Our Motherland - My Life chronicles the remarkable life of a true Ghanaian patriot who has been an active participant and observer in Ghanaian political transitions. His African cultural influences are undergirded by his deep spiritual belief in articulating the needs of Ghana and Africa as an influential communicator. His leadership legacy as a visionary will be remembered for generations to come as one of the best Ghanaian and Pan Africanist thinkers of his generation.
“I’m reading this book right now and loving it!”—Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild How can a mother and daughter who love (but don’t always like) each other coexist without driving each other crazy? “Vibrating with emotion, this deeply honest account strikes a chord.”—People “A wry and moving meditation on aging and the different kinds of love between women.”—O: The Oprah Magazine After surviving a traumatic childhood in nineteen-seventies New York and young adulthood living in the shadow of her flamboyant mother, Rita, a makeup-addicted former television singer, Elissa Altman has managed to build a very different life, settling in Connecticut with her wife of nearly twenty years. After much time, therapy, and wine, Elissa is at last in a healthy place, still orbiting around her mother but keeping far enough away to preserve the stable, independent world she has built as a writer and editor. Then Elissa is confronted with the unthinkable: Rita, whose days are spent as a flâneur, traversing Manhattan from the Clinique counters at Bergdorf to Bloomingdale’s and back again, suffers an incapacitating fall, leaving her completely dependent upon her daughter. Now Elissa is forced to finally confront their profound differences, Rita’s yearning for beauty and glamour, her view of the world through her days in the spotlight, and the money that has mysteriously disappeared in the name of preserving youth. To sustain their fragile mother-daughter bond, Elissa must navigate the turbulent waters of their shared lives, the practical challenges of caregiving for someone who refuses to accept it, the tentacles of narcissism, and the mutual, frenetic obsession that has defined their relationship. Motherland is a story that touches every home and every life, mapping the ferocity of maternal love, moral obligation, the choices women make about motherhood, and the possibility of healing. Filled with tenderness, wry irreverence, and unforgettable characters, it is an exploration of what it means to escape from the shackles of the past only to have to face them all over again. Praise for Motherland “Rarely has a mother-daughter relationship been excavated with such honesty. Elissa Altman is a beautiful, big-hearted writer who mines her most central subject: her gorgeous, tempestuous, difficult mother, and the terrain of their shared life. The result is a testament to the power of love and family.”—Dani Shapiro, author of Inheritance
August 1945. The Japanese onslaught on Vietnam and Philippines came to an end. Netaji Subhash Bose's sudden death was a big blow for the Indian diaspora in South East Asia, who were backing him for their motherland's freedom. Many of them remained in South East Asian countries instead of moving back to India. Two of these countries were Vietnam and the Philippines. The book is a tearful story about the Indian migrants who are still risking everything in their pursuit for a better life. Crossing boundaries and breaking barriers with every generation, their fates are tied to their adopted country’s economic and political merry go around. After 75 years, they still ask, where do we belong? You may find an answer in this book.
Library of America gathers for the first time the entire body of work set in the imaginary central European nation of Orsinia—the enchanting, richly imagined historical fiction series written by Hugo, Nebula, and National Book Award winner Ursula K. Le Guin. In a career spanning half a century, Ursula K. Le Guin has produced a body of work that testifies to her abiding faith in the power and art of words. She is perhaps best known for imagining future intergalactic worlds in brilliant books that challenge our ideas of what is natural and inevitable in human relations—and that celebrate courage, endurance, risk-taking, and above all, freedom in the face of the psychological and social forces that lead to authoritarianism and fanaticism. It is less well known that she first developed these themes in the richly imagined historical fiction collected in this volume, which inaugurates the Library of America edition of her works. Written before Ursula K. Le Guin turned to science fiction, the novel Malafrena is a tale of love and duty set in the central European country of Orsinia in the early nineteenth century, when it is ruled by the Austrian empire. The stories originally published in Orsinian Tales (1976) offer brilliantly rendered episodes of personal drama set against a history that spans Orsinia’s emergence as an independent kingdom in the twelfth century to its absorption by the eastern Bloc after World War II. The volume is rounded out by two additional stories that bring the history of Orsinia up to 1989, the poem “Folksong from the Montayna Province,” Le Guin’s first published work, and two never-before-published songs in the Orisinian language. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Poetry. Latinx Studies. MOTHER/LAND is focused on the intersection of motherhood and immigration and its effects on a speaker's relationship to place, others and self. It investigates the mutual and compounding complications of these two shifts in identity while examining legacy, history, ancestry, land, home, and language. The collection is heavily focused on the latter, including formal experimentation with hybridity and polyvocality, combining English and Portuguese, interrogating translation and transforming traditional repeating poetic forms. These poems from the perspective of an immigrant mother of an American child create a complex picture of the beauty, danger and parental love the speaker finds and the legacy she brings to her reluctant new motherland.
Pamela Marin was fourteen when her mother died of breast cancer. After keeping her illness a secret from her daughter, Mildred Marin left her home in Evanston, Illinois, to spend her last months alone and without treatment in California. When she died in 1973, her husband buried the family's memories with her -- clearing the house of her belongings, avoiding any mention of her, and never once taking his young daughter to her mother's grave. Before Marin was out of her teens, her father went bankrupt and moved in with his thirty-years-younger girlfriend. Now in this luminous memoir, written with rare grace and unflinching honesty, Marin chronicles how she came to reject her father's dismissal of the past and ultimately to embark on a cross- country search for traces of the mother she never really knew. With family and home gone, Marin got to work supporting herself, first as a waitress in Chicago's northside bars, then as a secretary, and finally as a journalist, landing a job as a staff writer at a newspaper in Southern California when she was twenty-seven. Two years later, happily ensconced in a beach house with the man who would become her husband and the father of her children, Marin began to dream about the mother who'd been gone for more than half her life. Those haunting dreams led to the quest at the heart of Motherland. Fifteen years after Mildred Marin's death, the author dropped out of her own life to research her mother's. Using her reporter's skills, Marin traveled to Tennessee, where her mother was born and reared; to Chicago, where her mother worked as a commercial artist and met the man she would marry; and back to California, where Mildred Marin went to die. Along the way, Marin collected treasured artifacts as well as others' memories of her mother. She confronted her father about the silence that enshrouded his wife's illness and death, causing a rift in their relationship that would last until he died a decade later. Motherland is a journey shot through with love and pain. It is a story of loss, discovery, and, ultimately, forgiveness. By coming to terms with her mother's life, Pamela Marin opened the way for the emotional intimacy she had craved as a child -- and finally found in her own motherhood.
A unique autobiography that provides an incomparable insight into the mind of a genius The Renaissance man of modern India, Rabindranath Tagore put his country on the literary map of the world when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. My Life in My Words is, quite literally, Tagore on Tagore. Uma Das Gupta draws upon the vast repertoire of Tagore’s writings to create a vivid portrait of the life and times of one of India’s most influential cultural icons. The result is a rare glimpse into the world of Tagore: his family of pioneering entrepreneurs who shaped his worldview; the personal tragedies that influenced some of his most eloquent verse; his groundbreaking work in education and social reform; his constant endeavour to bring about a synthesis of the East and the West and his humanitarian approach to politics; and his rise to the status of an international poet. Meticulously researched and sensitively edited, this unique autobiography provides an incomparable insight into the mind of a genius.
The acclaimed second collection of poetry by Patricia Lockwood, Booker Prize finalist author of the novel No One Is Talking About This and the memoir Priestdaddy SELECTED AS A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times * The Boston Globe * Powell’s * The Strand * Barnes & Noble * BuzzFeed * Flavorwire “A formidably gifted writer who can do pretty much anything she pleases.” – The New York Times Book Review Colloquial and incantatory, the poems in Patricia Lockwood’s second collection address the most urgent questions of our time, like: Is America going down on Canada? What happens when Niagara Falls gets drunk at a wedding? Is it legal to marry a stuffed owl exhibit? Why isn’t anyone named Gary anymore? Did the Hatfield and McCoy babies ever fall in love? The steep tilt of Lockwood’s lines sends the reader snowballing downhill, accumulating pieces of the scenery with every turn. The poems’ subject is the natural world, but their images would never occur in nature. This book is serious and funny at the same time, like a big grave with a clown lying in it.
This is an elucidation of accumulation of personal experience within the context of socio-cultural internalization in particular and the socio-political environment in general that is intended to provide some insights into a plethora of ingredients that converged and crystallized into a catalytic impetus that socially transformed my generation from village boys to highly politicised freedom fighters during the 1960s to the 1970s in Rhodesia. I hvae done this by tracing the footprints of my experience which show multiple stages and strands of cultural, social, political and physical determinants that landed themselves on my growth path starting from socialization in my parents’ home all the way through the local community traditions and schooling to active service for the freedom of my country at local and national levels. Here the crucial elements that moulded my social being in a very profound way have been ventilated to show when and how I became able to distinguish antagonistic differences between justice and injustice at my very early age. Proceeding from here I have brought out how I teamed up with others whose political outlook and aspirations were identical with mine as we all voluntarily joined anti-colonial struggle starting from (invisible) low intensity activism in schools and towns up to risky adventures that finished up in armed struggle within a broad national perspective. The narration further demonstrates the domesticity of the movements that championed liberation struggle as drivers were citizens who grew up in the rural villages and urban African Townships where they progressively became aware that they were born (unlike their parents) in a country under colonial administration. In doing all this I had to spell out how my interaction with informative social vectors brought awareness on how my country, Zimbabwe, was colonized and governed by Europeans without the consent of the indigenous natives who showed their resentment to foreign rule by rebelling (First Chimurenga) within six years of colonization but failed, only to succeed in the second rebellion (Second Chimurenga) after ninety years of racial domination. Furthermore I believe I have laid bare how I became a civilian freedom fighter, together with peers of my generation, in the second rebellion where intorable weight of oppression caused us to abandon nonviolent methods of struggle in favour of using arms of war to face a cobweb of security forces led by superb military machine of the colonial state wherein lay formidable challenges confronting rebelling citizens. The armed struggle phase meant that fighters and their collaborators had to face those challenges in the theatre of operation. Initially they exhibited more weaknesses than strengths and lost opportunities that were in the form of abundance of political support of masses of people in the country. The overall process of the struggle exhibited strengths and costly weaknesses right from the civilian phase up to the armed struggle phase with or without my participation. It was not until freedom fighters gained experience in planning and undertaking field operations that they became able to apply appropriate tactics that caused the struggle to gain sustainability in the theatre of operation. More importantly the narration makes the point that the Rhodesian colonial system was presided over by European settler leaders who hardly recognized African citizens as entitled to participation in governance of the country with equal rights in social, political, economical and juridical spheres of societal setting of two main races. Exclusion of African from consensus on the act of Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) by Ian Douglas Smith was a fundamental blunder that precipitated nationwide fury that lead to a civil war in which a deprived citizen fought against a privileged citizen who was indoctrinated with falsehood that his adversary, freedom fighter, was sponsored by foreign powers of a communist type while the latter rightly believed that he was fighting to free his country from racially imposed injustices of deprivation. More importantly, the narration lays emphasis on the creation of massive political structures throughout the country well below the radar of legality for the purpose of sustaining guerrilla warfare in the face of the super professional Rhodesian security forces. In this connection, the final phase of armed struggle demonstrated to all at home and abroad that freedom fighters became significantly effective because they were politically rooted in the oppressed population whence came their strength against superior military hard ware and a ‘water-tight’ counter-insurgency strategy of the Rhodesian security forces. Essenially, it was that political strength, not Communist powers or betrayal by the West, which caused all stakeholders to become willing to come to a negotiating table at Lancaster House in Brittain in 1979 to settle the armed conflict decisively.
"My Road of Life" is his last work written during the Soviet rule. This book treasures love; love of everyone, love to motherland, history, culture. The book speaks out for the whole Azerbaijani people expressing its benevolent nature and good will. The 90s of the last century marked Azerbaijans history with independence from the Soviet regime and greatly contributed to introduce "My Road of Life" as one of the cult books of those times, spreading thoughts and spirit of liberty, independence, nations self-governance. Fighters for independence used to came to The Liberty Square in Baku with this book in their hands to demand the end of the authoritarian Soviet dominance. The book encouraged the young generation of those times to rise and wage the just struggle for future and signaled the complete destruction of the humiliating Soviet dictatorship. Today "My Road of Life" is a versed relic echoing the ardent freedom-loving spirit of the Azerbaijani people on their long way to hard-fought victory.
