Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s by Frederick Lewis Allen is a history textbook about the lively gloriousness of Roaring 20s America. Contents: "II. BACK TO NORMALCY III. THE BIG RED SCARE IV. AMERICA CONVALESCENT V. THE REVOLUTION IN MANNERS AND MORALS VI. HARDING AND THE SCANDALS VII. COOLIDGE PROSPERITY VIII. THE BALLYHOO YEARS IX. THE REVOLT OF THE HIGHBROWS X. ALCOHOL AND AL CAPONE XI. HOME, SWEET FLORIDA."
When Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon published the novel Only Yesterday in 1945, it quickly became recognized as a major work of world literature, not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. The book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to Palestine with the Second Aliya--the several hundred idealists who returned between 1904 and 1914 to work the Hebrew soil as in Biblical times and revive Hebrew culture. This epic novel also engages the reader in a fascinating network of meanings, contradictions, and paradoxes all leading to the question, what, if anything, controls human existence? Seduced by Zionist slogans, young Isaac Kumer imagines the Land of Israel filled with the financial, social, and erotic opportunities that were denied him, the son of an impoverished shopkeeper, in Poland. Once there, he cannot find the agricultural work he anticipated. Instead Isaac happens upon house-painting jobs as he moves from secular, Zionist Jaffa, where the ideological fervor and sexual freedom are alien to him, to ultra-orthodox, anti-Zionist Jerusalem. While some of his Zionist friends turn capitalist, becoming successful merchants, his own life remains adrift and impoverished in a land torn between idealism and practicality, a place that is at once homeland and diaspora. Eventually he marries a religious woman in Jerusalem, after his worldly girlfriend in Jaffa rejects him. Led astray by circumstances, Isaac always ends up in the place opposite of where he wants to be, but why? The text soars to Surrealist-Kafkaesque dimensions when, in a playful mode, Isaac drips paint on a stray dog, writing "Crazy Dog" on his back. Causing panic wherever he roams, the dog takes over the story, until, after enduring persecution for so long without "understanding" why, he really does go mad and bites Isaac. The dog has been interpreted as everything from the embodiment of Exile to a daemonic force, and becomes an unforgettable character in a book about the death of God, the deception of discourse, the power of suppressed eroticism, and the destiny of a people depicted in all its darkness and promise.
This is a humorous memoir about the life of Carolyn Robbins Reck that was written with great love for her children and grandchildren in order for them to better know and understand their mother and grandmother. From early childhood on through young adulthood and marriage, travels from New York to California to Washington state and Arizona, three careers and retirement, the book describes, sometimes hilariously, this mother and grandmother's life. It is a great adventure. She now resides, with her husband, six months a year in Port Ludlow, Washington and six months in Surprise, Arizona.
Hannah Mariam Meherete-Selassie's book, It was Only Yesterday... is an insider's story about life as a royal teenager and growing up in the Jubilee Palace in Africa's first royal family under the protective eyes of her great grand-father Emperor Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Lion of Judah, and Elect of God. In February 1974, her privileged life comes to an abrupt end with the advent of a bloody upheaval which overthrows her great grand-father's government and lands her mother and close family in a rotting Communist jail. By this time Hannah Mariam has fled to United Kingdom where she is granted status as a refugee. Interested in writing from a very young age, her first book It was Only Yesterday offers unique insights about the hardship she faced growing up in a new setting and how she effectively managed change and uncertainty. It was Only Yesterday is a delightful account of her interactions with friends and family in the backdrop of the intricate world of imperial protocol and palace politics. The book's narrative is based on diaries kept over the past forty-three years, a collection of family photographs, informal chats and interviews, generational stories, and researching academic books about her great grand-father and family. A promising new author, her readers will enjoy how she has interwoven personal experiences with firsthand knowledge of her great grand-father, one of the world's longest reigning monarchs and an important historical figure in Ethiopian, African and world history. The book's memoire genre will appeal to all, in particular to those interested in understanding the cultural, social, political and historical ramifications of pre-socialist Ethiopia of 1974.
The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us? “As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book." Bookpage Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.
In this heart-pounding mystery, a woman is found dead—but in a society where only the privileged have memories longer than a day, the chances of solving the crime seem futile. Imagine a world in which classes are divided not by wealth or religion but by how much each group can remember. Monos, the majority, have only one day's worth of memory; elite Duos have two. In this stratified society, where Monos are excluded from holding high office and demanding jobs, Claire and Mark are a rare mixed marriage. Clare is a conscientious Mono housewife, Mark a novelist-turned-politician Duo on the rise. They are a shining example of a new vision of tolerance and equality-until... A beautiful woman is found dead, her body dumped in England's River Cam. The woman is Mark's mistress, and he is the prime suspect in her murder. The detective investigating the case has secrets of his own. So did the victim. And when both the investigator's and the suspect's memories are constantly erased -- how can anyone learn the truth? Told from four different perspectives, that of Mark, Claire, the detective on the case, and the victim -- Felicia Yap's staggeringly inventive debut leads us on a race against an ever-resetting clock to find the killer. With the science-fiction world-building of Philip K. Dick and the twisted ingenuity of Memento, Yesterday is a thriller you'll never forget.
Ever wonder who was the first kid to keep a wallet on a big chunky chain, or wear way-too-big pants on purpose? What about the mythical first guy who wore his baseball cap backwards? These are the Innovators, the people on the very cusp of cool. Seventeen-year-old Hunter Braque's job is finding them for the retail market. But when a big-money client disappears, Hunter must use all his cool-hunting talents to find her. Along the way he's drawn into a web of brand-name intrigue- a missing cargo of the coolest shoes he's ever seen, ads for products that don't exist, and a shadowy group dedicated to the downfall of consumerism as we know it.
My book has 22 stories that happened to me and my family. I wrote this book to let people know that they can be born poor, but can become a good person in life. A person who is kind and decent to all. Each story has a meaning, a lesson. Most of all I wanted this book to bring joy, the way it gave me joy in writing it.
