Traveling to North America in the 1630s to help convert the "natives," Jesuit priest Marc Dupre unexpectedly falls in love with a Huron princess and finds himself torn between love and duty.
The book that launched environmental history, William Cronon's Changes in the Land, now revised and updated. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize In this landmark work of environmental history, William Cronon offers an original and profound explanation of the effects European colonists' sense of property and their pursuit of capitalism had upon the ecosystems of New England. Reissued here with an updated afterword by the author and a new preface by the distinguished colonialist John Demos, Changes in the Land, provides a brilliant inter-disciplinary interpretation of how land and people influence one another. With its chilling closing line, "The people of plenty were a people of waste," Cronon's enduring and thought-provoking book is ethno-ecological history at its best.
This book explores the economic coping practices of rural widows in the aftermath of the Cambodian civil war. War produces a preponderance of widows, often young widows with small children in their care. Rural widows must feed their families and educate their children despite rural poverty and the lack of opportunities for women. The economics of widowhood is therefore a significant social problem in less developed countries. The widows' predominant economic plan was to combine rice cultivation with an assortment of microenterprises, a "rice plus" strategy. Many widows were unable to grow enough rice on their land to feed their families. They filled the hunger gap by raising cash through microenterprises to purchase additional rice. Gender work roles were both permeable and persistent, allowing a flexible sexual division of labor in the short run but maintaining traditional roles in the long run. Most widows called on relatives or exchanged transplanting labor for male plowing services, although a few women took up the plow themselves. The study also explores widows' access to key economic resources such as land, credit, and education. War decimated widows' family support networks, including the loss of children, their social security. The study concludes that Cambodia's gender arrangement offered many economic options to widows but also devalued their labor in a cultural structure of inequality. Gender, poverty, and war interacted to reduce widows' financial resources, accounting for their economic vulnerability.
A mesmerizing debut about a young girl whose steadfast belief and imagination bring everything she once held dear into treacherous balance In Grace McCleen's harrowing, powerful debut, she introduces an unforgettable heroine in ten-year-old Judith McPherson, a young believer who sees the world with the clear Eyes of Faith. Persecuted at school for her beliefs and struggling with her distant, devout father at home, young Judith finds solace and connection in a model in miniature of the Promised Land that she has constructed in her room from collected discarded scraps--the Land of Decoration. Where others might see rubbish, Judith sees possibility and divinity in even the strangest traces left behind. As ominous forces disrupt the peace in her and Father's modest lives--a strike threatens her father's factory job, and the taunting at school slips into dangerous territory--Judith makes a miracle in the Land of Decoration that solidifies her blossoming convictions. She is God's chosen instrument. But the heady consequences of her newfound power are difficult to control and may threaten the very foundations of her world. With its intensely taut storytelling and crystalline prose, The Land of Decoration is a gripping, psychologically complex story of good and evil, belonging and isolation, which casts new and startling light on how far we'll go to protect the things we love most.
A deeply researched and geographically wide-ranging study that reveals that widows were much more economically and socially active than is often thought.
This book is about the gender dimensions of natural resource exploitation and management, with a focus on Asia. It explores the uneasy negotiations between theory, policy and practice that are often evident within the realm of gender, environment and natural resource management, especially where gender is understood as a political, negotiated and contested element of social relationships. It offers a critical feminist perspective on gender relations and natural resource management in the context of contemporary policy concerns: decentralized governance, the elimination of poverty and themainstreaming of gender. Through a combination of strong conceptual argument and empirical material from a variety of political economic and ecological contexts (including Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Thailand and Vietnam), the book examines gender-environment linkages within shifting configurations of resource access and control. The book will serve as a core resource for students of gender studies and natural resource management, and as supplementary reading for a wide range of disciplines including geography, environmental studies, sociology and development. It also provides a stimulating collection of ideas for professionals looking to incorporate gender issues within their practice in sustainable development. Published with IDRC.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! “If you liked Where the Crawdads Sing, you’ll love This Tender Land...This story is as big-hearted as they come.” —Parade The unforgettable story of four orphans who travel the Mississippi River on a life-changing odyssey during the Great Depression. In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesota’s Gilead River, Odie O’Banion is an orphan confined to the Lincoln Indian Training School, a pitiless place where his lively nature earns him the superintendent’s wrath. Forced to flee after committing a terrible crime, he and his brother, Albert, their best friend, Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own. Over the course of one summer, these four orphans journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.
2023 Philip K. Dick Award Nominee "A compulsive, terrifying read."—Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Rose Code For readers of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale comes a thrilling feminist dystopian novel set in an alternative history that terrifyingly imagines what a British alliance with Germany would look like if the Nazis had won WWII. To control the past, they edited history. To control the future, they edited literature. LONDON, 1953. Thirteen years have passed since England surrendered to the Nazis and formed a Grand Alliance with Germany. It was forced to adopt many of its oppressive ideologies, one of which was the strict classification of women into hierarchical groups based on the perceived value they brought to society. Rose Ransom, a member of the privileged Geli class, remembers life from before the war but knows better than to let it show. She works for the Ministry of Culture, rewriting the classics of English literature to ensure there are no subversive thoughts that will give women any ideas. Outbreaks of insurgency have been seen across the country with graffiti made up of seditious lines from forbidden works by women painted on public buildings. Suspicion has fallen on Widowland, the run-down slums where childless women over fifty have been banished. Rose is given the dangerous task of infiltrating Widowland to find the source of the rebellion before the Leader arrives in England for the Coronation ceremony of King Edward VIII and Queen Wallis. Will Rose follow her instructions and uncover the criminals? Or will she fight for what she knows in her heart is right? Praise for Widowland: "A mind-bender of a novel about the power of literature to change minds. I loved it!" —Mark Sullivan, bestselling author of The Last Green Valley and Beneath a Scarlet Sky "I rarely come across a book I can't put down but I devoured this one." —Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author of two historical mystery series as well as several internationally bestselling historical novels "An electrifying, Orwellian dystopia with a thrilling feminist twist." —Lara Prescott, New York Times bestselling author of The Secrets We Kept "Tense, thought-provoking, and terrifying." —Natalie Jenner, international bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls