I still remember vividly how as a child, we went in pursuit of lizards, rats and the smelly shrew to catch and eat. This was because of the intense hunger that pervaded in the besieged Biafra and to avoid our legs being swollen occasioned by kwashiorkor which was called ‘rain boots’ those days. Our flight in the middle of the day in our village, being pursued by Federal troops is remarkable. My mother and two brothers, my only sister having been claimed by the war earlier, survived the war by sheer providence. We lived in the forest like animals. Some of my cousins died right before me for their legs became swollen because of hunger and malnutrition and the pendant kwashiorkor. They became white or sickly discolored like a plant covered from the sun. Death came majestically to lead them to early and unwilling graves. Their mothers looked with tear filled bloodshot eyes as they were lowered unto the bosom of the earth, wrapped in disused wrapper for coffin too was luxury and unaffordable. It was sorrow filled days. This is all this narrative is about. Our ordeal in the fratricidal war.

1946-2006 Sixty Years for Children commemorates the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) 60th anniversary and traces, decade by decade, how the cause of children has evolved since World War II. This historical review explores UNICEF's contribution against a backdrop of rapid global changes in social, political and economic affairs - and looks ahead to 2015, the deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals that will transform the lives of millions of children.

Celebrating UNICEF's 50th anniversary in 1996, Children First examines changes in public attitudes and government policies which have put children at the top of the international agenda in the 1990s. Starting from the International Year of the Child in 1979, development historian Maggie Black studies the two movements which have done most to raise the visibility of children in the public consciousness: - the child survival campaign, which culminated in the 1990 World Summit for Children - the movement for children's rights, which resulted in the 1989 International Convention on the Rights of the Child, now ratified by 177 countries.Children First explores what brought these two movements such unprecedented success, and asks: Is this new found concern for the world's children likely to last?

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE ‘So long as we are alive, so long as we feel, so long as we love, everything in us is an energy we can use’ The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. He is born into a world of poverty, ignorance and injustice, but Azaro awakens with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute. The tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story. Despite belonging to a spirit world made of enchantment, where there is no suffering, Azaro chooses to stay in the land of the Living: to feel it, endure it, know it and love it. This is his story. ‘In a magnificent feat of sustained imaginative writing, Okri spins a tale that is epic and intimate at the same time. The Famished Road rekindled my sense of wonder. It made me, at age 50, look at the world through the wide eyes of a child’ Michael Palin

A brilliant, clear-eyed consideration of the visual representation of violence in our culture--its ubiquity, meanings, and effects. Considered one of the greatest critics of her generation, Susan Sontag followed up her monumental On Photography with an extended study of human violence, reflecting on a question first posed by Virginia Woolf in Three Guineas: How in your opinion are we to prevent war? "For a long time some people believed that if the horror could be made vivid enough, most people would finally take in the outrageousness, the insanity of war." One of the distinguishing features of modern life is that it supplies countless opportunities for regarding (at a distance, through the medium of photography) horrors taking place throughout the world. But are viewers inured—or incited—to violence by the depiction of cruelty? Is the viewer’s perception of reality eroded by the daily barrage of such images? What does it mean to care about the sufferings of others far away? First published more than twenty years after her now classic book On Photography, which changed how we understand the very condition of being modern, Regarding the Pain of Others challenges our thinking not only about the uses and means of images, but about how war itself is waged (and understood) in our time, the limits of sympathy, and the obligations of conscience.

Filmmaker, film essayist, installation artist, writer: the Berlin artist Harun Farocki has devoted his life to the power of images. Over the thirty-plus years of his career, Farocki has explored not the images of life but rather the life of images that surrounds us in newspapers, cinema, books, television, and advertising. Harun Farocki examines, from different critical perspectives, his vast oeuvre, which includes three feature films, critical media pieces, children’s television features, “learning films” in the tradition of Brecht, and installation pieces. Interviews, a selection of Farocki’s own writings, and an annotated filmography complete a valuable biography of this pioneering artist and his legendary career.