There Was A Country: A Personal History Of Biafra

For those who already know the writer of Things Fall Apart(1958), Chinua Achebe’s memoir, There Was a Country, will emphasize and elucidate certain intricate or fuzzy details of his already well-known life. This new work is not made of the mnemonic energy of grand autobiography but of the subtle and graceful power of Achebe’s taut prose, his mastery of the form and economy of memorable language. Achebe does chronicle and preserve for us a powerful memoir of a lost and ambiguous time. Achebe sets the score of his life’s story in the rise and fall of another country—the republic of Biafra—and one of the most brutal civil wars of the twentieth century.