This story is about Mina, a young girl who adores her family. Because of circumstances, she experiences a separation from her parents. Though she suffers some loss of identity, she also learns how to cope with coming of age. She learns the value of friendship and that things are usually not free in life. With the help and support of very special loved ones, she finds her inner capacity to accept life as it comes and make the best of it.
A New York Times Book ReviewEditors' Choice A teacher, a scholar, a philosopher, and an eyewitness to history, Sari Nusseibeh is one of our most urgent and articulate authorities on the conflict in the Middle East. From his time teaching side by side with Israelis at the Hebrew University through his appointment by Yasir Arafat to administer the Arab Jerusalem, he has held fast to the principles of freedom and equality for all, and his story dramatizes the consequences of war, partition, and terrorism as few other books have done. This autobiography brings rare depth and compassion to the story of his country.
Country folk have their own way of doing things and their own sense of humour too. They are naturally wary of men in suits and university types, and such people have to be put to the test before they can be accepted. They are not too keen on new-fangled ways of doing things either; a meal of mountain oysters is one thing, but washed down with a glass of bull’s semen? What’s the world coming to? 'Once Upon A Cowpat' is a hugely enjoyable collection of rural yarns, with subjects ranging from the Hokitika Wildfoods Festival, country rugby and encounters with farm machinery, to uppity animals, time in the pub and Mystery Creek. The stories are peopled with a diverse collection of oddball farming types, tough hunter-gatherers, ten-acre blockers and wet-behind-the-ears farm workers. They frequently find themselves in some pretty hair-raising and sometimes downright hilarious predicaments. Tall tales or gospel truth? Well, Graham Hutchins has met some real characters in his time, but he is also a master story-teller, so you’ll have to make up your own mind on that one. One thing’s for sure though: this is a book that men and women of all ages will enjoy, whether in gumboots or fireside slippers.
In this inspirational and unflinchingly honest memoir, acclaimed author Reyna Grande describes her childhood torn between the United States and Mexico, and shines a light on the experiences, fears, and hopes of those who choose to make the harrowing journey across the border. Reyna Grande vividly brings to life her tumultuous early years in this “compelling...unvarnished, resonant” (BookPage) story of a childhood spent torn between two parents and two countries. As her parents make the dangerous trek across the Mexican border to “El Otro Lado” (The Other Side) in pursuit of the American dream, Reyna and her siblings are forced into the already overburdened household of their stern grandmother. When their mother at last returns, Reyna prepares for her own journey to “El Otro Lado” to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for years, her long-absent father. Funny, heartbreaking, and lyrical, The Distance Between Us poignantly captures the confusion and contradictions of childhood, reminding us that the joys and sorrows we experience are imprinted on the heart forever, calling out to us of those places we first called home. Also available in Spanish as La distancia entre nosotros.
"Constitutes an important and timely addition to the literature on peasant rebellion; wisely, the editors have been eclectic in drawing from some of the leading historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and sociologists active in the field an analysis of the forms that rural violence has taken through the past three centuries."--Pacific Affairs
Yougodid has trained his whole life for the battle that is about to ensue. Find out what it is he’s fighting for and how the future of the world is at stake in this page-turning novella.
Once Upon a Distance War tells the stories of such young Vietnam war correspondents as Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett, and David Halberstam, providing a riveting chronicle of high adventure and brutal slapstick, gallantry and cynicism, as well as a vital addition to the history they shaped. "Prochnau . . . tells a Vietnam story we haven't heard before. . . . Complex, witty, and humane."--Tobias Wolff. of photos.
Across the globe, something is amiss. Even pedestrian observation recognizes that rural communities and small towns are fundamentally changing. Local economies, generations-old cultures, and ingrained ways of life are being severely altered. Within the United States, these changes are symbiotically tied to the demise of the family farm. The decline in family farming and -- the so-called “development” of the country-side -- race along unimpeded and, in fact, are aided by public officials and their policies. With these two great and fundamental changes – the downturn in family farming and the general paving of paradise – locally owned and operated small businesses are dying as big-box retailers come to dominate local economies. The “Wal-Marting of rural America” alters the economic and cultural landscape of rural communities and small towns. People are leaving their homes where their families have lived for generations. The exodus of residents, for example, from the Kansas plains and the Ohio Valley is tied to these forces of late modernity. The result: once-quaint hamlets are becoming vastly different places than of only a generation ago. Some of those places simply no longer exist. Living in central Kentucky and as a rural dweller, my community and I likewise are not immune as we are confronted with vast changes. I contemplate their affect on my life, my family, and our shared anxiety about what may come and what might have been. Over the past few years I have set out to document these fundamental shifts within rural Kentucky. I have paid visual attention to the downturn in family farming and to the closing of local businesses, schools, post offices, and churches; to local governments’ difficulties at providing infra-structural resources to financially strapped counties; to the aggressive influx of big-box retail chains; to the decaying, abandoned, and forgotten symbols of community awash in change; to the near absence of “civic community” among some public officials in rural villages and small towns; and to indications of subsequent social disorganization played out as myriad social problems that over- run ill-equipped communities. My observations of these unprecedented events within Kentucky, one of our country’s most rural and poorest states, are described within these pages. Readers will see too the many photographs that I have composed as I have made my rounds, camera in hand, to record geographical and cultural features of rural life in the throes of late modernity. My observations and writing are intended for both popular and scholarly audiences. Readers will soon learn that I take guidance from academic sociology. I have spent my adult life writing and teaching in sociology. Across this book, the fields of visual, rural and criminological sociology – particularly that specific to communities – guide the descriptive and theoretical analyses. My hope is that the prose is easily accessible.
Although most discussions of the Guatemalan "revolution" of 1944-54 focus on international and national politics, Revolution in the Countryside presents a more complex and integrated picture of this decade. Jim Handy examines the rural poor, both Maya and Ladino, as key players who had a decisive impact on the nature of change in Guatemala. He looks at the ways in which ethnic and class relations affected government policy and identifies the conflict generated in the countryside by new economic and social policies. Handy provides the most detailed discussion yet of the Guatemalan agrarian reform, and he shows how peasant organizations extended its impact by using it to lay claim to land, despite attempts by agrarian officials and the president to apply the law strictly. By focusing on changes in rural communities, and by detailing the coercive measures used to reverse the "revolution in the countryside" following the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, Handy provides a framework for interpreting more recent events in Guatemala, especially the continuing struggle for land and democracy.
