The secret of success is not what they taught you in school. What matters most is not IQ, not a business school degree, not even technical know-how or years of expertise. The single most important factor in job performance and advancement is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is actually a set of skills that anyone can acquire, and in this practical guide, Daniel Goleman identifies them, explains their importance, and shows how they can be fostered.

For leaders, emotional intelligence is almost 90 percent of what sets stars apart from the mediocre. As Goleman documents, it’s the essential ingredient for reaching and staying at the top in any field, even in high-tech careers. And organizations that learn to operate in emotionally intelligent ways are the companies that will remain vital and dynamic in the competitive marketplace of today—and the future.

Comprehensively researched, crisply written, and packed with fascinating case histories of triumphs, disasters, and dramatic turnarounds, Working with Emotional Intelligence may be the most important business book you’ll ever read.

In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.

Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the aeroplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?

In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?”

Most accounts of Nigeria’s colonisation were written by British officials, presenting it as a noble civilising mission to rid Africans of barbaric superstition and corrupt tribal leadership. Thanks to this skewed writing of history, many Nigerians today still have Empire nostalgia and view the
colonial period through rose-tinted glasses.

Max Siollun offers a bold rethink: an unromanticised history, arguing compellingly that colonialism had few benevolent intentions, but many unjust outcomes. It may have ended slavery and human sacrifice, but it was accompanied by extreme violence; ethnic and religious identity were cynically
exploited to maintain control, while the forceful remoulding of longstanding legal and social practices permanently altered the culture and internal politics of indigenous communities. The aftershocks of this colonial meddling are still being felt decades after independence. Popular narratives often
suggest that the economic and political turmoil are homegrown, but the reality is that Britain created many of Nigeria’s crises, and has left them behind for Nigerians to resolve.

This is a definitive, head-on confrontation with Nigeria’s experience under British rule, showing how it forever changed the country–perhaps cataclysmically.

Frederick Forsyth is a best-selling popular novelist. He strongly and publicly supported the cause of Biafra in the Nigerian civil war and covered the period as a war correspondent in Biafra. He had a fifteen-year association with the Igbo leader, Chukwuemeka Ojukwu. His biography of Emeka’s was published in 1982 with the full cooperation of the subject. It covers his youth, army training, the civil war, and his twelve-year exile. Still, of great interest, the biography has now been revised.

In a well-appointed sequel to his earlier book on the subject – Igbos: 25 years after Biafra, Joe Igbokwe reprises his role as a moral pathfinder in a strident, impassioned call to his people, the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria who, fifty years after a costly three-year civil war of self-determination in 1966, seem to have all packed up with briefcases for trading and sundry business, leaving the agitation for political power to the other major legs of the ethnopolitical tripod in Nigeria, the Yoruba Hausa-Fulani.

This is the history of the Nigerian civil war, a four-year period of events that have been meticulously and painstakingly tied to actual and specific dates and days of the week, creating the greatest one-volume diary on the civil war, with verifiable and referenced sources. The contents of this book reflect the events of the Nigerian civil war and world reactions, woven together into a simultaneous and situational sequence that creates a real and actual experience to the reader as if the events were still contemporaneous.

To borrow a hackneyed phrase, Nigeria has had a chequered political history before and since independence from British colonial rule on October 1, 1960. Two sets of actors – the civilian politicians and the military politicians – have been on the national political stage since January 15, 1966. General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida was one of them. In his eight years in power as president, or perhaps more correctly as military president, he affected the course of Nigeria’s events, for better or for worse, in a way that few, if any, before him did. It is not possible to tell Nigeria’s story without Babangida’s part in it. The book is the story of IBB, the little orphan from Minna, Niger State and his meticulous rise to the top of his profession and the leadership of his country. Perhaps, more importantly, it is the story of Nigeria, its post-independence politics and power, told from the perspective of the actions and decisions of one of the main actors on the country’s political stage. The events that shaped the Babangida era did not begin on August 27, 1985, the day he staged a palace coup against General Muhammadu Buhari. They began long before that. This book is the definitive story of the military, politics and power in Nigeria.

All of us are looking for love. We carry enough pain, frustration, and doubt in us to crush us. And only the comforting embrace of love can save us. We look around and see a world embroiled in so much greed, racism, inequality, and cynicism. We have become more suspicious of each other, more intolerant, and crueller. We need change. Many sing the praises of love and tout it as the answer. But they do not tell us what love is, what to love, and how to love it? Each imagines it and lives it differently. Which one is right? Which path should we follow?