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How have different forms of colonialism shaped societies and their politics? William F. S. Miles focuses on the Hausa-speaking people of West Africa whose land is still split by an arbitrary boundary established by Great Britain and France at the turn of the century. In 1983 Miles returned as a Fulbright scholar to the region where he had served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the late 1970s. Already fluent in the Hausa language, he established residence in carefully selected twin villages on either side of the border separating the Republic of Niger from the Federal Republic of Nigeria. Over the next year, and then during subsequent visits, he traveled by horseback between the two places, con...
A cross-cultural memoir by a former Peace Corps volunteer and Fulbright scholar.
Here is a unique collection of fifty years of essays chosen to form an unconventional autobiography and capstone to his remarkable career as the conservative writer par excellence. Included are essays that capture Buckley's joyful boyhood and family life; his years as a conservative firebrand at Yale; the life of a young army officer; his love of wine and sailing; memories of his favourite friends; the great influences of music and religion; a life in politics; and exploring the beauty, diversity, and exactitude of the English language.
Africa's newest Jewish community of note is in Nigeria, where upwards of twenty thousand Igbos are commonly claimed to have adopted Judaism. Bolstered by customs recalling an Israelite ancestry, but embracing rabbinic Judaism, they are also the world's first 'Internet Jews'. William Miles has spent over three decades conducting research in West Africa. He shares life stories from this spiritually passionate community, as well as his own Judaic reflections as he celebrates Hanukka and a bar mitzvah with 'Jubos' in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria.
A vivid and lucid analysis of the electoral process in a rural area of Northern Nigeria.
Airborne is how William F. Buckley, Jr. describes his sail across the wide Atlantic with his son and five friends. The trip, for fifteen years a dream, for fifteen months a planned operation, was always a risk: one doesn’t set out haphazardly in a small sailboat across 4,400 miles of ocean, and Buckley’s account of perils of the sea as experienced by himself since he acquired his first sailboat at age thirteen is at once graphic, instructive, and terrifying. But, we learn quickly, the concern is mostly for the prospect of thirty days and thirty nights away from the cosmopolitan jungle to which he and his friends are accustomed; their lair, so to speak. But it happened: notwithstanding vicissitudes amusing, annoying, and even dangerous, suddenly the schooner, and the entire trip, were airborne, and the experience resulted in a fusion of hopes, fears, ambitions, and pleasures that lifts the book from the category of mere chronicles of the sea, into a chronicle of our time, a passage of the spirit.
Thailand's Bhumibol Adulyadej, the only king ever born in the United States, came to the throne of his country in 1946 and is now the world's longest-serving monarch. This book tells the unexpected story of his life and 60-year rule: how a Western-raised boy came to be seen by his people as a living Buddha; and how a king widely seen as beneficent and apolitical could in fact be so deeply political, autocratic, and even brutal. Paul Handley provides an extensively researched, factual account of the king's youth and personal development, ascent to the throne, skilful political maneuverings, and attempt to shape Thailand as a Buddhist kingdom. Blasting apart the widely accepted image of the ki...
"For God, for country, and for Yale... in that order," William F. Buckley Jr. wrote as the dedication of his monumental work—a compendium of knowledge that still resonates within the halls of the Ivy League university that tried to cover up its political and religious bias. In 1951, a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate published his first book, which exposed the "extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude" that prevailed at his alma mater. The book, God and Man at Yale, rocked the academic world and catapulted its young author, William F. Buckley Jr. into the public spotlight. Now, half a century later, read the extraordinary work that began the modern conservative movement. Buckley's harsh assessment of his alma mater divulged the reality behind the institution's wholly secular education, even within the religion department and divinity school. Unabashed, one former Yale student details the importance of Christianity and heralds the modern conservative movement in his preeminent tell-all, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom."
The first book about the only two Reform Movement kibbutzim in Israel.