The defining experience of Chinua Achebe''s life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War. For more than forty years Achebe was silent on those terrible years, until he produced this towering reckoning with one of modern Africa''s most fateful events. A marriage of history, remembrance, poetry and vivid first-hand observation, There Was a Country is a work of wisdom and compassion from one of the great voices of our age.