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Shaped by the Past

by Lola Ayton Rowe

SHAPED BY THE PAST aims to encourage the reader to work through problems and difficulties in life, and to be inspired to find courage and laughter even in the midst of misery. It challenges one’s thought patterns, suggests how one can look at things differently, and how through difficulties one can find personal growth opportunities even when so many things around don’t make any sense. The author strongly believes that one has the power within to change one’s circumstances for achieving one’s personal goals. SHAPED BY THE PAST uses a candid approach to show the reader that problems are common to all but determination will see one to one’s own destination. Unrealistic expectations will not always bring comfort in life but learning lessons from the past will make one pause and say, “Yes, I have the power to make it!”

The Shard: The Vision of Irvine Sellar

by Howard Watson

'We were told we would never get planning consent and we did. We were told we would never be able to fund it and we did. Then we were told we would never be able to build it and we did.' Irvine SellarIn 2000, Irvine Sellar, a former market trader famous for helping to create the look of the Swinging Sixties on Carnaby Street, stood on a rooftop in Southwark, London, and decided to build the tallest building in western Europe. He had virtually no experience, and he wanted to build at the wrong height, in the wrong place, on the wrong side of the river and at the wrong time.Twelve years later, the Shard, a 'vertical city' designed by one of the world's leading architects, Renzo Piano, changed the skyline of London. It immediately became one of the most instantly recognizable and admired contemporary buildings in the world.This is the story of one man's vision for London and his determination to redefine an ancient but maligned part of the city despite seemingly insurmountable challenges including mass opposition, a huge planning inquiry, the financial crash, and major construction issues that required radical improvisation at every turn. At every twist in the tale, Sellar refused to give up.The Shard is a tale of extreme ambition, innovation and a relentless desire to recast the skyscraper as a force for good.

The Shard: The Vision of Irvine Sellar

by Howard Watson

'We were told we would never get planning consent and we did. We were told we would never be able to fund it and we did. Then we were told we would never be able to build it and we did.' Irvine SellarIn 2000, Irvine Sellar, a former market trader famous for helping to create the look of the Swinging Sixties on Carnaby Street, stood on a rooftop in Southwark, London, and decided to build the tallest building in western Europe. He had virtually no experience, and he wanted to build at the wrong height, in the wrong place, on the wrong side of the river and at the wrong time.Twelve years later, the Shard, a 'vertical city' designed by one of the world's leading architects, Renzo Piano, changed the skyline of London. It immediately became one of the most instantly recognizable and admired contemporary buildings in the world.This is the story of one man's vision for London and his determination to redefine an ancient but maligned part of the city despite seemingly insurmountable challenges including mass opposition, a huge planning inquiry, the financial crash, and major construction issues that required radical improvisation at every turn. At every twist in the tale, Sellar refused to give up.The Shard is a tale of extreme ambition, innovation and a relentless desire to recast the skyscraper as a force for good.

Sharing Christmas

by Deborah Raffin

Christmas conjures up memories for so many, and this holiday compendium is full of festive treats— not only anecdotes but poems, lyrics, and even beloved recipes— from dozens and dozens of celebrities. Found in this collection are offerings from Oscar-winning actors and actresses— Julie Andrews, George Burns, Keith Carradine, Charlton Heston, Jack Lemmon, Karl Malden, Sir John Mills, Sidney Poitier, Anthony Quinn, Paul Scofield, and Elizabeth Taylor— as well as acclaimed musicians, including Kim Carnes, Johnny Cash, Placido Domingo, Al Jarreau, Kenny Loggins, Johnny Mathis, Dolly Parton, Kenny Rogers, and Ringo Starr. Also represented here are acclaimed authors Art Buchwald, Mary Higgins Clark, Sidney Sheldon, and Amy Tan; champion athletes Arthur Ashe, Pam Shriver, Steve Sax, and Ruben Sierra; television greats Steve Allen, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Charles Osgood, Fred Rogers, and Jonathan Winters; and revered public figures such as civil rights activist Coretta Scott King, astronaut Wally Schirra, and President Gerald Ford. This bounty of goodwill is sure to inspire the holiday spirit in all who partake in these Christmas treasures.

Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean

by Morten Stroksnes

A salty story of friendship, adventure, and the explosive life that teems beneath the ocean, for readers of Bill Bryson and such classics as The Snow Leopard. In the great depths surrounding the Lofoten islands in Norway lives the infamous Greenland shark. At twenty-six feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it is truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not just known for its size alone: its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory. <P><P>Shark Drunk is the true story of two friends, the author and the eccentric artist Hugo Aasjord, as they embark on a wild pursuit of the famed creature--from a tiny rubber boat. Together, the two men tackle existential questions, survive the world's most powerful maelstrom, and, yes, get drunk, as they attempt to understand the ocean from every possible angle, drawing on poetry, science, history, ecology, mythology, and their own, sometimes intoxicated, observations. <P><P>Winner of the Norwegian Brage Prize 2015 <P><P>Winner of the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature 2015 <P><P>Winner of the Norwegian Reine Ord Prize at Lofoten International Literature Festival 2016

Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

by Jonathan Allen Amie Parnes

<P>It was never supposed to be this close. And of course she was supposed to win. How Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election to Donald Trump is the tragic story of a sure thing gone off the rails. For every Comey revelation or hindsight acknowledgment about the electorate, no explanation of defeat can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary's campaign--the candidate herself. <P>Through deep access to insiders from the top to the bottom of the campaign, political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss. Drawing on the authors' deep knowledge of Hillary from their previous book, the acclaimed biography HRC, Shattered will offer an object lesson in how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders. <P>Moving blow-by-blow from the campaign's difficult birth through the bewildering terror of election night, Shattered tells an unforgettable story with urgent lessons both political and personal, filled with revelations that will change the way readers understand just what happened to America on November 8, 2016. <P><b>A New York Times Bestseller</b>

The Shattered Lens: A War Photographer's True Story of Captivity and Survival in Syria

by Jonathan Alpeyrie Stash Luczkiw

Discover a gripping and harrowing tale of war and torture from the man who lived it in this powerful memoir by the celebrated war journalist who not only documented over a dozen conflict zones worldwide but was also captured and held hostage by Syrian rebels in 2013.Capturing history was Jonathan Alpeyrie’s job but he never expected to become a news story himself. For a decade, the French‑American photojournalist had weaved in and out of over a dozen conflict zones. He photographed civilians being chased out of their homes, military trucks roving over bullet‑torn battlefields, and too many bodies to count. But on April 29, 2013, during his third assignment to Syria, Alpeyrie was betrayed by his fixer and handed over to a band of Syrian rebels. For eighty‑one days he was bound, blindfolded, and beaten. Not too far away, President Bashar al‑Assad’s forces and those in opposition continued their bitter and bloody civil war. Over the course of his captivity, Alpeyrie kept his spirits up and strived to see, without his camera lenses, the humanity in his captors. He took part in their activities, taught them how to swim, prayed with them, and tried learning their language and culture. He also discovered a dormant faith within himself, one that strengthened him throughout the ordeal. The Shattered Lens is the firsthand account of a photojournalist who has always answered the next adrenaline‑pumping assignment. Yet, during his headline‑making kidnapping, he was left to consider the value and risks of his career, ponder the violent conflicts he had seen, and put the historical events over which we have no control into perspective.

She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World

by Chelsea Clinton

Chelsea Clinton introduces tiny feminists, mini activists and little kids who are ready to take on the world to thirteen inspirational women who never took no for an answer, and who always, inevitably and without fail, persisted. Throughout American history, there have always been women who have spoken out for what's right, even when they have to fight to be heard. <P><P>In early 2017, Senator Elizabeth Warren's refusal to be silenced in the Senate inspired a spontaneous celebration of women who persevered in the face of adversity. In this book, Chelsea Clinton celebrates thirteen American women who helped shape our country through their tenacity, sometimes through speaking out, sometimes by staying seated, sometimes by captivating an audience. They all certainly persisted. <P> She Persisted is for everyone who has ever wanted to speak up but has been told to quiet down, for everyone who has ever tried to reach for the stars but was told to sit down, and for everyone who has ever been made to feel unworthy or unimportant or small. <P>With vivid, compelling art by Alexandra Boiger, this book shows readers that no matter what obstacles may be in their paths, they shouldn't give up on their dreams. Persistence is power. This book features: Harriet Tubman, Helen Keller, Clara Lemlich, Nellie Bly, Virginia Apgar, Maria Tallchief, Claudette Colvin, Ruby Bridges, Margaret Chase Smith, Sally Ride, Florence Griffith Joyner, Oprah Winfrey, Sonia Sotomayor--and one special cameo.

She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons: A Life in Novels

by Kathleen Hill

This memoir takes readers around the world, from New York to Nigeria, exploring a life illuminated by novels. As a child in music class, Kathleen Hill comes upon Willa Cather’s Lucy Gayheart, and the novel prepares her for a drowning death that soon occurs in her own life. Later, recently married and working as a teacher in a newly independent Nigeria, Hill assigns Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to her students, which leads to learning from them about the violent legacy of colonialism, and visiting an old slave port whose disturbing relics make her aware of her benighted American innocence. Also in Nigeria, she is given Henry James’s A Portrait of a Lady and deeply ponders her new marriage through the lens of Isabel Archer, remembering her adolescent fear that reading might be a way of avoiding experience. But is it possible that the act of reading itself may be a form of ardent, transforming experience? In this memoir, Hill reflects on her literary lifetime, reminiscing about her year in northern France, where she resolutely put Flaubert’s Madame Bovary aside to discover, in Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, a detailed guide to the town where she was living, a more acute perspective on the poverty and suffering hidden within its walls. She also shares a tender account of her friendship with writer Diana Trilling, whose failing sight inspired a plan to read aloud Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, an undertaking that required six years to complete. From an author whose novel Still Waters in Niger was named a New York Times Notable Book and a best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times, She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons is both a wide-ranging autobiographical journey and a deeply felt appreciation of literature and its power to reflect our immediate reality and open windows onto vast new worlds.

Shelter: Off the Grid in the Mostly Magnetic North

by Sarah Stonich

In her search for land to call her own—among tall pines and on a lake—newly single mom Sarah Stonich seeks a sense of permanence, a legacy for her son, and a connection to her heritage. Along this way, Stonich recalls family lore, meets remarkable characters, considers another go at love, and, finally, builds a cabin. But when her precious patch of land is threatened, she discovers that family is no less treasured with or without a piece of earth.

Sherezade y otros relatos: Una colección de clásicos de la literatura universal

by Javier Vicente Sánchez

Revive los grandes Clásicos. Si no los conoces aún que no te los cuenten, descúbrelos aquí y lánzate a por ellos. <P><P>¿Quién no soñó alguna vez con formar parte de la tripulación del Pequod y ganar aquel doblón del capitán Ahab o viajar por tierras de Castilla y ser testigo directo de las aventuras y desventuras de nuestro afamado y gentil caballero Don Quijote? <P><P> Con humor, romanticismo e incluso denuncia social, el autor nos anima con estos relatos, en los que se asocian hechos, experiencias y anécdotas reales con algunos de los grandes clásicos de la literatura universal, a acercarnos a estas obras inmortales por las que nunca pasa el tiempo.

Shift the Narrative: A Blind Man's Vision for Rewriting the Stories that Limit Us

by Russell Redenbaugh

Shift is a blind man&’s vision of how he changed his life narrative from the impossible to the economically probable and in the process, moved from welfare to wealth. Blind from the age of 16, Russell Redenbaugh's achievement as a successful investor and economist, a Commissioner on the US Civil Rights Commission serving under three US Presidents and a black belt, three time gold medal jiu-jitsu world champion fighting sighted opponents, prove that if he can, anyone can. Most people think that their circumstances produce their narratives, but Russell shows it is their narratives that produce their circumstances. If you change your story, you change your future. Through a set of actions and behaviors, Russell demonstrates how anyone can "Shift Your Narrative" to produce more of what they care about in their personal life, career and money matters, starting today.

Shimmering Details, Volume I: A Memoir

by Péter Nádas

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers.“Instead of a chronicle, a person tends to manufacture legends when he relates the story of his life for others,” Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories. Now, in his illuminating memoir, Shimmering Details, the renowned author investigates what it means to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling.Taking his firmly imbedded memories—the “shimmering details” that give this work its title—as his starting point, Nádas dissects them using a method inspired by Freudian dream interpretation. Sounds, scenes, smells, feelings—all are probed for details that might allow him to reconstruct what happened, and when and where. In order to avoid conscious or unconscious distortions, he deconstructs the stories of others, too—moving in concentric circles toward cause and effect, until their meaning and significance come to light.In Shimmering Details, Volume I, Nádas probes the history of his family from the late 19th century to his birth in 1942 and beyond. In a work that encompasses World War II and the Hungarian Revolution, Nádas traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.

Shimmering Details, Volume II: A Memoir

by Péter Nádas

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers.In Shimmering Details, Volume II, Péter Nádas delves deeper into his and his parents’ lives during the tumultuous years spanning the rise of Hungarian communism in 1948 to the brutal suppression of the 1956 uprising. Zeroing in on this critical period—which overlapped with the formative years of his childhood—Nádas concludes his monumental history of a family whose own experiences and fortunes are deeply intertwined with two centuries of Hungarian history.This second volume is a composite portrait of life lived at the nexus of world-historical forces—a jewel-like study that holds up different facets of the human experience to the light of Nádas’s singular prose style. What emerges is a memoir of unusual insight and exceptional power. Hailed by Deborah Eisenberg as an “extraordinary writer,” Nádas has confirmed his place among Europe’s greatest living authors.

Shoe Dog: Young Readers Edition

by Phil Knight

In this young readers edition of the New York Times bestseller, Nike founder and board chairman Phil Knight “offers a rare and revealing look at the notoriously media-shy man behind the swoosh” (Booklist, starred review), opening up about how he went from being a track star at an Oregon high school to the founder of a brand and company that changed everything.You must forget your limits. It was only when Nike founder Phil Knight got cut from the baseball team as a high school freshman that his mother suggested he try out for track instead. Knight made the track team and he found he could run fast and even more he liked it. Ten years later, young and searching, Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and launched a company with one simple mission: import high quality running shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his car to start, he and his gang of friends and runners built one of the most successful brands ever. Phil Knight encountered risks and setbacks along the way, but always followed his own advice. Just keep going. Don’t stop. Whatever comes up, don’t stop. Filled with wisdom, humanity, humor, and heart, the young readers edition of the bestselling Shoe Dog is a story of determination that inspires all who read it. The Young Reader’s Edition is an abridged version of the internationally bestselling adult book and it features original front matter and back matter, including a new introduction and “A Letter to the Young Reader” containing advice from Phil Knight for budding entrepreneurs.

Shoe Dog (Young Readers Edition): A Memoir By The Creator Of Nike

by Phil Knight

In this young readers edition of the international bestseller, Nike founder and board chairman Phil Knight 'offers a rare and revealing look at the notoriously media-shy man behind the swoosh' (Booklist), opening up about how he went from being a track star at an Oregon high school to the founder of a brand and company that changed everything.You must forget your limits. It was only when Phil Knight got cut from the baseball team as a high school freshman that his mother suggested he try out for track instead. Knight made the track team and he found he could run fast and even more he liked it. Ten years later, young and searching, Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and launched a company with one simple mission: import high-quality running shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the boot of his car to start, he and his gang of friends and runners built one of the most successful brands ever. Phil Knight encountered risks and setbacks along the way, but always followed his own advice. Just keep going. Don’t stop. Whatever comes up, don’t stop. Filled with wisdom, humanity, humour and heart, the young readers edition of the bestselling Shoe Dog is a story of determination that inspires all who read it. This is an abridged edition of the internationally bestselling adult book, but in addition it includes new frontmatter and backmatter, an introduction to the younger reader and 'A Letter to the Young Reader' that provides advice from Phil Knight for the battles that lie ahead for young people.

Shoebox Funeral: Tales From Wolf Creek

by Elisabeth Voltz

Growing up with ten siblings on a farm in rural Grove City, PA, Beth Voltz came in contact with many animals, as one would expect when you live on a farm. But the Voltz family farm would usually have a few additions each week—the townspeople would often drop off their unwanted, or worse, dying animals for the Voltz family to take care of. Grave Tales: Stories from Wolf Creek is a heartfelt collection of short stories about the ducks, cats, dogs, and birds that Beth would befriend, all the while knowing that they wouldn't be around for very long.

Shooting Ghosts: A U.S. Marine, a Combat Photographer, and Their Journey Back from War

by Thomas J. Brennan Finbarr O'Reilly

"A majestic book." --Bessel van der Kolk, MD, author of The Body Keeps the ScoreA unique joint memoir by a U.S. Marine and a conflict photographer whose unlikely friendship helped both heal their war-wounded bodies and soulsWar tears people apart, but it can also bring them together. Through the unpredictability of war and its aftermath, a decorated Marine sergeant and a world-trotting war photographer became friends, their bond forged as they patrolled together through the dusty alleyways of Helmand province and camped side by side in the desert. It deepened after Sergeant T. J. Brennan was injured during a Taliban ambush, and both returned home. Brennan began to suffer from the effects of his injury and from the fallout of his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. But war correspondents experience similar rates of posttraumatic stress as combat veterans. The causes can be different, but guilt plays a prominent role in both. For Brennan, it’s the things he’s done, or didn’t do, that haunt him. Finbarr O’Reilly’s conscience is nagged by the task of photographing people at their most vulnerable while being able to do little to help, and his survival guilt as colleagues die on the job. Their friendship offered them both a shot at redemption. As we enter the fifteenth year of continuous war, it is increasingly urgent not just to document the experiences of the battlefield but also to probe the reverberations that last long after combatants and civilians have returned home, and to understand the many faces trauma takes. Shooting Ghosts looks at the horrors of war directly, but then turns to a journey that draws on our growing understanding of what recovery takes. Their story, told in alternating first-person narratives, is about the things they saw and did, the ways they have been affected, and how they have navigated the psychological aftershocks of war and wrestled with reforming their own identities and moral centers. While war never really ends for those who’ve lived through it, this book charts the ways two survivors have found to calm the ghosts and reclaim a measure of peace.

Shopping Town: Designing the City in Suburban America

by Anette Baldauf Victor Gruen

Victor Gruen was one of the twentieth century’s most influential architects and is regarded as the father of the U.S. shopping mall. In spring 1979, less than a year before his death, he began reconstructing his life story. Now available in English for the first time, Shopping Town is the long overdue account of a man whose work fundamentally altered the course of city development. Shopping Town opens in Vienna in 1938 with the Anschluss—the turning point in Gruen’s life—as he narrowly escaped the Nazi regime. A few years later, in the suburbs of postwar America, the Jewish refugee sought to reproduce the vitality of Vienna’s city center and invented the commercial apparatus now known as the shopping mall. Gruen’s Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota, was the first fully enclosed shopping center in America. He then translated the concept to economically neglected city centers, setting the path for pedestrian zones and fighting passionately for an urban ideal without compromise. Highlighting Gruen’s sense of humor as well as reflections on the complex forces that sustained the postwar transformation of American cities, Shopping Town embeds Gruen’s experiences and perspectives in a wider social and political context while helping us understand his problematic place in American architectural culture. With afterwords by his son and daughter, Shopping Town closes with Anette Baldauf’s richly insightful essay on the legacy of Victor Gruen.

A Short Border Handbook: A Journey Through the Immigrant's Labyrinth

by Gazmend Kapllani Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife

An exhilarating and darkly comical exploration of migration and borders from an Albanian who grew up in Hoxha's madhouse, longing to cross to Greece, only to find another seam of absurdities and disappointments on his eventual arrival.After spending his childhood in Albania, and fantasizing about life across the border, Gazmend Kapllani escapes to Greece--only to get banged up in a detention center. As he and his fellow immigrants try to find jobs, they begin to plan their future lives in Greece, imagining success that is always beyond their grasp. The sheer absurdity of both their plans and their new lives is overwhelming. Both ironic and emotional, Kapllani interweaves the story of his experience with meditations upon "border syndrome"--a mental state, as much as a geographical experience--to create a brilliantly observed, amusing, and perceptive debut. And a timely one at that, given that immigration is again at the forefront of politics both in the US and Europe.

A Short Life of Pushkin

by Robert Chandler

A short yet fascinating account of Russia's most celebrated writer.In Robert Chandler's exquisite biography, literary giant Alexander Pushkin, lauded as the Russian Shakespeare, is examined as writer, lover and public figure. Chandler explores his relationship to politics and provides a fascinating glimpse of the turbulent history Pushkin lived through. The book acts as a succinct guide to anybody trying to understand Russia's most celebrated literary figure and also illuminates the wider historical and political context of early nineteenth-century Russia.

Shots Fired: The Misunderstandings, Misconceptions, and Myths about Police Shootings

by Kate Flora Joseph K. Loughlin

Get a deeper understanding of police shootings through interviews with officers involved in real-life casesToday’s media is filled with discussions about officer-involved shootings. Too often missing from that discussion are the police officers’ voices and the reality of what happens in actual shooting incidents. Through actual interviews with involved officers, this book addresses common myths and misunderstandings about these shootings. Shots Fired is a journey “behind the shield” and the experiences of the real human beings behind the badge. It explores true events through the participants’ own eyes and takes readers inside the minds of officers during the actual event. The officers detail the roller coaster of emotions and severe trauma experienced during and after a shooting event. Along with the intimate, in-depth explorations of the incidents themselves, the book touches the aftermath of police-involved shootings—the debriefings, internal and external investigations, and psychological evaluations. It challenges many commonly held assumptions created by the media such as the meaning of “unarmed” and why the police can’t just “shoot him in the leg,” creating an understanding that reaches beyond slogans such as “hands up, don’t shoot.”The book is valuable reading for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of police shootings—officers and police departments, reporters and politicians, and the public who rely on the police to keep them safe.

Should I Still Wish: A Memoir (American Lives)

by John W. Evans

In this candid and moving memoir, John W. Evans articulates the complicated joys of falling in love again as a young widower. Though heartbroken after his wife’s violent death, Evans realizes that he cannot remain inconsolable and adrift, living with his in-laws in Indiana. Motivated by a small red X on a map, Evans musters the courage for a cross-country trip. From the Badlands to Yellowstone to the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, Evans’s hope and determination propel him even as he contemplates his vulnerability and the legacy of a terrible tragedy.Should I Still Wish chronicles Evans’s efforts to leave an intense year of grief behind, to make peace with the natural world again, and to reconnect with a woman who promises, like San Francisco itself, a life of abundance and charm. With unflinching honesty Evans plumbs the uncertainties, doubts, and contradictions of a paradoxical experience in this love story, celebration of fatherhood, meditation on the afterlife of grief and resilience, and, ultimately, showcase for life’s many profound incongruities.

Shriramkrishna Paramhansa

by Shri Swami Adhyatmanand Sarswati

શ્રીરામકૃષ્ણ પરમહંસ એ નવજીવન દ્વારા પ્રકાશિત સંતવાણી ગ્રંથાવલિનું દ્વિતીય પુસ્તક છે. સંતવાણી ગ્રંથાવલિ એ ભારતના મહાનુભાવોના જીવન અને વિચારને વાચક સુધી પહોંચાડવાનો નવજીવન ટ્રસ્ટનો નમ્ર પ્રયાસ છે.

Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter's Reckoning

by Julija Sukys

When Julija Šukys was a child, her paternal grandfather, Anthony, rarely smiled, and her grandmother, Ona, spoke only in her native Lithuanian. But they still taught Šukys her family’s story: that of a proud people forced from their homeland when the soldiers came. In mid-June 1941, three Red Army soldiers arrested Ona, forced her onto a cattle car, and sent her east to Siberia, where she spent seventeen years separated from her children and husband, working on a collective farm. The family story maintained that it was all a mistake. Anthony, whose name was on Stalin’s list of enemies of the people, was accused of being a known and decorated anti-Bolshevik and Lithuanian nationalist. Some seventy years after these events, Šukys sat down to write about her grandparents and their survival of a twenty-five-year forced separation and subsequent reunion. Piecing the story together from letters, oral histories, audio recordings, and KGB documents, her research soon revealed a Holocaust-era secret—a family connection to the killing of seven hundred Jews in a small Lithuanian border town. According to KGB documents, the man in charge when those massacres took place was Anthony, Ona’s husband. In Siberian Exile Šukys weaves together the two narratives: the story of Ona, noble exile and innocent victim, and that of Anthony, accused war criminal. She examines the stories that communities tell themselves and considers what happens when the stories we’ve been told all our lives suddenly and irrevocably change, and how forgiveness or grace operate across generations and across the barriers of life and death.

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