Reddit reviews Things Fall Apart
We found 7 Reddit comments about Things Fall Apart. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Anchor Books
Reddit reviews Things Fall ApartWe found 7 Reddit comments about Things Fall Apart. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Dante is a pretty traditional part of the Western canon, but you can probably make the argument if you try.
Some other books to consider (and I'll even give you male protags):
(And I know you probably don't have time to read any/all of these before school starts, but they're good books to be aware of, and you should check them out if you can.)
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
http://www.amazon.com/Things-Fall-Apart-Chinua-Achebe/dp/0385474547/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255456961&sr=8-1
Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Fucking Breathtaking
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. just trust me on this
I'm going to have to go with Things Fall Apart: http://www.amazon.com/Things-Fall-Apart-Chinua-Achebe/dp/0385474547. It was written in response to Joseph Conrad, and would specifically compare the critique of civility among the culture shown in both works.
I think a great one would be Things fall apart crossed with "Star Wars" because of some of the themes.
I'm a huge star wars fan and now a ton about the lore and there's a recurring theme: Jedi are okay taking immoral actions as long as it's justified by their whole "it's the dark side!". And for all of those that don't know the book "When things fall apart", it's a book from a perspective of an African man right around the time that white people start exploring/colonizing Africa.
So here's what I'm thinking:
With that said, I imagine that the Jedi come down on the planet, and the whole "white people colonization" takes place. Jedi try to teach the tribes that they're using the "dark side of the Force", try to change their culture, and ultimately eradicate several tribes that are unwilling to conform because of their dark-side threat.
What's interesting is really reading into the SW history as well as the manual and some of their core principles. They're very religious and devoted and anyone who disagrees and uses the Force will be exiled, expelled, or killed.
I'm not aware of any academic histories that have the wide scope that you are after, but there are a few introductory texts that do attempt it. Shillington's History of Africa is the most famous one. It stretches way back to the first written accounts from Greek expansion, but is particularly interesting for trying to provide an African perspective of the colonial period.
Africans and Their History has a similar scope, but also extends way back into pre-history and the beginnings of human evolution. I haven't read it myself, but I believe it is well-written.
Someone else has mentioned The Scramble for Africa, by Thomas Pakenham, which deals specifically with the period of European imperialism between about 1860 and 1910. It's probably worth while taking a look at it just because offers insight into what Africa was like when Europeans found it. Also, it's probably worth reading because it is just really rare to find a history that is so griping, despite being so ambitious.
Similar to the above, the many of he great river explorers between 1600 and 1900 wrote accounts of their journeys that form the only primary sources that we really have (although, there are certainly earlier accounts of Northern Africa and the Horn). Stanely is quite famous, but he is a product of his time. He is entertaining, and includes all sorts of interesting diagrams and charts, but he regards the native people with a fair bit of ridicule. Mungo Park's Travels is probably the most readable, and he was writing a full century prior to Stanely, prior to the racism of the Imperial era, and in a continent much freer of European involvement.
If you like fiction, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart gives an African perspective of tribal lifestyle as it was before colonisation.
>Excerpt:
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> On a sunny morning in November, 2018, twelve men and two women gathered in a lavishly furnished living room in Oguta, a town in southeastern Nigeria, with the air-conditioning at full blast. They had come to discuss the caste system that persists among the Igbo people in the region. The group’s host, Ignatius Uchechukwu Okororie, a short, sixty-two-year-old retired civil servant, split open a kola nut with his fingernails and ate its flesh; he then passed a metal tray of nuts around the room, for the others to taste. “He who brings kola nut brings life,” he said. The breaking of kola nut, known as iwa oji, is an important Igbo ritual traditionally performed to welcome guests to a gathering. The group in Okororie’s living room were members of a caste called ohu: descendants of slaves who, almost a century ago, were owned by townspeople. They are typically restricted from presiding over such ceremonies. In Okororie’s house, the iwa oji was a small rebellion. Slavery existed among the Igbo long before colonization, but it accelerated in the sixteenth century, when the transatlantic trade began and demand for slaves increased. Under slavery, Igbo society was divided into three main categories: diala, ohu, and osu. The diala were the freeborn, and enjoyed full status as members of the human race. The ohu were taken as captives from distant communities or else enslaved in payment of debts or as punishment for crimes; the diala kept them as domestic servants, sold them to white merchants, and occasionally sacrificed them in religious ceremonies or buried them alive at their masters’ funerals. (A popular Igbo proverb goes, “A slave who looks on while a fellow-slave is tied up and thrown into the grave should realize that it could also be his turn someday.”) The osu were slaves owned by traditional deities. A diala who wanted a blessing, such as a male child, or who was trying to avoid tribulation, such as a poor harvest or an epidemic, could give a slave or a family member to a shrine as an offering; a criminal could also seek refuge from punishment by offering himself to a deity. This person then became osu, and lived near the shrine, tending to its grounds and rarely mingling with the larger community. “He was a person dedicated to a god, a thing set apart—a taboo forever, and his children after him,” Chinua Achebe wrote of the osu, in “Things Fall Apart.” (The ume, a fourth caste, was comprised of the slaves who were dedicated to the most vicious deities.) In the nineteenth century, the abolition of slavery in the West inadvertently led to a glut of slaves in the Igbo markets, causing the number of ohu and osu to skyrocket. “Those families which were really rich competed with one another in the number of slaves each killed for its dead or used to placate the gods,” Adiele Afigbo, an Igbo historian, wrote in “The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria, 1885–1950.” The British formally abolished slavery in Nigeria in the early twentieth century, and finally eradicated it in the late nineteen-forties, but the descendants of slaves—who are also called ohu and osu—retained the stigma of their ancestors. They are often forbidden from speaking during community meetings and are not allowed to intermarry with the freeborn. In Oguta, they can’t take traditional titles, such as Ogbuagu, which is conferred upon the most accomplished men, and they can’t join the Oriri Nzere, an important social organization.