosa Parks. Long before Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard organized successful boycotts against Juim Crowe,publicly took J. Edgar Hoover, fought for truth in Emmett Till's murder, provided affordable health care to the poor, and helped kick off the modern civil rights movement. Black Maverick tells the story of an American renaissance man."

------ Harpers Online

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe
By Gerad Provier, Oxfor University Press, 529 pp $27.95

The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa
By Rene Lemarchand, University of Pennsylvania Press, 377 pp... $59.95

The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality
By Thomas Turner, Zed Books Publishers; 243 pp..., $32.95

Evangelicals and Democracy in America Vol 1: Religion and Society
By Steven Brint and Jean Reith Schrordel, editors. Russell Sage Foundation Publishers; $49.95

"The sociologists and political scientists assebled for this project are first rate; what they write may be, collectively, the wisest words yet published on the character of 'the new Christian right."

------ Mark A. Noll, University of Notre Dame.

Letters To My Father: William Styron
Edited by James L.W. West III; Foreword by Rose Styron

"These informative letters to an encouraging father provide a touching portrait of the earnestness and dedication of a budding master and place Styron squarely in the war years during which he came of age."

------ Philip Roth, Southern Literary Studies

For The Thrill Of It: Leopold, Loeb, And The Murder That Shocked Jazz Age Chicago
By Simon Baatz; Harper

"Mr Baatz... has done meticulous research, and he writes extremely well. His book on the Leopld and Loeb case is the best we'll have for a long, long time."

------ New York Times

Beginning To End Lord Jesus Christ: From Alpha To Omega
By Rev. Doris M. Malone; Xlibris

"From Alpha To Omega: Beginning To End Lord Jesus Christ is the result of thirty five years of prayer and the study, prompted by the rise of flwed doctrine on the second advent of Christ to the determent of even some elect. Its central theme is about the miraculaous relationship of God using the tribulation to cleanse and purify of the Church 1 Peter 4: 17-20. Readers will find inspirational poems that answer countless prayers laced with varied references from the Holy Bible. Ultimately, this richly-layered release strongly emphasizes the core values of Christianity."

------ Biblical View

Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race and American Politics
By Peter Goodwin Heltzel; Forewod by Mark A. Noll; Yale University Press

"With this head-turning first book, Peter Helzel emerges as the most provocative new interpreter of American evangelism. Jesus and Justice will change the way we think about Christianity and politics."

------ Charles Marsh, University of Virginia

The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays
By Chinua Achebe; Alfred A. Knopf, 192 pp, $25.95

"The idea that personal narrative is too small, too inward, too individual to reflect our grander collective concerns, is a variation on an attitude that Achebe once observed among critics of fiction. Because the drama in some African novels depended upon the fate of a group, not an individual, these works were dismissed as being too local in their reach..."

------ Eula Biss, Columbia Journalism Review

Recommendations on further reading:

Damage: The Personal Costs of Political Change in Zimbabwe
Edited by Iren Stauton; 542 pp; Weaver Press

Millennium Development Goals: Achievements and Prospects of Meeting the Targets in Africa
Edited by Francis Nwonwu

This book reviews the progress, prospects and challenges of meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Africa. Each chapter corresponds with one of the eight goals of the Millennium Declaration. The introduction sets the stage for the discourse contained in the main text while the conclusion forms an opinion from the findings and prescribes the way forward. The goals, in sequence, include:

• Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

• Achieve universal primary education

• Promote gender equality and empower women

• Reduce child mortality

• Improve maternal health

• Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

• Ensure environmental sustainability

• Develop a global partnership for development.

Summer Read

Books, academic journals, newsmagazines, newspapers, your hood free papers on your doorsteps, the freebies we bump into on our way to run errands and the take that, it's free that comes in your mailbox just to get informed in every aspect of life endeavors is honestly what keeps body and mind one. Without that, body and mind will simply rust away.

So as the Summer jams echoes every nook and cranny of our neigborhoods, it becomes clear that reading is not only for information but a resouceful avenue to keep our internal being healthy, and in some other ways to stay away from trouble by being preoccupied reading a good book.

Let's see here. Too many books have popped up on the shelves this summer and a whole lot seems to be fascinating according to the reviews that I have read. I shall begin with a book I had long expected which eventually surfaced and, the reviews seemingly applauds the author's work, and even though I haven't read it yet, which I would, certainly, and based on the numerous articles posted by the author regarding the troubled, fabricated Nigerian state, I believe the critics for lauding Nigerian-born, British trained and United States-based professor, Max Siollun, on Oil, Plitics and Violence: Nigeria's Military Coup Culture.

Siollun, whose political commentaries on Nigeria, particularly on the military juntas and a corrupt civilian regime is all over Nigerian-related web sites and other publications, covered the fabrication of a Nigerian state to the civilian and military staged coups. I read Siollun coupled with the reviews on his new book meaning that I haven't read the book yet as I write, and other than having a copy in my study, there's not much that I would learn because the story about Nigeria's internal strife has been told in many different ways. And the book's hardcover prize of $33.95 and two hundred and something pages published by Algora is way high, though good in a sense for its revelations.

Like one reviewer noted, "most people probably do not see the Nzeogwu coup as the second attempt at overthrowing the Balewa government by force. While many followers of Nigerian history may know that Awolowo -- leader of the Action Group, one of the opposition parties in the First Republic -- was jailed for treason in 1964, few are aware that it was not a trumped up charge, and that three decades later, Action Group General Secretary, S.G. Ikokwu, confirmed that there was a genuine AG plot to topple the federal government."

I read Chris Mullin's "Diary" on the toxic mess in British parliament he wrote for the London Review of Books in which he came out unblemished and still has his 30-year-old black and white television. Mullin is a member of the British parliament. Detailed and quite some interesting stuff that reveals the digging by the Telegraph after paying a lump sum to purchase a computer disc which had to do with British Parliament's "unexpurgated expenses." The drama, indeed, makes Nigeria National Assembly look like a child's play.

On divinity and spirituality, there are good summer reads. In Martin Luther King Jr. for Armchair Theologians by Rufus Burrow Jr and illustrated by Ron Hill, "Burrow addresses those who see King as 'only' a social activist by showing how King's studies -- particularly his theological studies -- influenced, shaped, and transformed the activist part he pursued during his public life." And there's With God on All Sides: Leadership in a Devout and Diverse America by Douglas A. Hicks which deals with how American leadership bridges two bodies of knowledge -- "religion and leadership studies" which has been destroyed from complex problems. Here Hicks widens the discussion to include overcoming not only religious differences but also socio-economic, political, and cultural divides, according to D. Michael Lindsay who teaches sociology at Rice University and the author of Faith in the Halls of power: How Evangelicals Joined The American Elite.

And check this out. I remember while growing up, My childhood buddies and I hanged out on the beach and most often at Ruga Park playgrounds talking about the Knicker Bockers and the Yankees. Now there's a book titled Knicker Bocker: The Myth Behind New York by Elizabeth L. Bradley and published by Rutgers University Press. Philip Lopate had this to say about Knicker Bocker: "Those who puzzle at the incessant branding and rebranding of New York City would do well to read this fascinating, sophisticated, and witty social history of a myth."

There's interestingly The Making Of A Tropical Disease: A Short History Of Malaria by Randall M. Packard, published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. There's The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter Leeson published by Princeton University Press. There's Love Lessons: Selected Poems of Alba Merini and translated by Susan Stewart, and here the book talks of Italy's foremost poets already known by Italian readers while English readers are about to discover for the first time.

There's Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity by B. Allan Wallace, published by Columbia University Press, and Father Lawrence Freeman calls it "our best selling mind and consciousness scholar boldly corrects the balance bewtween empirical study and religion. There's Einstein's Generation: The Origins of the Relativity Revolution by Richard Staley published by The University of Chicago Press and Times Higher Education Simon Milton puts it this way: "A magnificent achievement and a work of great scholarship. Staley succeeds brilliantly in providing new ground for understanding how Einstein gradually emerged as the central figure within the German physics community."

There's Hitler, The Germans, and the Final Solution by Ian Kershaw and published by Yale University Press. And there's last but not the least, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt by Hasan Kwame Jefferies and published by New York University Press. Robin D. G. Kelley calls it the "book historians of the black freedom movement have been waiting for."

It's just too many of them books out there to keep you going along with the summer jams. So, people, go out there, sit and relax in any book store, browse some books for highlights and get yourself some good books for the summer read.

The Reader, The Writer, The Informed and The Library

I had held an open-minded discourse with a friend and colleague of mine, Austen Oghuma, on a variety of issues regarding books, library, reading and writing, and writing stands alone when it comes to the way most of us think. It all began from David Ejoor's biased and unintelligible interview that got internet crackpots outraged.

But I had reasoned Ejoor does not deserve the attention given him, so far, and I have kept my word that Ejoor is a midget in the history books of the Nigeria crisis and as far as I am concerned he has no place in that fabricated country's history. Well the point I am trying to make here is when I asked Oghuma where one can purchase Ejoor's "Reminiscence" he said probably in Nigeria but I doubt if the book is still around any shelf. Besides, most of the books in Nigeria are poorly produced and published.

We don't write and we don't keep archives which is why our history will one day vanish. On the other hand, it is absolutely why our democracy will keep to be fledgling until eternity and the following comments are vivid accounts why a democracy had thrived:

"A popular government without a popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

James Madison

Libraries are the wardrobes of literature, whence men, properly informed may bring forth something for ornament, much for curiosity, and more for use."

William Dyer (1636 -- 1696)

"There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the Earth as the Free Public Library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office, nor wealth receives the slightest consideration."

Andrew Carnegie

"A democratic society depends upon informed and educated citizenry. Information is the currency of democracy."

Thomas Jefferson

"I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to change through that door and make the most of it. Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself."

Isaac Asimov, New York: Doubleday, 1994

Democracy works if applied on the basis of the above comments and I strongly believe in letters, and I encourage that as we learn each day that we live. Now, let me hear from you, where, how and when you write and which is your favorite and why writing is a powerful weapon.