At once a mystery of detection, a family history, and a rite of passage, Blood and Village traces the lives of the author's parents from the closing years of the 19th century in a small South German town to the New York neighborhoods where they raised their family. Why did they leave their bucolic village, the author asks, why them and so few others? In what sense did the village die after they left? And in having left, why did the village still have such a hold over them all their lives? In his search for some answers, the author delves into the social history of this Swabian village and describes his own return to its people, vineyards, pastures, and orchards. Along the way he ruminates on his father's World War I service and on his mother's trip back to the village in the turbulent summer of 1934, on his life in the 1940s and 1950s as a first-generation American, and on how the U.S. Navy and his research interests in physics brought him back to the village of his parents.
During the most terrible years of World War II, when inhumanity and political insanity held most of the world in their grip and the Nazi domination of Europe seemed irrevocable and unchallenged, a miraculous event took place in a small Protestant town in southern France called Le Chambon. There, quietly, peacefully, and in full view of the Vichy government and a nearby division of the Nazi SS, Le Chambon's villagers and their clergy organized to save thousands of Jewish children and adults from certain death.
This book is based on a series of episodes from village or small town life in the duchy of WÜrttemberg in southwest Germany between 1580 and 1800, in which state authorities conducted a special investigation into local events. The cases and characters involved include peasants' refusal to celebrate church rituals; a self-proclaimed prophet who encountered an angel in his vineyard; a thirteen-year-old-witch; a paranoid pastor; a murder; and live burial of a village bull.
“A brilliant and harrowing novel” about a deadly epidemic fueled by corruption, based on real-life events in China (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Officially censored upon its Chinese publication, Dream of Ding Village is based on a real-life blood-selling scandal in eastern China. The novel is the result of three years of undercover work by Yan Lianke, who worked as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a small village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood selling. Whole villages were wiped out with no responsibility taken or reparations paid. Dream of Ding Village focuses on one family, destroyed when one son rises to the top of the party pile as he exploits the situation, while another son is infected and dies. The result is a passionate and steely critique of the rate at which China is developing and what happens to those who get in the way. “Lianke confronts the black market blood trade and the subsequent AIDS epidemic it sparked, in a brilliant and harrowing novel.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
As a child, Elias Chacour lived in a small Palestinian village in Galilee. When tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly one million forced into refugee camps in 1948, Elias began a long struggle with how to respond. In Blood Brothers, he blends his riveting life story with historical research to reveal a little-known side of the Arab-Israeli conflict, exploring whether bitter enemies can ever be reconciled. This book offers hope and insight to help each of us learn to live at peace in a world of tension and terror.
Presented for the first time in English, Mammad Said Ordubadi's Years of Blood: A History of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Clashes in the Caucasus, 1905-1906, provides detailed reports of the tragic events of those dramatic years.
Zľie Adebola remembers when the soil of Ors̐ha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zľie's Reaper mother summoned forth souls.
Almost a million Nahua Indians, many of them descendants of Mexico's ancient Aztecs, continue to speak their native language, grow corn, and practice religious traditions that trace back to pre-Hispanic days. This ethnographic sketch, written with a minimum of anthropological jargon and illustrated with color photographs, explores the effects of Hispanic domination on the people of Amatlan, a pseudonymous remote village of about six hundred conservative Nahuas in the tropical forests of northern Veracruz. Several key questions inspired anthropologist Alan R. Sandstrom to live among the Nahuas in the early 1970s and again in the 1980s. How have the Nahuas managed to survive as a group after nearly five hundred years of conquest and domination by Europeans? How are villages like Amatlan organized to resist intrusion, and what distortions in village life are caused by the marginal status of Mexican Indian communities? What concrete advantages does being a Nahua confer on citizens of such a community? Sandstrom describes how Nahua culture is a coherent system of meanings and at the same time a subtle and dynamic strategy for survival. In the 1980s, however, the villagers presented themselves as less Indian because increased urban wage imigration[sic] and profound changes in local economic conditions diminished the value of the Indian identity. Long-term participant-observation research has yielded new information about village-level Nahua society, culture change, magico-religious beliefs and practices, Protestantism among Mesoamerican Indians, and the role of ethnicity in maintaining and transforming traditional culture. Where possible, the villagers' own words are used in telling their history and culture.
Border Town Blood is a contemporary horror novel in three acts. "But I'm not really into horror," you may say. Well, Border Town Blood is like an excellent submarine sandwich (or a po' boy for my friends in the Deep South); there is something in it for everyone: horror, fantasy, romance, inspiration and even a little comic relief tossed in for good measure. Border Town Blood is set in a geographically accurate Fort Smith. I have always believed that fear thrives on the familiar. Television programs like The Twilight Zone were much more frightening and disturbing for their real world setting. Sure having a homicidal alien chasing someone around a spaceship is scary; but having a horde of zombies rise from the cemetery you drive past every day at dusk is terrifying! In Border Town Blood, I have taken great pains to describe local geography and local businesses exactly where they are. To paraphrase the great American storyteller Louis L'Amour, if I tell you there's a water hole somewhere, if you follow my directions, you will end up with a cool drink. Of course, it has been necessary to fictionalize most of the names of the businesses and people, but there is still a barbecue place where Nealson's stands, a record storage business where Centralized Record Storage stands and, as of January 2009, the Mallalieu Church still stands right where Ellis left it. I am confident that Mayor Ray Baker would love to have the fans of Border Town Blood visit Fort Smith and spend a day or two driving around on a Border Town Blood tour. Border Town Blood is based on actual historic events and authentic Native American mythology. Many of today's most successful television programs brag that their stories are "ripped from the headlines." Border Town Blood takes that premise and stands it on its head. The stories in Border Town Blood are ripped from the history books. The Trail of Tears is one of the most shameful events in our country's history. The carnival atmosphere of the public hangings in 19th Century Fort Smith were probably more raucous than I portray them. The multiple waves of refugees and displaced persons referenced by Alice Harvey were actual events. In the forties, Camp Chaffee was a German prisoner of war camp. Fort Chaffee was the Middle American staging ground for fifty-one thousand Hmong, Indochinese, and Vietnamese men, women and children in the seventies; and in the eighties over twenty-five thousand Cuban refugees passed through Fort Smith. Over ten thousand refugees from Hurricane Katrina were housed in Fort Chaffee in 2005. What is so special about Fort Smith that, time and again, the disenfranchised and the footloose end up here? Border Town Blood poses an answer to that and many other questions. Native American mythology is a rich and largely untapped seedbed of tales and legends. Border Town Blood borrows a few of these myths and weaves them into a tapestry that is rooted in history and flies high in the firmament of modern imagination. Tsul Kalu and Jumlin are genuine figures in Native American pantheons. Shapeshifters, dreamwalkers and warriors mighty enough to slay gods are part and parcel of Native American oral tradition. Border Town Blood tells its story through the eyes of those experiencing the action. Unlike the bird's eye view of many third-person novels or the solo inside-out view of a first-person narrative, Border Town Blood puts you the reader inside the heads and hearts of the stories' characters. You get to know the characters, their feelings and their motivations through their own eyes: unvarn
The culmination of years of fieldwork in southern Malawi, River of Blood reconstructs the beginnings of the Mbona martyr cult, follows its history to the present day, and reveals the fascinating intersections of an indigenous belief system with European Christianity. In the cult of Mbona, the central African mythology of the snake that is beheaded to make the rains come has been combined with a more spiritual interpretation: the snake has been transformed into a human martyr and redeemer. According to the cult, the rainmaker Mbona was tracked down by his enemies; they cut off his head, and his blood formed the River of Blood. Mbona returned as a storm wind and asked that a shrine be dedicated in his name. J. Matthew Schoffeleers recounts how the Portuguese presence in Zambezia in the period 1590-1622 led to more than three decades of internecine warfare and caused the people of southern Malawi tremendous suffering. In response to this political oppression and social upheaval, Schoffeleers shows, the people looked to Mbona, their "black Jesus," for redemption. Beyond reconstructing the cult's genesis, Schoffeleers traces its recent history, particularly in political context. He provides texts of seven cult myths from different historical periods in both Chimang'anja and English. His analysis presents the Mbona myth as a continuous social construction and deconstruction. Emphasizing the impact of political and spiritual oppression on the cult, he distinguishes between the differing versions of the myth preserved by the aristocracy and by the commonalty and demonstrates how these disparate views unite to preserve historical information. In so doing, he shows that cults serve as valuable repositories for historical information.
