Details

ISBN-10: 014312403X
ISBN-13: 9780143124030
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publish Date: 09/24/2013
Dimensions: 8.50" L, 5.70" W, 0.80" H

There Was a Country: A Memoir

Paperback

Price: $18.00

Overview

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart–a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war

For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967-1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.

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Reviews
"Foreign Policy Must Read 2012" by Books from Global Thinkers

"Chinua Achebe's history of Biafra is a meditation on the condition of freedom. It has the tense narrative grip of the best fiction. It is also a revelatory entry into the intimate character of the writer's brilliant mind and bold spirit. Achebe has created here a new genre of literature in which politico-historical evidence, the power of story-telling, and revelations from the depths of the human subconscious are one. The event of a new work by Chinua Achebe is always extraordinary; this one exceeds all expectation."–Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

"A fascinating and gripping memoir." –The Wall Street Journal

"There Was a Country ought to be essential reading...an eclectic range of insights and fascinating anecdotes."–Financial Times

"Achebe writes in a characteristically modest fashion...Like much of Achebe's other work, this book about the progress of war and the presence of violence has a universal quality. In a world where sectarian hatreds augmented by political mediocrity have fractured Syria and threaten to bring Israel and Iran to blows, There Was a Country is a valuable account of how the suffering caused by war is both unnecessary and formative."–Newsweek

"Memoir and history are brought together by a master storyteller."
The Guardian

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Details

ISBN-10: 014312403X
ISBN-13: 9780143124030
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publish Date: 09/24/2013
Dimensions: 8.50" L, 5.70" W, 0.80" H
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