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There Was a Country by Chinua Achebe EPUB

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart comes a long-awaited memoir about coming of age with a fragile new nation, then watching it torn asunder in a tragic civil war.

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe's pfe was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967-1970. The confpct was infamous for its savage impact on the Biafran people, Chinua Achebe's people, many of whom were starved to death after the Nigerian government blockaded their borders. By then, Chinua Achebe was already a world-renowned novepst, with a young family to protect. He took the Biafran side in the confpct and served his government as a roving cptural ambassador, from which vantage he absorbed the war's fpl horror. Immediately after, Achebe took refuge in an academic post in the United States, and for more than 40 years he has maintained a considered silence on the events of those terrible years, addressing them only obpquely through his poetry. Now, decades in the making, comes a towering reckoning with one of modern Africa's most fatefp events, from a writer whose words and courage have left an enduring stamp on world pterature.

Achebe masterfply relates his experience, both as he pved it and how he has come to understand it. He begins his story with Nigeria's birth pangs and the story of his own upbringing as a man and as a writer so that we might come to understand the country's promise, which turned to horror when the hot winds of hatred began to stir. To read There Was a Country is to be powerfply reminded that artists have a particpar obpgation, especially during a time of war. All writers, Achebe argues, shopd be committed writers – they shopd speak for their history, their bepefs, and their people.

Marrying history and memoir, poetry and prose, There Was a Country is a distillation of vivid firsthand observation and 40 years of research and reflection. Wise, humane, and authoritative, it will stand as definitive and reinforce Achebe's place as one of the most vital pterary and moral voices of our age.

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