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.”


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!


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.


Almost Midnight

Almost Midnight

Author: Rainbow Rowell

Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books

Published: 2018-09-27

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 9781529003772

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Almost Midnight: Two Festive Short Stories by New York Times bestselling author Rainbow Rowell contains two wintery short stories, decorated throughout with gorgeous black and white illustrations by Simini Blocker. 'Midnights' is the story of Noel and Mags, who meet at the same New Year's Eve party every year and fall a little more in love each time . . . 'Kindred Spirits' is about Elena, who decides to queue to see the new Star Wars movie and meets Gabe, a fellow fan. 'Midnights' was previously published as part of the My True Love Gave to Me anthology, edited by Stephanie Perkins and 'Kindred Spirits' was previously published as a World Book Day title.


The M.D.

The M.D.

Author: Thomas M. Disch

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 9780816672097

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A chilling allegory for the field of modern medicine.