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Author: Robert Mcgill Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 9780099564997 Category : Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
Itâe(tm)s the summer of 1972. Maggie, a young schoolteacher, leaves the United States to settle with her boyfriend, Fletcher, on a farm near Niagara Falls. Theyâe(tm)ve made the journey to keep him out of the draft, but they also have loftier plans âe" to start a commune and work the land. As the summer passes, Maggie is haunted by the lack of word from her father, a missionary in the war-torn jungles of Laos. Then the US government announces the end of the draft, and Fletcher faces pressure from his family to return home. More people arrive at the farm, but they arenâe(tm)t who anyone expected. Tensions threaten the commune, the neighbours are suspicious, and Maggie finds herself negotiating the gap between ideals and reality, between who people want to be and who they actually are. Just as her new life seems on the brink of falling apart, Maggie receives word from Laos that her father has disappeared. Suddenly, her future depends not only on keeping everyone together, but also on discovering the truth about her fatherâe(tm)s actions and beliefs in the days before he vanished. Once We Had a Country returns us to an era we thought we knew and compels us to consider the courage of our own convictions as well as the depths of our desire for a meaningful life. It cements Robert McGillâe(tm)s standing as a writer of rare and exceptional talent.
Author: Robert Mcgill Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 9780099564997 Category : Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
Itâe(tm)s the summer of 1972. Maggie, a young schoolteacher, leaves the United States to settle with her boyfriend, Fletcher, on a farm near Niagara Falls. Theyâe(tm)ve made the journey to keep him out of the draft, but they also have loftier plans âe" to start a commune and work the land. As the summer passes, Maggie is haunted by the lack of word from her father, a missionary in the war-torn jungles of Laos. Then the US government announces the end of the draft, and Fletcher faces pressure from his family to return home. More people arrive at the farm, but they arenâe(tm)t who anyone expected. Tensions threaten the commune, the neighbours are suspicious, and Maggie finds herself negotiating the gap between ideals and reality, between who people want to be and who they actually are. Just as her new life seems on the brink of falling apart, Maggie receives word from Laos that her father has disappeared. Suddenly, her future depends not only on keeping everyone together, but also on discovering the truth about her fatherâe(tm)s actions and beliefs in the days before he vanished. Once We Had a Country returns us to an era we thought we knew and compels us to consider the courage of our own convictions as well as the depths of our desire for a meaningful life. It cements Robert McGillâe(tm)s standing as a writer of rare and exceptional talent.
Author: Muriel R. Gillick Publisher: University of Alabama Press ISBN: 0817356207 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 238
Book Description
Once They Had a Country conveys well what it was like to establish a new life in a foreign country--over and over again and in constant fear for one's life. The book draws from a remarkable set of primary source materials, including letters, telegrams, and police records to relate the story of two teenage refugees during World War II.
Author: Sari Nusseibeh Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 1250098750 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 560
Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A teacher, a scholar, a philosopher, and an eyewitness to history, Sari Nusseibeh is one of our most urgent and articulate authorities on the conflict in the Middle East. From his time teaching side by side with Israelis at the Hebrew University through his appointment by Yasir Arafat to administer the Arab Jerusalem, he has held fast to the principles of freedom and equality for all, and his story dramatizes the consequences of war, partition, and terrorism as few other books have done. This autobiography brings rare depth and compassion to the story of his country.
Author: Robert McGill Publisher: Knopf Canada ISBN: 0307361225 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 418
Book Description
A richly textured novel of idealism and romance, Once We Had a Country re-imagines the impact of the Vietnam War by way of the women and children who fled with the draft dodgers. It's the summer of 1972. Maggie, a young schoolteacher, leaves the United States to settle with her boyfriend, Fletcher, on a farm near Niagara Falls. Fletcher is avoiding the Vietnam draft, but they've also come to Harroway with a loftier aim: to start a commune, work the land and create a new model for society. Hopes are high for life at Harroway; equally so for Maggie and Fletcher's budding relationship, heady as it is with passion, jealousy and uncertainty. As the summer passes, more people come to the farm--just not who Maggie and Fletcher expected. Then the US government announces the end of the draft, and Fletcher faces increasing pressure from his family to return home. At the same time, Maggie must deal with the recent disappearance of her father, a missionary, in the jungle of Laos. What happened in those days before her father vanished, and how will his life and actions affect Maggie's future? Once We Had a Country is a literary work of the highest order, a novel that re-imagines an era we thought we knew, and that compels us to consider our own belief systems and levels of tolerance.
Author: Lea Ypi Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393867749 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Shortlisted for the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlisted for the 2021 Costa Biography Award The Sunday Times Best Book of the Year in Biography and Memoir A Financial Times Best Book of 2021 (Critics' Picks) The New Yorker, Best Books We Read in 2021 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year 2021 A Guardian Best Book of the Year A reflection on "freedom" in a dramatic, beautifully written memoir of the end of Communism in the Balkans. For precocious 11-year-old Lea Ypi, Albania’s Soviet-style socialism held the promise of a preordained future, a guarantee of security among enthusiastic comrades. That is, until she found herself clinging to a stone statue of Joseph Stalin, newly beheaded by student protests. Communism had failed to deliver the promised utopia. One’s “biography”—class status and other associations long in the past—put strict boundaries around one’s individual future. When Lea’s parents spoke of relatives going to “university” or “graduating,” they were speaking of grave secrets Lea struggled to unveil. And when the early ’90s saw Albania and other Balkan countries exuberantly begin a transition to the “free market,” Western ideals of freedom delivered chaos: a dystopia of pyramid schemes, organized crime, and sex trafficking. With her elegant, intellectual, French-speaking grandmother; her radical-chic father; and her staunchly anti-socialist, Thatcherite mother to guide her through these disorienting times, Lea had a political education of the most colorful sort—here recounted with outstanding literary talent. Now one of the world’s most dynamic young political thinkers and a prominent leftist voice in the United Kingdom, Lea offers a fresh and invigorating perspective on the relation between the personal and the political, between values and identity, posing urgent questions about the cost of freedom.
Author: Chinua Achebe Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 1101595981 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.
Author: Ben Metcalf Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks ISBN: 0812972783 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Against the Country is a gift for fans of Southern Gothic and metafiction alike. Set in the Virginia pines, and overrun with failed parents, racist sex offenders, cast-off priests, and suicidal chickens, this novel challenges literary convention even as it attacks our national myth—that the rural naturally engenders good, while the urban breeds an inevitable sin. In a voice both perfectly American and utterly new, Ben Metcalf introduces the reader to Goochland County, Virginia—a land of stubborn soil, voracious insects, lackluster farms, and horrifying trees—and details one family’s pitiful struggle to survive there. Eventually it becomes clear that Goochland is not merely the author’s setting; it is a growing, throbbing menace that warps and scars every one of his characters’ lives. Equal parts fiery criticism and icy farce, Against the Country is the most hilarious sermon one is likely to hear on the subject of our native soil, and the starkest celebration of the language our land produced. The result is a literary tour de force that raises the question: Was there ever a narrator, in all our literature, so precise, so far-reaching, so eloquently misanthropic, as the one encountered here? Praise for Against the Country “Iconoclastic . . . Against the Country has obvious affinities to Southern Gothic, both in its voice and in the delight it takes in rural ignorance and grotesqueries. . . . [A] country cousin of David Foster Wallace.”—The New York Times Book Review “Exceptional in its verbal brilliance and conscientiousness, Against the Country involves us in a family’s anguished and hilarious struggle against the strange dooms that seem peculiar to white rural America. This is a savage and gladdening novel.”—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland and The Dog “Metcalf’s unnamed narrator dazzles with his Puritan deadpan and capacious intellect, not to mention his double-barreled blasts of dark humor and wicked satire. . . . There are so many brilliant turns of phrase in Against the Country that it’s hard to choose favorites, but Metcalf is at his sharpest and most seductive when his antihero does more than blast and blame, when he steps outside his sermons to say something real. . . . Every note in every solo is sounded with exquisite perfection.”—Slate “Faulknerian . . . eccentric, magnificent Southern Gothic metafiction.”—Vanity Fair “Ben Metcalf is a brilliant writer, and Against the Country is an ingenious and hilarious novel, a glittering, bitter celebration of how the lousiness of life can be redeemed in the hands (and mouth) of a top-shelf teller of life’s stories.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and The Fun Parts “A daring conglomeration of every trick, swindle and gimmick possible using only ink and paper, a pulpwood imagination machine so finely and expertly wrought that it can take on Jefferson, Thoreau, the church, patriotism, race relations, sexual identity, J. D. Salinger, the myth of America and a thousand other targets . . . [Against the Country] is absolutely and completely worth all investment of time and effort, because it is an undeniably beautiful object, sharp as a new razor.”—NPR “One of the more necessary—and most eloquent—expressions of a distinctly American, provincial rage in some years.”—Flavorwire
Author: Stan Grant Publisher: Scribe Us ISBN: 9781947534261 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
As an Aboriginal Australian, Grant has had to contend with his country's racist legacy all his life. Born into adversity, he found an escape route through education, going on to become one of Australia's leading journalists and a correspondent for CNN. Here, he presents an extraordinarily powerful and personal meditation on race, culture, and identity.
Author: Hisham Matar Publisher: Dial Press ISBN: 0440336643 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Hisham Matar's Anatomy of a Disappearance. Libya, 1979. Nine-year-old Suleiman’s days are circumscribed by the narrow rituals of childhood: outings to the ruins surrounding Tripoli, games with friends played under the burning sun, exotic gifts from his father’s constant business trips abroad. But his nights have come to revolve around his mother’s increasingly disturbing bedside stories full of old family bitterness. And then one day Suleiman sees his father across the square of a busy marketplace, his face wrapped in a pair of dark sunglasses. Wasn’t he supposed to be away on business yet again? Why is he going into that strange building with the green shutters? Why did he lie? Suleiman is soon caught up in a world he cannot hope to understand—where the sound of the telephone ringing becomes a portent of grave danger; where his mother frantically burns his father’s cherished books; where a stranger full of sinister questions sits outside in a parked car all day; where his best friend’s father can disappear overnight, next to be seen publicly interrogated on state television. In the Country of Men is a stunning depiction of a child confronted with the private fallout of a public nightmare. But above all, it is a debut of rare insight and literary grace.
Author: Robert Hicks Publisher: Grand Central Publishing ISBN: 9780446558365 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 448
Book Description
Set in New Orleans in the years after the Civil War, A Separate Country is based on the incredible life of John Bell Hood, arguably one of the most controversial generals of the Confederate Army--and one of its most tragic figures. Robert E. Lee promoted him to major general after the Battle of Antietam. But the Civil War would mark him forever. At Gettysburg, he lost the use of his left arm. At the Battle of Chickamauga, his right leg was amputated. Starting fresh after the war, he married Anna Marie Hennen and fathered 11 children with her, including three sets of twins. But fate had other plans. Crippled by his war wounds and defeat, ravaged by financial misfortune, Hood had one last foe to battle: Yellow Fever. A Separate Country is the heartrending story of a decent and good man who struggled with his inability to admit his failures-and the story of those who taught him to love, and to be loved, and transformed him.
Author: Robert Mcgill
Author: Robert Mcgill
Author: Muriel R. Gillick
Author: Sari Nusseibeh
Author: Robert McGill
Author: Lea Ypi
Author: Chinua Achebe
Author: Ben Metcalf
Author: Stan Grant
Author: Hisham Matar
Author: Robert Hicks