Journalist Muzamil Jaleel had reported from countries all around the world but then he still hadn’t been to America…

One of the more notable North American releases in the past few months (in my world) is Stefan Zweig’s The Post-Office Girl.

Two new children’s books tell the story of how Negro League baseball, led by the great Jackie Robinson, broke down racial boundaries in America and predated the end of the Jim Crow races laws.

They say never judge a book by it’s cover. Well good for you, but that’s precisely how must of us, who only encounter books in airport lounges, go about buying them anyway.

Q&A with Bart Jones, a former Associated Press reporter and Catholic mission worker in the slums of Caracas, talking about his biography of Venezulan President Hugo Chavez.

Poet-author Charles Bukowski amused a lot of people by getting drunk, behaving badly and then writing inspired half-truths about it. Here’s his greatest hits package:

English novelist David Peace wrote arguably the finest novel about football, The Damned Utd. Seriously. His most recent novel Tokyo Year Zero, follows a Japanese detective hunting down a serial killer amid the aftermath of World War Two.

We were a small, mainly agricultural colony and we said all the time, without unhappiness, that we were a dot on the map of the world. It was a liberating thing to be, and we were really very small. There were just over half a million of us. We were racially much divided.

In the midst of all that has gone wrong since the United States took the unilateral decision to invade Iraq and topple dictator Saddam Hussein, one man, Saad Eskander, director of Baghdad’s national library, has a vision to rescue his country by cultural education. And he wants the US to surrender looted papers.

Always use the word ‘Africa or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title…Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.