An epic journey across borders, The Vale of Tears chronicles close to two years in the life of Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung as he seeks an escape route from Nazi-occupied Europe. In this rare, near day-byday account, Rabbi Hirschprung illuminates what life was like for an Orthodox rabbi fleeing persecution, finding inspiration and hope in Jewish scripture and psalms as he navigates the darkness of wartime to a safe harbour in Kobe, Japan.
In his inimitable "two track" style of creating a fictional future and flashing back to actual events in recent history, Peter T. King once again places Congressman Sean Cross at the center of international terrorism, this time coming from radical Islam in cahoots with the Irish Republican Army. The "reality-based" track gives a minute-by-minute account of September 11, 2001 and its effect on the cities of New York and Washington, and continues with month-by-month accounts up until September 11, 2002. A leading congressional Republican, King offers keen insight into President Bush's inner circle in the days immediately following the attacks. In King's fictional future New York once again comes under attack, and it falls upon the resourceful Sean Cross to uncover the odd bedfellows that comprise this latest conspiracy to visit terror on American soil.
Pascuala Herrera, a Mexican immigrant woman with a physical disability resulting from childhood polio, had the odds against her, yet she conquered simply by working hard, having unfailing faith, and finding her own life purpose. Although her mother always told her that "life was a valley of tears," Pascuala learned that although there were many difficult moments in her life, there were also beautiful miracles that happened every day. Pascuala Herrera tells her life's narrative with honest painful stories, simple yet joyous triumphs, and humor that will lead all readers to embrace their own struggles and realize that life is "Not Always a Valley of Tears." From being a child crawling in the streets of her pueblo in Mexico to becoming a successful educator in the United States, she proved that everything is possible. This autobiography covers many facets of the human experience - race, health, disability, religion, poverty, immigration, access to medical care, education, disability rights, miscarriage, adoption, and much more. For supplemental materials for the book, please visit pascualaherrera.com.
The massacre of Canudos In 1897 is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. Looking at the event through the eyes of the inhabitants, Levine challenges traditional interpretations and gives weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-raced descent and were thus perceived as opponents to progress and civilization. In 1897 Brazilian military forces destroyed the millenarian settlement of Canudos, murdering as many as 35,000 pious rural folk who had taken refuge in the remote northeast backlands of Brazil. Fictionalized in Mario Vargas Llosa's acclaimed novel, War at the End of the World, Canudos is a pivotal episode in Brazilian social history. When looked at through the eyes of the inhabitants of Canudos, however, this historical incident lends itself to a bold new interpretation which challenges the traditional polemics on the subject. While the Canudos movement has been consistently viewed either as a rebellion of crazed fanatics or as a model of proletarian resistance to oppression, Levine deftly demonstrates that it was, in fact, neither. Vale of Tears probes the reasons for the Brazilian ambivalence toward its social history, giving much weight to the fact that most of the Canudenses were of mixed-race descent. They were perceived as opponents to progress and civilization and, by inference, to Brazil's attempts to "whiten" itself. As a result there are major insights to be found here into Brazilians' self-image over the past century.
There were several compelling reasons which prompted me to undertake the work of translating and commenting upon the Vale of Tears by Joseph Hacohen, the sixteenth century physician and historian. First of all, those of us who have been teaching in the area of the Middle Ages have noticed over the past several years a distinct upsurge of interest in the field. Consequently, a number of Medieval Institutes, non-denominational in character and attached to major universitites, have sprung up allover the United States to relate themselves to that age which witnessed - among trying once more other things - the unparalleled struggle between two power complexes, the Church and the State. Scholars will also have to consider the Jewish Middle Ages, interconnected with the Christian Middle Ages, which lasted much longer and far beyond the Renaissance in Europe. Most of them tended to gloss over this aspect of Western Civilization which found the Jew in the juggernaut between these two powers. Students of all faiths, ecumenically oriented and truthful to the point of self-abasement are now ready, without a sense of embarrassment, to discuss this long bleak period in the history of European man, where greed, envy, suspicion and religious fanaticism had triumphed over reason and piety. Yet, beyond all of this, there was another consideration which guided me in doing this tedious and often frustrating work: the knowledge of Hebrew has been on the decline in this country.
Vale of Tears: New Essays in Religion and Reconstruction offers a window into the exciting work being done by historians, social scientists, and scholars of religious studies on the epoch of Reconstruction. A time of both peril and promise, Reconstruction in America became a cauldron of transformation and change. This collection argues that religion provided the idiom and symbol, as often the very substance, of those changes. The authors of this collection examine how African Americans and white Southerners, New England Abolitionists and former Confederate soldiers, Catholics and Protestants on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line brought their sense of the sacred into collaboration and conflict. Together, these essays mark an important new departure in a still-contested period of American history. Interdisciplinary in scope and content, it promises to challenge many of the traditional parameters of Reconstruction historiography. The range of contributors to the project, including Gaines Foster and Paul Harvey, will draw a great deal of attention from Southern historians, literary scholars, and scholars of American religion.
The Book is a first hand account of violence incidents handled by the author as a police officer in insurgency torn state of Manipur in India's North Eastern region, covering the period 1990 - 2000. It recalls chilling incidents of excesses committed by members of security forces while dealing with insurgency related violence. It also recounts equally chilling incidence of savage tactics adopted by members of different communities against their rivals during communal and ethnic clashes. It points out certain system failures in the way insurgency has been handled for decades without course corrections, leading to human right violations, alienating the population of a peripheral state from the mainstream.
