One Hundred Species and One Family Tree
One Hundred Species and One Family Tree

Author: William Moldwin

Publisher: Archway Publishing

Published: 2022-03-08

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1665716711

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While surrounded by a two-acre property, garden, and wooded thicket that contains over a hundred species of trees, William Moldwin has been pondering the ethics of simplicity, ecology, aging, growth, and time. Moldwin entwines fascinating facts about trees with inspiring historical and personal stories of their significance to him, an amateur botanist and son of Hungarian immigrants. While exploring the connections and roles trees play within our natural world, including their medicinal uses, Moldwin reflects on how these trees sustain each other by communicating in various ways through pheromones such as chemical agents, fungi, and root systems—all while his own family tree has sustained many generations, each providing unique contributions to the world. Throughout his presentation, Moldwin’s essays inspire tranquility and harmony while encouraging others to walk among the trees and to bathe in their physical and psychological health benefits as you remember to fight for the green revolution. One Hundred Species and One Family Tree blends a fascinating exploration of the history of trees with a retired pastor’s reflections on his family legacy.

Into the Briar Patch
Into the Briar Patch

Author: Mariann S. Regan

Publisher: Author House

Published: 2011-10-12

Total Pages: 365

ISBN-13: 1463407769

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This book is the story of the authors quest to understand her family history. She tries to untangle the briars of the past by tracing lines of cause and effect back to the early 1800s. As slaveholders, her South Carolina ancestors lived inside a psychological briar patch of American history. Through family documents and cultural studies, the author explores the likely results of slaveholding upon the family character as it passes from parents to children. History participates in shaping the moral psychology of a Southern family through five generations. Deep within the briar patch lies the will to survive. Belief in ones own goodness is necessary to survival. The author considers evidence of her familys self-professed virtuesphysical bravery, nurturing, and purityand locates their roots partly in slaveholding. Her family may have needed to intensify certain qualities as if they were extreme virtues, in order to reassure themselves of their own goodness while they were participating in slavery and Jim Crow. These unspoken depths of the briar patch may also have produced stories about blacks and whites that turn and twist so as to reassure whites that they were themselves good. Into the Briar Patch interrogates the roots of racism and the interplay of culture and soul. The psychological entanglements of slavery seem to have brought about both good and bad in family history, both fruit and thorns. The family tree becomes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Each branch bends differently, and each family story sounds its own wistful, amusing, tragic, zealous, or ironic tone. Kirkus Discoveries praises the book as an expansive, accomplished memoir with succinct, rich language that rings in ones ear like a wind chime gently stirred by a slow breeze. Madelon Sprengnether, memoirist and Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, writes that Into the Briar Patch is a profound meditation on the mixture of good and evil and praises the authors compelling . . . labor to achieve not only clear-eyed understanding of the past, but also compassion for all of the (living and dead) players involved. Further information about Into the Briar Patch is at http://www.mariannregan.com.

A DOOR TO THEIR HEARTS
A DOOR TO THEIR HEARTS

Author: Jeannine Miceli Martin

Publisher: Outskirts Press

Published: 2018-07-21

Total Pages: 489

ISBN-13: 1478798300

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Growing up in a Sicilian family with most of its members born and raised in America, Jeannine was eager to grasp a deeper understanding of her true heritage, not the Americanized version. She’d known that her maternal grandparents, Giuseppe Ferro and Angela Luca, had immigrated to the United States to Waltham, Massachusetts, where her mother was raised, but she hadn’t known from where, why, or when they’d arrived. She’d begun her quest for answers on Ellis Island, and from there, her grandparents’ journey had become her journey as she’d traced their paths by going to Sicily herself to learn about their lives there and what made them leave. To her surprise, Jeannine found more than their childhood villages of Ucria and Bronte. She’d discovered more Ferro cousins in Ucria. When Jeannine found a door, she’d enlisted the help of the New England Historic Genealogical Society for a quick lesson in ancestry research, which led her as far back as her three-times-great-grandparents. From that point, she built her family tree and returned to her cousins in Ucria to experience her true authentic heritage. Through legal documents, she’d followed her grandparents and other Ferro ancestors who emigrated to Waltham with them and chronicled the changes in their family lives in America, not necessarily for betterment. She’d learned from medical transcripts of a dramatic twist in her grandfather’s life as a patient in an insane asylum. While Jeannine had opened the door to her ancestry, she’d bridged a gap between the Ferro family of the past and present and the miles between Ucria and Waltham.

In-Flight Entertainment
In-Flight Entertainment

Author: Helen Simpson

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2012-02-21

Total Pages: 117

ISBN-13: 0307957632

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A new collection of stories—dazzling, poignant, wickedly funny, and highly addictive—by the internationally acclaimed writer whose work The Times (London) calls “dangerously close to perfection.” These thirteen stories brilliantly focus on aspects of contemporary living and unerringly capture a generation, a type, a social class, a pattern of behavior. They give us the small detail that reveals large secrets and summons up the inner stresses of our lives (“It is a blissful relief to turn to the coolness and clarity of Helen Simpson . . . She is, to my mind, the best short story writer now working in English” —Ed Crooks, Financial Times). Whether her subject is single women or wives in stages of midlife-ery, marriage or motherhood, youth, young love, homework, or history, Simpson writes near to the bone and close to the heart. In one story, a squirrel trapped under a dustbin lid in the back garden vanishes, and a woman’s marriage is revealed in the process . . . In another, a young woman on her way for an MRI reflects on new love, electromagnetism, and Sherlock Holmes, and afterward goes to a museum and finds herself wanting to escape into one of the paintings. And in the title story, two men on a flight from London to Chicago—one an elderly scientist, the other a businessman upgraded to first class—discuss climate change and what flying is doing to “our shrunken planet,” this while the “in-flight entertainment” shows the crop-duster scene from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. When a passenger in the seat across the aisle suddenly becomes ill and dies, the plane is forced to land in Goose Bay, Labrador, to the utter frustration of the two men. In the story’s moment of reckoning, one of the men, furious at the delay, says to the other, “I don’t care about you. You don’t care about me. We don’t care about him [the deceased passenger]. We all know how to put ourselves first, and that’s what makes the world go round.” These darkly comic, brave, and, says The Guardian, “deeply unsentimental” stories brilliantly evoke life’s truest sensations—love, pain, joy, and grief—and give us, with precision and complex economy, a shrewd and painfully true glimpse into our dizzying 3-D age.

No Life for a Lady
No Life for a Lady

Author: Agnes Morley Cleaveland

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 1977-01-01

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780803258686

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When Agnes Morley Cleaveland was born on a New Mexico cattle ranch in 1874, the term "Wild West" was a reality, not a cliché. In those days cowboys didn't know they were picturesque, horse rustlers were to be handled as seemed best on the occasion, and young ladies thought nothing of punching cows and hunting grizzlies in between school terms.

Page and Place: Ongoing Compositions of Plot
Page and Place: Ongoing Compositions of Plot

Author: Jon Anderson

Publisher: Rodopi

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9401211752

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If people are geographical beings, what can fiction tell us about this truth? This book explores how literature can help us understand the nature of the relations between people and place, how humans create connections between their identities and their geographies, and how these can be threatened and lost. Literature is an important, if unusual, way to explore these relations. At once centred in imagination and ideas, fiction is also indelibly connected to, as well as influenced by, the geographies in which it is set. As this book argues, the relationship between fiction and location is so important that it is often difficult to know which is imagined and which is real. Exploring the relations between people and place through fiction writing set in Wales, Page and Place garners poetic insight into how places are written into our stories, and how these stories take and make the places around us. The book introduces the notion of ‘plot’ to describe the complex entanglement between fiction and geography, and to help understand the role that places play in defining human identity.

The Fate Weaver Collection
The Fate Weaver Collection

Author: ReGina Welling

Publisher: Willow Hill Books

Published: 2021-10-17

Total Pages: 1433

ISBN-13:

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Lexi Balefire wears many hats, and only one of them is pointy. As the last of her line, she’s the current keeper of the Balefire, an ancient flame that brings magic to all witches. It’s a job that requires a certain amount of power, and Lexi’s only talent, a knack for matchmaking isn’t enough. When Lexi finally comes into her full power, she discovers a family secret that turns everything she ever knew about herself upside down. Her gift for matchmaking isn’t just a knack, it’s a direct inheritance from the father she never knew, and not the only thing he handed down to her. Follow Lexi as she uses the gifts from both sides of her family to fight a deranged demi-goddess bent on revenge and learns whether or not love really conquers all. This omnibus includes the entire Fate Weaver series.