The speaker in Laura K. McRae's debut poetry collection, Were There Gazelle, has travelled long and hard, wide open to the world. The poems explore how moments can become fixed points in our memory, and how the senses and the strangeness of travel can awaken us to links between past and present, place and time. "There is no shelter in folklore," McRae writes, "we taste what is to come/ in what once was. M]oments scour our passage, / clear it of debris--/human discourse and rot--a few shining pebbles/ left to bruise our feet."
As mesmerizing as a tale from the lips of Sheherazade, Gazelle traces the story of Elizabeth, a thirteen-year-old American girl whose adolescent passion is awakened in the exotic climate of 1950s Cairo. While her mother–whose beauty and sexual prowess both frighten and fascinate Elizabeth–moves into a hotel to pursue a string of lovers, her father, a historian, loses himself in a world of chess and toy soldiers. Elizabeth’s imagination, primed by an explicit edition of The Arabian Nights, leads her to fantasies about her father’s friend, a gentle, older man named Ramses Ragab, a perfume maker who visits their house regularly to play games of war and who opens her up to the mystery of hieroglyphics and the art of exotic scents.
EM"Tell me how to live so many lives at once ..."/em Fowzi, who beats everyone at dominoes; Ibtisam, who wanted to be a doctor; Abu Mahmoud, who knows every eggplant and peach in his West Bank garden; mysterious Uncle Mohammed, who moved to the mountain; a girl in a red sweater dangling a book bag; children in velvet dresses who haunt the candy bowl at the party; Baba Kamalyari, age 71; Mr. Dajani and his swans; Sitti Khadra, who never lost her peace inside. EMMaybe they have something to tell us./em Naomi Shihab Nye has been writing about being Arab-American, about Jerusalem, about the West Bank, about family all her life. These new and collected poems of the Middle East -- sixty in all -- appear together here for the first time.
Mingling memoir, history, politics, and mythology, the doctor who could not save Neda Agha-Soltan tries to understand how the Iranian revolution that brought down the Shah's peacock throne evolved into an equally repressive regime--and how his generation can reclaim their country.
Who Knows Where Butterflies Die is a timeless story of the human spirit's desire for freedom "We're made to believe that learning the alphabet or chemistry and mathematics and this and that is more important than learning how to act like humans. Yet, believe it or not, it's humanity that would save the world. Humanity is what prevents revolution and war. Humanity is what prevents tyranny, famine, mass killing, and torturing one another. It's sad to know that external forces are leading people to lose the respect and understanding they used to have towards each other. "With the never-ending invention of newer technologies, I feel that the world has fallen into a race to turn people to robots. Everyone seems to be in a competition to show off the latest gadgets in their hands, but they hide the quality of their hearts in their chests. With all the new developments that are pushing us into a deeper isolation, I don't know where we're headed. I just know that that's what's leading us to a gradual, global self-destruction in many ways." -Excerpt from Who Knows Where Butterflies Die Praise for Who Knows Where Butterflies Die "An important and powerful story that brings awareness to the pain and devastation innocent families experience when mired in a homeland full of oppression, war, and revolution." -Brock Tully, inspirational speaker and author of 9 books, including The Great Gift "Who Knows Where Butterflies Die ... It's a must read. It inspires us to take responsibility for the world we are creating by our action and inaction." -Ted Kuntz, educational speaker and author of 4 books, including Peace Begins with Me
Once the world’s prairies, grasslands, steppes and tundra teemed with massive herds of game: gazelle, wild ass, bison, caribou and antelope. Humans seeking to hunt these large fast-moving herds devised a range of specialised traps that share many characteristics across all continents. Typically consisting of guiding walls or lines of stones leading to an enclosure or trap, game drives were designed for a mass killing. Construction of the game drive, organisation of the hunt and processing of the carcass often required group co-operation and in many cases game drives have been linked to seasonal gatherings of otherwise scattered groups, who may have used these occasions not only to hunt, but also for social, ritual and economic activities. The Gazelle’s Dream: Game Drives of the Old and New Worlds is the first comparative study of game drives, examining this mode of hunting across three continents and a broad range of periods. The book describes the hunting of bison in North America, reindeer in Scandinavia, antelope in Tibet and an extensive array of examples from the greater Middle East, from Egypt to Armenia. The Gazelle’s Dream will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of hunting and wildlife management.
This book brings together a collection of 16 essays, first published in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, that explore Jewish communities in North Africa, Turkey and Iraq. The discussions are located primarily in the 20th century but essays also examine the Jewish community in 16th-century Istanbul, and in early modern Morocco. Topics include traumatic departures of communities from countries of centuries-old Jewish residence, and relocations; pilgrimages to holy sites by Mizrahi Jews in Israel; resonances of Shabbetai Zevi in Turkey and Morocco; "otherness" and the nature of homeland; the Sephardi culinary heritage as realised in the cookbooks of Claudia Roden; sites of memory, such as Kuzguncuk in Turkey; and a controversial view of the exclusions and erasures that Arabized Jews have undergone. In this unique collection a major, but not exclusive, theme is that of the instability of memory, and the attempt to understand the interactions between memory and history as Jews recount their experiences of living in, and often leaving, their past homelands. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies.
