Based on lectures Achebe gave at Harvard in 1998, the three elegant essays in "Home and Exile" focus on the politics of culture. In the first essay, "My Home Under Imperial Fire, " he recalls the African stories of his childhood, looks back on his school and university days, and provides devastating examples of European cultural imperialism and African cultural dispossession. In the second piece, "The Empire Fights Back, " he tells how Africa's story came to be reclaimed by Africans. The final essay, "The Balance of Stories, " delves further into notions of dispossession and reclamation, home and exile, through memories and critiques of other writers. Stories are a real source of power in the world, he concludes, and to imitate the literature of another culture is to give that power away.