O, My Ancestor

O, My Ancestor

Author: Claudia K. Jurmain

Publisher: Heyday

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13:

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This book gives voice to the Tongva Faced with the challenge of reconst


Ancestor Trouble

Ancestor Trouble

Author: Maud Newton

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2023-06-20

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0812987497

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“Extraordinary and wide-ranging . . . a literary feat that simultaneously builds and excavates identity.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club Pick • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize • An acclaimed writer goes searching for the truth about her complicated Southern family—and finds that our obsession with ancestors opens up new ways of seeing ourselves—in this “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” (The Boston Globe). ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Time, Entertainment Weekly, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Esquire, Garden & Gun Maud Newton’s ancestors have fascinated her since she was a girl. Her mother’s father was said to have married thirteen times. Her mother’s grandfather killed a man with a hay hook. Mental illness and religious fanaticism percolated Maud’s maternal lines back to an ancestor accused of being a witch in Puritan-era Massachusetts. Newton’s family inspired in her a desire to understand family patterns: what we are destined to replicate and what we can leave behind. She set out to research her genealogy—her grandfather’s marriages, the accused witch, her ancestors’ roles in slavery and other harms. Her journey took her into the realms of genetics, epigenetics, and debates over intergenerational trauma. She mulled over modernity’s dismissal of ancestors along with psychoanalytic and spiritual traditions that center them. Searching and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to make peace with the secrets and contradictions of her family's past and face its reverberations in the present, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.


100 Million Years of Food

100 Million Years of Food

Author: Stephen Le

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2016-02-02

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1250050421

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A fascinating tour through the evolution of the human diet and how we can improve our health by understanding our complicated history with food. There are few areas of modern life that are burdened by as much information and advice, often contradictory, as our diet and health: eat a lot of meat, eat no meat; whole grains are healthy, whole grains are a disaster; eat everything in moderation; eat only certain foods--and on and on. In 100 Million Years of Food, biological anthropologist Stephen Le explains how cuisines of different cultures are a result of centuries of evolution, finely tuned to our biology and surroundings. Today many cultures have strayed from their ancestral diets, relying instead on mass-produced food often made with chemicals that may be contributing to a rise in so-called Western diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, and obesity.


Becoming Kin

Becoming Kin

Author: Patty Krawec

Publisher: Broadleaf Books

Published: 2022-09-27

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 1506478263

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We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history. This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.


Voices from the Ancestors

Voices from the Ancestors

Author: Lara Medina

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2019-10-08

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 0816539561

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Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge. This wisdom is based on the authors’ oral traditions, research, intuitions, and lived experiences—wisdom inspired by, and created from, personal trajectories on the path to spiritual conocimiento, or inner spiritual inquiry. This conocimiento has reemerged over the last fifty years as efforts to decolonize lives, minds, spirits, and bodies have advanced. Yet this knowledge goes back many generations to the time when the ancestors understood their interconnectedness with each other, with nature, and with the sacred cosmic forces—a time when the human body was a microcosm of the universe. Reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization, particularly in these fraught times. The wisdom offered here appears in a variety of forms—in reflective essays, poetry, prayers, specific guidelines for healing practices, communal rituals, and visual art, all meant to address life transitions and how to live holistically and with a spiritual consciousness for the challenges of the twenty-first century.


Red Sister

Red Sister

Author: Mark Lawrence

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 1101988851

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The international bestselling author of the Broken Empire and the Red Queen's War trilogies begins a stunning epic fantasy series about a secretive order of holy warriors... At the Convent of Sweet Mercy, young girls are raised to be killers. In some few children the old bloods show, gifting rare talents that can be honed to deadly or mystic effect. But even the mistresses of sword and shadow don't truly understand what they have purchased when Nona Grey is brought to their halls. A bloodstained child of nine falsely accused of murder, guilty of worse, Nona is stolen from the shadow of the noose. It takes ten years to educate a Red Sister in the ways of blade and fist, but under Abbess Glass's care there is much more to learn than the arts of death. Among her class Nona finds a new family--and new enemies. Despite the security and isolation of the convent, Nona's secret and violent past finds her out, drawing with it the tangled politics of a crumbling empire. Her arrival sparks old feuds to life, igniting vicious struggles within the church and even drawing the eye of the emperor himself. Beneath a dying sun, Nona Grey must master her inner demons, then loose them on those who stand in her way.


Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Author: Carl Sagan

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2011-07-06

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0307801039

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Exciting and provocative . . . A tour de force of a book that begs to be seen as well as to be read.”—The Washington Post Book World World renowned scientist Carl Sagan and acclaimed author Ann Druyan have written a Roots for the human species, a lucid and riveting account of how humans got to be the way we are. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is a thrilling saga that starts with the origin of the Earth. It shows with humor and drama that many of our key traits—self-awareness, technology, family ties, submission to authority, hatred for those a little different from ourselves, reason, and ethics—are rooted in the deep past, and illuminated by our kinship with other animals. Sagan and Druyan conduct a breathtaking journey through space and time, zeroing in on critical turning points in evolutionary history, and tracing the origins of sex, altruism, violence, rape, and dominance. Their book culminates in a stunningly original examination of the connection between primate and human traits. Astonishing in its scope, brilliant in its insights, and an absolutely compelling read, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors is a triumph of popular science.


The Ancestral Continuum

The Ancestral Continuum

Author: Natalia O'Sullivan

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-02-28

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1849837570

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Our ancestry influences more than just our physical characteristics - it can also have a profound effect on who we are as people. The success of TV shows likeWho Do You Think You Are?has prompted a massive interest in people tracing their family roots. But researching into our forebears' lives can often unearth turbulent histories. The past 250 years has seen more change and upheaval on a global scale than at any other point in history. The legacy of the holocaust, of slavery, indentured servitude and of two world wars, has seen a massive migration of peoples across the world, and almost all families know of a recent ancestor whose life was turned upside down by these events. Discovering more about our forebears, and identifying inherited traits, can help us realise our potential and assist us in overcoming obstacles that may be holding us back. As we learn about and honour our ancestors, we can reclaim who we are, discover our creativity, and find our true soul path. In this extraordinary book, readers will find out how to: discover and honour their ancestors, heal their family histories, reveal inherited creative and inspirational gifts, discover their guardian ancestors and learn from inspiring case studies of personal growth. The Ancestral Continuumwill take each reader on a journey through the labyrinth of their own ancestral legacy. As we explore our family tree, we can begin to see ourselves as just one strand in a never-ending tapestry of history and emotion, personality and achievement, birth and death, that will continue into infinity. The book is a powerful and revolutionary blueprint for transforming how we feel about ourselves.


Holy Sister

Holy Sister

Author: Mark Lawrence

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-02-25

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1101988932

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The searing conclusion of the thrilling epic fantasy trilogy that saw a young girl trained by an arcane order of nuns grow into the fiercest of warriors... They came against her as a child. Now they face the woman. The ice is advancing, the Corridor narrowing, and the empire is under siege from the Scithrowl in the east and the Durns in the west. Everywhere, the emperor’s armies are in retreat. Nona Grey faces the final challenges that must be overcome if she is to become a full sister in the order of her choice. But it seems unlikely that she and her friends will have time to earn a nun’s habit before war is on their doorstep. Even a warrior like Nona cannot hope to turn the tide of war. The shiphearts offer strength that she might use to protect those she loves, but it’s a power that corrupts. A final battle is coming in which she will be torn between friends, unable to save them all. A battle in which her own demons will try to unmake her. A battle in which hearts will be broken, lovers lost, thrones burned.


Your Inner Fish

Your Inner Fish

Author: Neil Shubin

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2008-01-15

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0307377164

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The paleontologist and professor of anatomy who co-discovered Tiktaalik, the “fish with hands,” tells a “compelling scientific adventure story that will change forever how you understand what it means to be human” (Oliver Sacks). By examining fossils and DNA, he shows us that our hands actually resemble fish fins, our heads are organized like long-extinct jawless fish, and major parts of our genomes look and function like those of worms and bacteria. Your Inner Fish makes us look at ourselves and our world in an illuminating new light. This is science writing at its finest—enlightening, accessible and told with irresistible enthusiasm.