Ghana Books

Much information here about Ghanaian fabrics and the history of their usage. Beautiful pictures. Very poor binding, the cover of the paperback edition I bought fell off in about a week. Can I get my money back or get a new copy?

As far as instruction goes, this book is not great, but it just about the only one out there. First of all it does not give much information on phonetics and neglets to instruct the learner that the letter combination re- in a certain tense change is not pronounced. It just signifies that the vowel sound in the subject should be pronounced longer. This is just one example.
In addition, Ghanaians would be more than happy to teach you Twi, and this is the best way to learn and meet people.
My advice, to those who can, is to wait and purchase this book in Ghana. It can be purchsed at the University of Ghana-Legon bookstore for about US$4.00.

Don't waste your time buying this book. They promise a cd or audio tape with the book, but didn't send it. So we returned it, and they sent it a second time, also without the cd. It is virtually impossible to learn this tonal language without a cd or tape.

I was not happy because I never received the cd that came with the book. Someone I knew bought the same thing and they let me listen to the cd that I never received and It was not clear they did not explain anythnig just started reading and paused a lot in the cd. The moral of this story is I was very unhappy

I am trying to learn basic Twi, as I will be working in Ghana later this year. By ordering the book, I had hoped to acquire basic language skills to increase my communication skills while in Ghana.

To this end, I found the 146 page book to be worthless. How can a "comprehensive" course be so short?

It is accompanied by a disk that is difficult to hear, as it seems to be recorded from a simple tape recorder. The content is not repeated so that I had to "reverse" the disk constantly, and still was unable to comprehend what was being said.

In conclusion, this book is a thorough disappointment. While I tend to have an affinity for foreign language, I did not even come close to mastering basic greetings.

I would advise anyone looking to learn Twi to find an alternative resource.

I have used this text for two classes. Overall, it has been very helpful. The notes on culture are also very helpful. Initially, the audio CD and Cassette which accompany the book were of low quality; however, I received a better audio (I believe the stock was replenished with better audio) from the CD and the cassette.

The audio supplement could be improved by additing specific pronunciation examples.

I recommend it for indivivdual and group classes in Twi.

Daniel

Tessitore's biography of Kofi Annan leaves the reader with only very vague insight into the life of the seventh Secretary-General to the United Nations. After only a few pages, it becomes evident that the author himself couldn't possibly have known too much about Mr. Annan. Thus, it was no surprise to learn later that Tessitore had never even had an opportunity to interview with the UN Secretary-General.

As a biography, Tessitore's account left me dissatisfied, since it gave me little detail about the life of Kofi Annan. It would be a perfect option for someone seeking only a very broad understanding of Mr. Annan's background. Considering he had access to scarce information himself, I guess Tessitore did a good job. But this begs the question: Why write a biography on a man you know very little about?

Kofi Annan is a sick man and a dangerous one at that. Kofi Annan: The Peacekeeper is ironic in that Annan has been indirectly and directly responsible for the deaths of many people due his being asleep at the wheel at the UN, support for Arafar, etc.

Jeff Jacoby recently wrote that he is basically a symptom of UN's sickness. Jacoby noted that just last week, Annan woke up to a Wall Street Journal column by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, publisher of the influential InstaPundit website, urging that he be replaced by Vaclav Havel, the much-admired former president of the Czech Republic.

In The New York Times, op-ed eminence William Safire reviewed the revelations that link the massive oil-for-food scandal to Annan's own family: Until this year, his son Kojo was getting monthly payments from a firm that had a major oil-for-food contract with the UN -- even though he'd left the company in 1998. The corruption enveloping the UN will not begin to dissipate, Safire wrote, until Annan resigns, "having, through initial ineptitude and final obstructionism, brought dishonor on the Secretariat of the United Nations."

Meanwhile, the latest National Review was out, with its cover photo of Annan and the headline, in large red letters: "You're Fired!" An editorial inside insisted that "Annan should either resign, if he is honorable, or be removed, if he is not," while an essay by Nile Gardiner, a former aide to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, explained why "Kofi's hour is up." With his record, Gardiner observed, "if Annan were the CEO of a Fortune 500 company . . . he would have been forced to resign months ago."

On Wednesday came another call for Annan's ouster, this one from the chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has amassed evidence that Saddam Hussein used stolen oil-for-food dollars to underwrite terrorism and suborn at least one senior UN official. It is "abundantly clear" that Kofi Annan should resign, Senator Norm Coleman said. "As long as Mr. Annan remains in charge, the world will never be able to learn the full extent of the bribes, kickbacks, and under-the-table payments that took place under the UN's collective nose."

But odds are the world won't much care about getting to the bottom of the latest UN scandal. UN scandals rarely provoke lasting outrage. There was no global uproar when the brutal regime in Libya was chosen to chair the UN's Human Rights Commission. Nothing happened to the UN after its troops allowed Serbs to slaughter 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the "safe haven" of Srebrenica. Sex scandals seem to erupt wherever the UN goes -- the latest involves charges of rape, child abuse, and prostitution by UN personnel in the Congo -- but they never cause heads to roll in Turtle Bay. Annan himself became secretary general despite his failure, when he headed the UN's peacekeeping operations, to pay attention to warnings of genocide in Rwanda.

Why should anything be different this time? Oil-for-food may be the greatest international rip-off of modern times, it may have strengthened one of the world's bloodiest dictators, but if history is any guide, the scandal headlines will fade from view long before the secretary general does. By week's end, in fact, dozens of governments, including all the permanent members of the Security Council save the United States, had publicly rallied to Annan's support. Scandal or no scandal, he will almost certainly serve out the remaining two years of his term.

Which is just as well. Annan is merely a symptom of the UN's sickness, not the cause of it. His resignation would do nothing to reform the UN into the engine of peace and liberty its founders envisioned. Better that Annan remain in place as a symbol of UN fecklessness and failure, and a spur to those who can envision something better.

The UN is a corrupt institution, one that long ago squandered whatever moral legitimacy it had. The UN's founding documents venerate justice and human rights, but for the past 40 years, the organization has been dominated by a bloc of states -- essentially the Afro-Asian Third World -- most of whose governments routinely pervert justice and violate human rights.

Inside the United Nations, there is no difference between a dictatorship or a democracy: Each gets exactly one vote in the General Assembly. The reason the UN indulges vicious regimes like those in North Korea, Syria, and Cuba is that they are members in good standing, and most other governments lack the courage to cross them. The UN cannot be fixed unless that changes -- and that isn't going to change.

Kofi is a bad man.

BOOK WAS MORE ADVANCED THAN WHAT I NEEDED. I WAS LOOKING FOR A GENERAL CONVERSATIONAL TYPE LANGUAGE BOOK FOR QUICK STUDY.

This book is hopeless without the instructional CD of the same name that is advertised on the White Cliffs web site. However it seems the instruction CD doesn't exist. Give the book a miss, there are plenty of better books on African drumming.

This book is more of a western type oF a book, DO NOT PURCHASE IF YOU'RE LOOKING FOR TRADITIONAL TYPE COOKING. IT'S EXTREMELY DISAPPOINTING! AND, NOT WORTH THE PRICE!

This is a very low quality printed book. I do not recommend it for the price they are charging. I would pay something less then $10 but nothing more then that. I talked to one of the individuals who is reading it and he says it is o.k. I am just saying that it is very low quality and I will look for something else for this premium price.

Caveat emptor! The product description from Amazon.com is misleading. This is not the full article as suggested by Amazon.com in the title and in the description. This is just the Abstract and the References. Not the Article itself. I was expecting to read the article and paid for just the abstract which I could have already read for free on other websites. Oh Well, as I said "caveat emptor" - Let the buyer beware! - SKO

If you are looking for scholarly criticism on the works of Armah or Cheatwood, look elsewhere. I can succinctly describe the contents of this book thusly: if I had written any of the three chapters in this slim volume as a book report for a sophomore lit class, I would have fervently hoped for a B, but I would have accepted a C+ without complaint.

If you've read any of the works under discussion, you'll already know far more about it than you could learn from this book; all you'll get here is a lot of summary along with some simplistic analysis. As for the packaging, it's strictly cheap-o cheap-o productions. I truly can't see a reason for this book, other than as an attempt to capitalize on a couple of famous names. The book is overpriced by precisely the amount you'll pay for it, and the hour or so it takes to read it would be far better spent reading Armah and Cheatwood themselves.