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Surviving Peace: A Political Memoir
by Olivera SimicHow do you pick up the pieces after your life is shattered by war? How do you continue living when your country no longer exists, your language is no longer spoken and your family is divided, not just by distance but by politics too? What happens when your old identity is taken from you and a new one imposed, one that you never asked for? When Olivera Simic was seven years old, President Tito died. Old divisions re-emerged as bitter ethnic conflicts unfolded. War arrived in 1992. People were no longer Yugoslavs but Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians. Old friends became enemies overnight. In this heartfelt account of life before, during, and after the Bosnian War and the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Simic talks of her transition from peace to war and back again. She shows how she found the determination to build a new life when the old one was irretrievable. Traversing four continents, she takes us on her winding journey from Bosnia to Australia, revealing the complex challenges of adjusting to life in a new country and exposing the harsh reality of the post-traumatic stress that accompanies her. Simic strives to find the balance between wanting to move on to a different future and a pressing need to look back at a past that won't go away. The pull of her homeland remains irresistible despite it being ravaged by destruction, and her exposure of the war crimes that took place there means she is labeled both a "traitor" and a "truth seeker." Surviving Peace is one woman's story of courage that echoes the stories of millions of people whose lives have been displaced by war. As we still face a world rife with armed conflict, this book is a timely reminder that once the last gunshot has been fired and the last bomb dropped, the new challenge of surviving peace begins.
Caroline: Little House, Revisited
by Sarah MillerA September Indie Next PickOne of Refinery29's Best Reads of SeptemberIn this novel authorized by the Little House Heritage Trust, Sarah Miller vividly recreates the beauty, hardship, and joys of the frontier in a dazzling work of historical fiction, a captivating story that illuminates one courageous, resilient, and loving pioneer woman as never before—Caroline Ingalls, "Ma" in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved Little House books.In the frigid days of February, 1870, Caroline Ingalls and her family leave the familiar comforts of the Big Woods of Wisconsin and the warm bosom of her family, for a new life in Kansas Indian Territory. Packing what they can carry in their wagon, Caroline, her husband Charles, and their little girls, Mary and Laura, head west to settle in a beautiful, unpredictable land full of promise and peril.The pioneer life is a hard one, especially for a pregnant woman with no friends or kin to turn to for comfort or help. The burden of work must be shouldered alone, sickness tended without the aid of doctors, and babies birthed without the accustomed hands of mothers or sisters. But Caroline’s new world is also full of tender joys. In adapting to this strange new place and transforming a rough log house built by Charles’ hands into a home, Caroline must draw on untapped wells of strength she does not know she possesses.For more than eighty years, generations of readers have been enchanted by the adventures of the American frontier’s most famous child, Laura Ingalls Wilder, in the Little House books. Now, that familiar story is retold in this captivating tale of family, fidelity, hardship, love, and survival that vividly reimagines our past.
Sally's Story
by Sally MorganSally Morgan’s My Place is an Australian classic. Since first publication in 1987, My Place has sold more than half a million copies in Australia, been translated and read all over the world, and been reprinted dozens of times. Sally’s rich, zesty and moving work is perhaps the best-loved biography of Aboriginal Australia ever written.My Place for Young Readers is an abridged edition, especially adapted for younger readers, that retains all the charm and power of the original. It is published as three separate books. Sally’s Story focuses on Sally’s childhood, and her growing realisation of the truth her family has been hiding.
Sand
by Robert Drewe John KinsellaA collection of prose, poetry, and memoir, this collaboration celebrates the profound effect environment has on our stories, assumptions, and geographical reckonings, just as it evokes childhood nostalgia and a sense of place. In a dialogue of perceptions, two of Australia’s foremost authors explore a common geography and memories—both cultural and personal—as they consider the theme of “sand” from intimate, geological, and historical points of view.
Seriously Not All Right: Five Wars in Ten Years
by Ron CappsFor more than a decade, Ron Capps, serving as both a senior military intelligence officer and as a Foreign Service officer for the U.S. Department of State, was witness to war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. From government atrocities in Kosovo, to the brutal cruelties perpetrated in several conflicts in central Africa, the wars in both Aghanistan and Iraq, and culminating in genocide in Darfur, Ron acted as an intelligence collector and reporter but was diplomatically restrained from taking preventative action in these conflicts. The cumulative effect of these experiences, combined with the helplessness of his role as an observer, propelled him into a deep depression and a long bout with PTSD, which nearly caused him to take his own life. Seriously Not All Right is a memoir that provides a unique perspective of a professional military officer and diplomat who suffered (and continues to suffer) from PTSD. His story, and that of his recovery and his newfound role as founder and teacher of the Veterans Writing Project, is an inspiration and a sobering reminder of the cost of all wars, particularly those that appeared in the media and to the general public as merely sidelines in the unfolding drama of world events.
Year of Impossible Goodbyes
by Sook Nyul ChoiThis autobiographical story tells of ten-year-old Sookan and her family's suffering and humiliation in Korea, first under Japanese rule and after the Russians invade, and of a harrowing escape to South Korea.
Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (Revised and Expanded Edition)
by Jacqueline Barnitz Patrick FrankThis book's second edition might not have seen the light of day had it not been for the foresight of Dr. Patrick Frank. The original edition covered the art up to the 1980s and required a follow-up. Currently there is far more literature on the subject, as a result of greater interest among the public, and an increasing number of museum exhibitions accompanied by scholarly catalogues with essays by key specialists in the field. I was grateful to Dr. Frank not only for suggesting this revision but even more so for his willingness to be part of the process as coauthor and editor. I was most familiar with the generation of artists and critics whose visibility peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, while Dr. Frank has the advantage of being familiar with the younger generation that followed, which I knew less well. Among his numerous publications, Readings in Latin American Modern Art (Yale, 2004) proved to be most valuable when I taught at the University of Texas at Austin. For all of these reasons, I am gratified to see this book go into a second edition that should carry it well into the new century. It is my hope that this trend continues so that future generations can remain informed about the dynamic creativity of artists from Latin American countries.
Westchester Burning: Portrait of a Marriage
by Amine WefaliAmine Wefali had four beautiful children and houses in Westchester, Nantucket, and Florida--but her marriage had become acrimonious. She had moved into the attic of her exclusive home in Westchester, a suburb of New York, while Phillip, her prosperous husband, remained downstairs. Torn between ambivalent emotions about her marriage and the inability to articulate her own longing for freedom, Wefali channeled her frustration into a whirlwind of domestic activity. Emotionally estranged, financially dependent, she was landlocked. Parting the curtains on the intimate stage of contemporary marriage, Wefali delicately coaxes from beneath the surface of domestic life the poignancy, tragedy, loss, and humor that punctuate a long-term relationship. With lacerating wit and candor--about herself and the upperclass world around her--Wefali finds her way out of the attic and into the selfhood she always wanted. And along her journey, she has recorded a stunning personal odyssey both unique and universal. From the Hardcover edition.
More Than Things
by Margaret RandallMore Than Things is a collection of essays on a variety of political, cultural, and literary issues, all linked by Margaret Randall’s attention to power: its use, misuse, and impact on how we live our lives. There are texts on sex, fashion, food, LGBT rights, automobiles, forgiving, women’s self-image, writing, books, and more. Two of the essays provide glimpses into present-day Cuba and Tunisia. She reflects on her family; her romantic partners; and the revolutionaries, writers, artists, and activists she has known personally and admired: Roque Dalton, Meridel LeSueur, and Haydée Santamaría. Randall’s writings move in unexpected directions, evoked by the “things” and ideas in her life: objects picked up around the world, her children’s names, family heirlooms, artistic practices, dreams, poems, and memories. Elegantly weaving together the personal and the political, More Than Things is a tour de force by one of America’s most formidable and elegiac writers and political activists.
Black Print with a White Carnation: Mildred Brown and the Omaha Star Newspaper, 1938-1989 (Women in the West)
by Amy Helene ForssMildred Dee Brown (1905–89) was the cofounder of Nebraska’s Omaha Star, the longest running black newspaper founded by an African American woman in the United States. Known for her trademark white carnation corsage, Brown was the matriarch of Omaha’s Near North Side—a historically black part of town—and an iconic city leader. Her remarkable life, a product of the Reconstruction era and Jim Crow, reflects a larger American history that includes the Great Migration, the Red Scare of the post–World War era, civil rights and black power movements, desegregation, and urban renewal.Within the context of African American and women’s history studies, Amy Helene Forss’s Black Print with a White Carnation examines the impact of the black press through the narrative of Brown’s life and work. Forss draws on more than 150 oral histories, numerous black newspapers, and government documents to illuminate African American history during the political and social upheaval of the twentieth century. During Brown’s fifty-one-year tenure, the Omaha Star became a channel of communication between black and white residents of the city, as well as an arena for positive weekly news in the black community. Brown and her newspaper led successful challenges to racial discrimination, unfair employment practices, restrictive housing covenants, and a segregated public school system, placing the woman with the white carnation at the center of America’s changing racial landscape.
The Big O: My Life, My Times, My Game
by Oscar P. RobertsonPerhaps the greatest all-around player in basketball history, Oscar Robertson revolutionized basketball as a member of the Cincinnati Royals and won a championship with the Milwaukee Bucks. When he was twenty-three, in 1962, he accomplished one of basketball’s most impressive feats: averaging the triple-double in a single season—a feat never matched since. Cocaptain of the Olympic gold medal team of 1960; named the player of the century by the National Association of Basketball Coaches; named one of the fifty greatest players in NBA history; and inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1980—Robertson’s accolades are as numerous as they are impressive. But The Big O is also the story of a shy black child from a poor family in a segregated city; of the superstar who, at the height of his career, became the president of the National Basketball Players Association to try to improve conditions for all players. It is the story of the man forced from the game at thirty-four and blacklisted from coaching and broadcasting. But two years after he left basketball, after six years of legal wrangling, Robertson won his lawsuit against the NBA, eliminating the option clause that bound a player to a single NBA team in perpetuity and ending restrictions on free agency. The Big O is the story of how the NBA, as we now know it, was built; of race in America in the second half of the twentieth century; and of an uncompromising man and a complex hero.
Freshwater Passages: The Trade and Travels of Peter Pond
by David ChapinPeter Pond, a fur trader, explorer, and amateur mapmaker, spent his life ranging much farther afield than Milford, Connecticut, where he was born and died (1740–1807). He traded around the Great Lakes, on the Mississippi and the Minnesota Rivers, and in the Canadian Northwest and is also well known as a partner in Montreal’s North West Company and as mentor to Alexander Mackenzie, who journeyed down the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Sea. Knowing eighteenth-century North America on a scale that few others did, Pond drew some of the earliest maps of western Canada.In this meticulous biography, David Chapin presents Pond’s life as part of a generation of traders who came of age between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. Pond’s encounters with a plethora of distinct Native cultures over the course of his career shaped his life and defined his reputation. Whereas previous studies have caricatured Pond as quarrelsome and explosive, Chapin presents him as an intellectually curious, proud, talented, and ambitious man, living in a world that could often be quite violent. Chapin draws together a wide range of sources and information in presenting a deeper, more multidimensional portrait and understanding of Pond than hitherto has been available.
Young Widower: A Memoir (River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize)
by John W. EvansJohn W. Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania when they set off with friends to hike into the Carpathian Mountains. In an instant their life together was shattered. Katie became separated from the group. When Evans finally found her, he could only watch helplessly as she was mauled to death by a brown bear.In such a love story, such a life story, how could a person ever move forward? That is the question Evans, traumatized and restless, confronts in this book as he learns the language of grief, the rhetoric of survival, and the contrary algorithms of holding fast and letting go. His memories of Katie and their time together, and the strangeness of his life with her family in the year after her death, create an unsentimental but deeply moving picture of loss, the brutality of nature, and the unfairness of needing to narrate a story that nothing can prepare a person to tell.Told with unyielding witness, elegance, and care, Young Widower is a heartbreaking account of a senseless tragedy and the persistence of grief in a young person’s life.
A Grizzly in the Mail and Other Adventures in American History
by Tim GroveFor more than twenty years, Tim Grove has worked at the most popular history museums in the United States, helping millions of people get acquainted with the past. This book translates that experience into an insider’s tour of some of the most interesting moments in American history. Grove’s stories are populated with well-known historical figures such as John Brown, Charles Lindbergh, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea—as well as the not-so-famous. Have you heard of Mary Pickersgill, seamstress of the Star-Spangled Banner flag? Grove also has something to say about a few of our cherished myths, for instance, the lore surrounding Betsy Ross and Eli Whitney.Grove takes readers to historic sites such as Harpers Ferry, Fort McHenry, the Ulm Pishkun buffalo jump, and the Lemhi Pass on the Lewis and Clark Trail and traverses time and space from eighteenth-century Williamsburg to the twenty-first-century Kennedy Space Center. En route from Cape Canaveral on the Atlantic to Cape Disappointment on the Pacific, we learn about planting a cotton patch on the National Mall, riding a high wheel bicycle, flying the transcontinental airmail route, and harnessing a mule. Is history relevant? This book answers with a resounding yes and, in the most entertaining fashion, shows us why.
My First Booke of My Life (Early Modern Cultural Studies)
by Alice Thornton Raymond A. AnselmentAn early modern domestic and spiritual memoir, My First Booke of My Life depicts the life of Alice Thornton (1626–1707), a complex, contradictory woman caught in the changing fortunes and social realities of the seventeenth century. Her memoir documents her perspective on the Irish rebellion and English civil war as well as on a plethora of domestic dangers and difficulties: from her reluctant marriage, which sought to rescue the sequestered family estate and clear her brother’s name, to financial crises, to the illnesses and deaths of several family members and six children, to slanderous criticisms of her fidelity and her parenting. This first complete edition of an autobiographical apologia begins with recollections of Thornton’s childhood and ends with the death of her husband, restoring almost half of the original text omitted from the nineteenth-century edition. The image she fashions of a woman devoted to God and family evolves from the conventional format of the deliverance memoir into a rhetorically sophisticated defense of her life in response to rumored scandal. Inseparable from the praise of God and family is the distinctive sense of identity that emerges from the introduction, text, and annotations, all of which provide a significant contribution to early modern woman’s writing.
The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (Women in the West)
by Margot MifflinIn 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own. She was fully assimilated and perfectly happy when, at nineteen, she was ransomed back to white society. She became an instant celebrity, but the price of fame was high and the pain of her ruptured childhood lasted a lifetime.Based on historical records, including letters and diaries of Oatman’s friends and relatives, The Blue Tattoo is the first book to examine her life from her childhood in Illinois—including the massacre, her captivity, and her return to white society—to her later years as a wealthy banker’s wife in Texas.Oatman’s story has since become legend, inspiring artworks, fiction, film, radio plays, and even an episode of Death Valley Days starring Ronald Reagan. Its themes, from the perils of religious utopianism to the permeable border between civilization and savagery, are deeply rooted in the American psyche. Oatman’s blue tattoo was a cultural symbol that evoked both the imprint of her Mohave past and the lingering scars of westward expansion. It also served as a reminder of her deepest secret, fully explored here for the first time: she never wanted to go home.
Called Out but Safe: A Baseball Umpire's Journey
by Al Clark Dan Schlossberg Marty AppelIf an umpire could steal the show in a Major League game, Al Clark might well have been the one to do it. Tough but fair, in his thirty years as a professional umpire he took on some of baseball’s great umpire baiters, such as Earl Weaver, Billy Martin, and Dick Williams, while ejecting any number of the game’s elite—once tearing a hamstring in the process. He was the first Jewish umpire in American League history, and probably the first to eject his own father from the officials’ dressing room. But whatever Clark was doing—officiating at Nolan Ryan’s three hundredth win, Cal Ripken’s record breaker, or the “earthquake” World Series of 1989, or braving a labor dispute, an anti-Semitic tirade by a Cy Young Award winner, or a legal imbroglio—it makes for a good story. Called Out but Safe is Clark’s outspoken and often hilarious account of his life in baseball from umpire school through the highlights to the inglorious end of his stellar career. Not just a source of baseball history and lore, Clark’s book also affords a rare look at what life is like for someone who works for the Major Leagues’ other team.
The Horse Lover: A Cowboy's Quest to Save the Wild Mustangs
by H. Alan Day Lynn Wiese Sneyd Justice Sandra O'ConnorHe already owned and managed two ranches and needed a third about as much as he needed a permanent migraine: that’s what Alan Day said every time his friend pestered him about an old ranch in South Dakota. But in short order, he proudly owned 35,000 pristine grassy acres. The opportunity then dropped into his lap to establish a sanctuary for unadoptable wild horses previously warehoused by the Bureau of Land Management. After Day successfully lobbied Congress, those acres became Mustang Meadows Ranch, the first government-sponsored wild horse sanctuary established in the United States.The Horse Lover is Day’s personal history of the sanctuary’s vast enterprise, with its surprises and pleasures and its plentiful dangers, frustrations, and heartbreak. Day’s deep connection with the animals in his care is clear from the outset, as is his maverick philosophy of horse-whispering, with which he trained fifteen hundred wild horses. The Horse Lover weaves together Day’s recollections of his cowboying adventures astride some of his best horses, all of which taught him indispensable lessons about loyalty, perseverance, and hope. This heartfelt memoir reveals the Herculean task of balancing the requirements of the government with the needs of wild horses.
Mover and Shaker: Walter O'Malley, the Dodgers, and Baseball's Westward Expansion
by Andy McCueOne of the most influential and controversial team owners in professional sports history, Walter O’Malley (1903–79) is best remembered—and still reviled by many—for moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Yet much of the O’Malley story leading up to the Dodgers’ move is unknown or created from myth, and there is substantially more to the man. When he entered the public eye, the self-constructed family background and early life he presented was gilded. Later his personal story was distorted by some New York sportswriters, who hated him for moving the Dodgers. In Mover and Shaker Andy McCue presents for the first time an objective, complete, and nuanced account of O’Malley’s life. He also departs from the overly sentimentalized accounts of O’Malley as either villain or angel and reveals him first and foremost as a rational, hardheaded businessman, who was a major force in baseball for three decades and whose management and marketing practices radically changed the shape of the game.
The Melon Capital of the World: A Memoir
by Blake AllmendingerIn this psychologically gripping memoir, Blake Allmendinger returns to his childhood home after a forty-year absence. His homecoming to the struggling farming community of Rocky Ford, Colorado, formerly known as the Melon Capital of the World, forces the author to confront his own sad and disturbing history, one that parallels his hometown’s decline.Allmendinger’s family was dominated by his emotionally and mentally unstable mother, who became depressed while living in Rocky Ford as a young woman. For the rest of her life she abused the members of her family, creating tensions that remained unresolved until the end of the author’s visit, when his mother died suddenly, a family member committed suicide, and a secret diary was discovered.The Melon Capital of the World is a remarkable blend of personal narrative, memoir, and Allmendinger’s interviews with people who knew his mother and her family. His story is a gritty but compassionate, and at times humorous, portrait of a family trying to survive in the rapidly disappearing rural American West.
The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book
by Ted KooserTed Kooser sees a writer’s workbooks as the stepping-stones on which a poet makes his way across the stream of experience toward a poem. Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what’s jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year. Written by one of America’s most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him.
Author Under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London, 1893-1902
by Jay WilliamsIn Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in London’s work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London’s “Story of a Typhoon” to The People of the Abyss.The Jack London who emerges in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time.Author Under Sail is a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.
American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives
by Gretchen M. Bataille Kathleen Mullen SandsIndian women's autobiographies have been slighted because of the assumption that women had a secondary and insignificant role in Indian society. Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands cogently demonstrate in this book the creative vitality of autobiographies that, despite differences in style and purpose, clarify the centrality of women in American Indian cultures. Included is a comprehensive, annotated bibliography or works by and about American Indian women.
The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew (American Lives)
by Sue William SilvermanGentile reader, and you, Jews, come too. Follow Sue William Silverman, a one-woman cultural mash-up, on her exploration of identity among the mishmash of American idols and ideals that confuse most of us—or should. Pat Boone is our first stop. Now a Tea Party darling, Boone once shone as a squeaky-clean pop music icon of normality, an antidote for Silverman’s own confusing and dangerous home, where being a Jew in a Christian school wasn’t easy, and being the daughter of the Anti-Boone was unspeakable. And yet somehow Silverman found her way, a “gefilte fish swimming upstream,” and found her voice, which in this searching, bracing, hilarious, and moving book tries to make sense of that most troubling American condition: belonging, but to what?Picking apricots on a kibbutz, tramping cross-country in a loathed Volkswagen camper, appearing in a made-for-television version of her own life: Silverman is a bobby-soxer, a baby boomer, a hippy, a lefty, and a rebel with something to say to those of us—most of us—still wondering what to make of ourselves.
Sustainable Compromises: A Yurt, a Straw Bale House, and Ecological Living (Our Sustainable Future)
by Alan BoyeLiving simply isn’t always simple. When Alan Boye first lived in sustainable housing, he was young, idealistic, and not much susceptible to compromise—until rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, and loneliness drove him out of the utilities-free yurt he’d built in New Mexico. Thirty-five years later, he decided to try again. This time, with an idealism tempered by experience and practical considerations, Boye and his wife constructed an off-the-grid, energy-efficient, straw bale house in Vermont. Sustainable Compromises chronicles these two remarkable attempts to live simply in two disparate American eras. Writing with hard-won authority and humor, Boye takes up the “how-to” practicalities of “building green,” from finances to nuts and bolts to strains on friends and family. With Walden as a historical and philosophical touchstone and his own experience as a practical guide, he also explores the ethical and environmental concerns that have framed such undertakings from Thoreau’s day to our own. A firsthand account of the pleasures and pitfalls of living simply, his book is a deeply informed and engaging reflection on what sustainability really means—in personal, communal, ethical, and environmental terms.