When the surgeons informed us that our unborn child had a fatal heart condition I was devastated. The only hope they offered was an infant transplant which was not only experimental but it was also unlikely that a donor organ would be found in time. Five years earlier Dr. Leonard Bailey had rocked the world when he transplanted the heart of a baboon into a human baby. He went on to pioneer an infant transplant program but it was still very much in its infancy. The medical community was deeply divided on questions related to the ethics and efficacy of this approach. I came to the conclusion that a decision for or against a transplant would need to be based entirely on faith. I was ill-equipped to perform an act of faith but I remembered studying Kierkegaard in my first year at university. In his book, Fear and Trembling, he asserts that the first movement of faith is Infinite Resignation. Starting with my own very tentative movements of Infinite Resignation and progressing toward Moriah - this is a very personal story of an odyssey to save the life of our son.

When the surgeons informed us that our unborn child had a fatal heart condition I was devastated. The only hope they offered was an infant transplant which was not only experimental but it was also unlikely that a donor organ would be found in time. Five years earlier Dr. Leonard Bailey had rocked the world when he transplanted the heart of a baboon into a human baby. He went on to pioneer an infant transplant program but it was still very much in its infancy. The medical community was deeply divided on questions related to the ethics and efficacy of this approach. I came to the conclusion that a decision for or against a transplant would need to be based entirely on faith. I was ill-equipped to perform an act of faith but I remembered studying Kierkegaard in my first year at university. In his book, Fear and Trembling, he asserts that the first movement of faith is Infinite Resignation. Starting with my own very tentative movements of Infinite Resignation and progressing toward Moriah - this is a very personal story of an odyssey to save the life of our son.

“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

A passionate meditation on the consolations and disappointments of religion and poetry