I read Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart as an undergrad at BYU, but forgot a lot of the plot details over the last 10 years. I am happy that teaching my cultural anthropology class gave me an opportunity to read it again. It takes place in Nigeria during the time when tribal society and customs were being pushed aside by Christian missionary efforts and the new power structure of colonial government. In cultural anthropology, you are supposed to try to view things with cultural relativism, in other words without your own biases. I find that harder to do in terms of religion than government. Culture by nature changes and adapts to environmental conditions and the availability of new knowledge does not seem a bad thing. The missionaries in the book do not use force, only invitation. They also use science to prove old taboos wrong - like twins being evil or a forest being haunted and unlivable. The political changes are quite the opposite -- violent and humiliating. Forcing tribesmen to do an immediate change from one power structure to another causes tension and makes life miserable for the generation caught in between new and old.
It is violent, but not graphic and very educational. I recommend it to anyone 13 and older.
I read a lot online about small scale farming and one website recommended several books by Gene Logsdon. My library only had Gene Everlasting. I requested it without really knowing what it was about beyond farming. The main focus of the book is the author's experience with cancer and what he learned from cancer in the context of his life experience with farming. I found it a slow read, very philosophical. My favorite parts were the practical suggestions on farming and observations about how nature heals and replenishes itself.
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