Childhood Country
Childhood Country

Author: Richard Vaughn

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2007-02

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0595428541

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A lonely boy's landscape encompasses the U. S. Middle West and California during the Great Depression 1930s through the World War II home front and late 1940s. Broken shards of youthful memory: rooming with strangers, moving from place to place with sudden frequency and continual uncertainty because of poverty and a mother's marital failures. Seen through a boy's eyes from six to sixteen, here are children and adults in the throes of financial hardship and tumultuous wartime: an empty house with deathly echoes, relatives swept into the cataclysm of war, a cousin gripped by suicidal grief, a family betrayed, and unexpected humor, friendship, hope and first love. He escapes into movies, comic books, adventurous imagination with fantasy excursions, and fascination with guns. Through it all is his mother, raised on dreams of a luxurious life but thwarted by doomed relationships as she searches for love and security when both are rationed or transient. He lives an adolescence not knowing who he is or where he belongs as events propel him toward the looming horizon of manhood.

Growing Up with the Country
Growing Up with the Country

Author: Elliott West

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780826311559

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This illustrated study shows how frontier life shaped children's character.

That Childhood Country
That Childhood Country

Author: Deirdre Purcell

Publisher: MacMillan

Published: 2011-11-04

Total Pages: 576

ISBN-13: 9780230765290

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An irresistible love story by the acclaimed author of A Place of Stones where the cruel hand of fate destroys a newfound love. A young man and woman's passionate beginnings are ruined by a terrible secret that their parents buried for nearly two decades.

Beautiful Country
Beautiful Country

Author: Qian Julie Wang

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2022-09-27

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0593313003

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A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The moving story of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world—an incandescent debut from an astonishing new talent • A TODAY SHOW #READWITHJENNA PICK In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to “beautiful country.” Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive. In Chinatown, Qian’s parents labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly “shopping days,” when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn’s streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center—confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all. But then Qian’s headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor’s visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived here. Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.

War Boy
War Boy

Author: Michael Foreman

Publisher: Penguin Books

Published: 1991-01-01

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 9780140342994

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Michael Foreman woke up when an incendiary bomb dropped through the roof of his Lowestoft home. Luckily, it missed his bed by inches, bounced off the floor and exploded up the chimney. So begins Michael's fascinating, brilliantly illustrated tale of growing up on the Suffolk frontline during World War II. He tells how he and his friends and family coped with bombing raids and deadly doodlebugs, how gas masks were great for making rude noises, and how nothing could beat rabbit pie! ' ... vivid, humorous and touching' Guardian.

Long Walk to Freedom
Long Walk to Freedom

Author: Nelson Mandela

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2008-03-11

Total Pages: 598

ISBN-13: 0759521042

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"Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand history – and then go out and change it." –President Barack Obama Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring political drama in the world. As president of the African National Congress and head of South Africa's antiapartheid movement, he was instrumental in moving the nation toward multiracial government and majority rule. He is still revered everywhere as a vital force in the fight for human rights and racial equality. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life -- an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph. The book that inspired the major motion picture Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

Kith
Kith

Author: Jay Griffiths

Publisher:

Published: 2014-07-03

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 9780141039459

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Why are so many Western children unhappy? Why has childhood become so unnatural? Why are we scared to let our kids be free? In Kith, Jay Griffiths seeks to discover why we deny our children the freedoms of space, time and the natural world. Visiting communities as far apart as West Papua and the Arctic, as well as the UK, and delving into history, philosophy, language and literature, she explores how children's affinity for nature is an essential and universal element of childhood. It is a journey deep into the heart of what it means to be a child, and it is central to all our experiences, young and old. 'Scintillating, passionate, supremely honest. Adults and children need more books like this.' Literary Review 'A subterranean book. We excavate it to refind the secrets of childhood, our own, and many other childhoods in times and places far from ours.' John Berger 'Griffiths' understanding of how it feels to be a child is extraordinary, and her writing is as vivid as poetry.' Mail on Sunday 'I didn't just read this book; I revelled in it. There's a rare vitality and robust energy . . . reading this book feels like playing in the woods. An unabashedly Romantic rallying cry for childhood. Playful and polemical, emotional and imaginative. As vital as play itself.' Independent

The Nation in Children's Literature
The Nation in Children's Literature

Author: Kit Kelen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-02-11

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 1136248943

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This book explores the meaning of nation or nationalism in children’s literature and how it constructs and represents different national experiences. The contributors discuss diverse aspects of children’s literature and film from interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches, ranging from the short story and novel to science fiction and fantasy from a range of locations including Canada, Australia, Taiwan, Norway, America, Italy, Great Britain, Iceland, Africa, Japan, South Korea, India, Sweden and Greece. The emergence of modern nation-states can be seen as coinciding with the historical rise of children’s literature, while stateless or diasporic nations have frequently formulated their national consciousness and experience through children’s literature, both instructing children as future citizens and highlighting how ideas of childhood inform the discourses of nation and citizenship. Because nation and childhood are so intimately connected, it is crucial for critics and scholars to shed light on how children’s literatures have constructed and represented historically different national experiences. At the same time, given the massive political and demographic changes in the world since the nineteenth century and the formation of nation states, it is also crucial to evaluate how the national has been challenged by changing national languages through globalization, international commerce, and the rise of English. This book discusses how the idea of childhood pervades the rhetoric of nation and citizenship, and how children and childhood are represented across the globe through literature and film.

Children, Place and Identity
Children, Place and Identity

Author: Jonathan Scourfield

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2006-09-27

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 1134266324

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In this, the first sociology book to consider the important issue of how children identify with place and nation, the authors use original research and international case studies to explore this topic in depth. The book is rooted in original qualitative research the authors conducted with a diverse sample of children (aged eight to eleven) across Wales, but this data is also located in the context of existing international research on place identity. The book features analysis of lively exchanges between children on their local, national and global identities, politics, language and race. It engages with important social and political questions such as whether cultural distinctiveness can be preserved in a context of globalization, whether we are destined to passively receive dominant representations of the nation or can creatively construct our own versions; and whether national identities are necessarily exclusive. Most importantly, the book focuses on what local and national identities mean to children in an era of cultural and economic globalization. Including material on racialization, language, politics, class and gender, Children, Place and Identity will be a valuable resource to students and researchers of childhood studies and the sociology of childhood.