Camp Olvido

Camp Olvido

Author: Lawrence Coates

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13:

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Fiction. California Interest. In the California heartland in 1932, at a migrant labor camp whose very name means forgotten, a child's sudden illness leads to tensions between workers wishing to break camp and the land barons enforcing their contracts. Into this dispute Esteban Alas--contrabandista and self- styled businessman--is reluctantly drawn as a mediator, until an act of violence forces him into a more tragic role. CAMP OLVIDO is everything a novella should be--intense as it is resonant, propulsive as it is deep--but, even more than a shining example of the form, it is simply a great story. I haven't read anything as powerful about pickers and California since I read John Steinbeck. Lawrence Coates writes with every bit as much tenderness and compassion, but this moving novella--full of characters I won't forget and images I can't--is cut with a clear-eyed, brutal honesty that gives it a hard-won wisdom and beauty all its own.--Josh Weil [A] stunning exploration of one man's bold actions and their consequences. Gorgeously written, the novella shows the dark side of California's prosperity, with violence and, unexpectedly, elements of the divine. A superb addition to a distinguished series.--Cary Holladay I have rarely read a novella so rich, with the moral complexities of Melville's Billy Budd and the social and visual acuity of a film like Buñuel's Los olvidados... Read CAMP OLVIDO, a masterful work of fiction, as provocative as it is jaw-dropping in its beauty.--Wendell Mayo In CAMP OLVIDO, Lawrence Coates paints a sensual and humane picture of life and death in a depression-era work camp peopled by Latino fieldworkers... showing not only the sorrow of endemic poverty and powerlessness but the love and good humor of a community that can endure.--Bonnie Jo Campbell


War Against All Puerto Ricans

War Against All Puerto Ricans

Author: Nelson A Denis

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2015-04-07

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1568585020

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The powerful, untold story of the 1950 revolution in Puerto Rico and the long history of U.S. intervention on the island, that the New York Times says "could not be more timely." In 1950, after over fifty years of military occupation and colonial rule, the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico staged an unsuccessful armed insurrection against the United States. Violence swept through the island: assassins were sent to kill President Harry Truman, gunfights roared in eight towns, police stations and post offices were burned down. In order to suppress this uprising, the US Army deployed thousands of troops and bombarded two towns, marking the first time in history that the US government bombed its own citizens. Nelson A. Denis tells this powerful story through the controversial life of Pedro Albizu Campos, who served as the president of the Nationalist Party. A lawyer, chemical engineer, and the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard Law School, Albizu Campos was imprisoned for twenty-five years and died under mysterious circumstances. By tracing his life and death, Denis shows how the journey of Albizu Campos is part of a larger story of Puerto Rico and US colonialism. Through oral histories, personal interviews, eyewitness accounts, congressional testimony, and recently declassified FBI files, War Against All Puerto Ricans tells the story of a forgotten revolution and its context in Puerto Rico's history, from the US invasion in 1898 to the modern-day struggle for self-determination. Denis provides an unflinching account of the gunfights, prison riots, political intrigue, FBI and CIA covert activity, and mass hysteria that accompanied this tumultuous period in Puerto Rican history.


In Praise of Forgetting

In Praise of Forgetting

Author: David Rieff

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2016-01-01

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 0300182791

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A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, "inoculate" the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds--whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces--neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option--sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget. Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times--the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11--Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.


Extinction Events

Extinction Events

Author: Liz Breazeale

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2019-09-01

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13: 1496218302

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In this collection of short stories, Liz Breazeale explores the connections between humans and the natural world by examining the processes and history of our planet. A myriad of extinction events large and small have ruptured the history of the earth, and so it is with the women of this book, who struggle to define themselves amid their own personal cataclysms and those igniting the world around them. They are a mother watching the islands of the world disappear one by one, a new bride using alien abduction to get closer to her estranged parent, a daughter searching for her mother among the lost cities of the world, a sister trying and failing to protect her mythical continent-obsessed brother. Here extinction events come in all sizes and shapes: as volcanic eruptions and devastating plagues and meteor impacts, as estrangements and betrayals and losses. Dark, angry, and apocalyptic, Extinction Events is a compendium of all the ways in which life can be annihilated.


The Camp

The Camp

Author: Colman Hogan

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2021-02-03

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1527565513

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The camp is nothing if not diverse: in kind, scope, and particularity; in sociological and juridical configuration; in texture, iconography, and political import. Adjectives of camp specificity embrace a spectrum from extermination and concentration, to detention, migration, deportation, and refugee camps. And while the geographic range covered by contributors is hardly global, it is broad: Chile, Rwanda, Canada, the US, Central Europe, Morocco, Algeria, South Africa, France and Spain. And yet—is to so characterize the camp to run the risk of diffusing what in origin is a concentration into a paratactical series of “identity particularisms”? While The Camp does not seek to antithetically promulgate a universalist vision, it does aim to explore the imbrication of the particular and the universal, to analyze the structure of a camp or camps, and to call attention the role of the listener in the construction of the testimony. For, by naming what cannot be said, is not every narrative of internment and exclusion a potential site of agency, articulating the inner splitting of language that Giorgio Agamben defines as the locus of testimony: “to bear witness is to place oneself in one’s own language in the position of those who have lost it, to establish oneself in a living language as if it were dead, or in a dead language as if it were living.”


The Descent

The Descent

Author: Jeff Long

Publisher: Crown

Published: 1999-11-12

Total Pages: 639

ISBN-13: 0609607022

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We are not alone. Some call them devils or demons. But they are real. They are down there. And they are waiting for us to find them. In a cave in the Himalayas, a guide discovers a self-mutilated body with a warning: Satan exists. In the Kalahari Desert, a nun unearths evidence of a proto-human species and a deity called Older-than-Old. In Bosnia, something has been feeding upon the dead in a mass grave. So begins mankind’s most shocking realization: the underworld is a vast geological labyrinth populated by another race of beings. With all of Hell's precious resources and territories to be won, a global race ensues. Nations, armies, religions, and industries rush to colonize and exploit the subterranean frontier. A scientific expedition is launched westward to explore beneath the Pacific Ocean floor, both to catalog the riches there and to learn how life could develop in the sunless abyss. But in the dark underground, as humanity falls away from them, the scientists and mercenaries find themselves prey not only to the savage creatures, but also to their own treachery, mutiny, and greed. One thing is certain: Miles inside the earth, evil is very much alive.


On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World

On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World

Author: Elizabeth Kadetsky

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780991314119

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Fiction. In the wake of a chaotic decade in New York, Netti and her eleven-year-old son, Ian, find themselves on the shores of Malta, a picturesque and antiquated Mediterranean island where the last world war still thrums in the nerves of its residents. When they witness an accident on the streets of Valletta, Netti becomes enmeshed in a mystery of old-world family alliances on an island little touched by time and outsiders. Faced with her own transgressions in the shape of reckless relationships and a constant pursuit of the bottom of the wine bottle, Netti desperately seeks to vindicate the crime and better herself as mother to her precocious, adolescent son. Detailed in sharp yet rich prose and a style reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño and Paul Bowles, ON THE ISLAND AT THE CENTER OF THE CENTER OF THE WORLD navigates a confounding existential crisis and the ultimate futility of the desire to escape oneself.


The New Valley

The New Valley

Author: Josh Weil

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2010-05-11

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 0802199895

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From the author of The Great Glass Sea, three linked novellas set between the Virginias about men confronting love, loss, and personal demons. Set in the hardscrabble hill country between the Virginias, The New Valley contains characters striving to forge new lives in the absence of those they have loved. Told in three varied and distinct voices—a soft-spoken middle-aged beef farmer struggling to hold himself together after his dad’s death; a health-obsessed single father desperate to control his reckless, overweight daughter; and a developmentally delayed man who falls in love with a married woman intent on using him in a scheme that will wound them both—each story explores survival, isolation, and the deep, consuming ache for human connection. As the men battle against grief and solitude, their heartache leads them all to commit acts that will bring both ruin and salvation, in these tales “full of tenderness and looming menace” (The New York Times Book Review). “Stark and haunting . . . Delivers great beauty” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “[Weil’s] language is exquisite, his sentences glorious. . . . Refreshing and engaging.” —Ploughshares


The Daughter's Tale

The Daughter's Tale

Author: Armando Lucas Correa

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2019-05-07

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1501187953

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From the internationally bestselling author of The German Girl, an unforgettable, “searing” (People) saga exploring a hidden piece of World War II history and the lengths a mother will go to protect her children—perfect for fans of Lilac Girls, We Were the Lucky Ones, and The Alice Network. Seven decades of secrets unravel with the arrival of a box of letters from the distant past, taking readers on a harrowing journey from Nazi-occupied Berlin, to the South of France, to modern-day New York City. Berlin, 1939. The dreams that Amanda Sternberg and her husband, Julius, had for their daughters are shattered when the Nazis descend on Berlin, burning down their beloved family bookshop and sending Julius to a concentration camp. Desperate to save her children, Amanda flees toward the South of France. Along the way, a refugee ship headed for Cuba offers another chance at escape and there, at the dock, Amanda is forced to make an impossible choice that will haunt her for the rest of her life. Once in Haute-Vienne, her brief respite is inter­rupted by the arrival of Nazi forces, and Amanda finds herself in a labor camp where she must once again make a heroic sacrifice. New York, 2015. Eighty-year-old Elise Duval receives a call from a woman bearing messages from a time and country that she forced herself to forget. A French Catholic who arrived in New York after World War II, Elise is shocked to discover that the letters were from her mother, written in German during the war. Her mother’s words unlock a floodgate of memories, a lifetime of loss un-grieved, and a chance—at last—for closure. Based on true events and “breathtakingly threaded together from start to finish with the sound of a beating heart” (The New York Times Book Review), The Daughter’s Tale is an unforgettable family saga of love, survival, and redemption.


Path to the Stars

Path to the Stars

Author: Sylvia Acevedo

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 1328526909

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The inspiring memoir for young readers about a Latina rocket scientist whose early life was transformed by joining the Girl Scouts and who currently serves as CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA. A meningitis outbreak in their underprivileged neighborhood left Sylvia Acevedo’s family forever altered. As she struggled in the aftermath of loss, young Sylvia’s life transformed when she joined the Brownies. The Girl Scouts taught her how to take control of her world and nourished her love of numbers and science. With new confidence, Sylvia navigated shifting cultural expectations at school and at home, forging her own trail to become one of the first Latinx to graduate with a master's in engineering from Stanford University and going on to become a rocket scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Simultaneously available in Spanish!