Download or read book The Fiftieth Gate written by Mark Raphael Baker and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What right did I possess, as a child of survivors, to recreate an account of the Holocaust as if I was there? In writing The Fiftieth Gate, Mark Baker describes a journey from despair and death towards hope and life; it is the story of a son who enters his parents’ memories and, inside the darkness, finds light. In his evocative prose, Baker takes us to this place of horror, and then brings us back to reflect on these events and remember: ‘Never again’. Across the silence of fifty years, Baker and his family travel from Poland and Germany to Jerusalem and Melbourne, as the author struggles to uncover the mystery of his parents’ survival: his father Yossl was imprisoned in concentration camps and his mother Genia was forced into hiding after the Jews of her village were murdered. Twenty years on from its first publication, The Fiftieth Gate remains an extraordinary book. It has become a classic and has now sold over 70,000 copies. In Baker's new introduction, he recalls his motivations for writing this important memoir, and highlights how the testimonial culture in Holocaust studies has spread to awareness of other genocides and our responsibility (and failure) to prevent them. As well as The Fiftieth Gate, A Journey Through Memory, a seminal book on his parents’ experience during the Holocaust, Mark Raphael Baker wrote a compelling memoir, Thirty Days, A Journey to the End of Love, about the death of his wife. He was Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies in the School at Monash University, Melbourne. He died in 2023. ‘Heartrending and beautiful...This simply written, subtly complex narrative is instantly recognisable as a masterpiece, and the reader is rewarded by the light it sheds.’ Age ‘Combining precise historical research and poetic eloquence, Mark Baker’s The Fiftieth Gate remains the gold standard of second generation Holocaust memoirs on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary edition.’ Christopher R. Browning ‘Baker does with memory, what Rembrandt does with light. He uses it to model, to imagine, to illuminate, to astonish.’ Philip Adams

Download or read book The Last Ocean written by Nicci Gerrard and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning journalist and author, a lyrical, raw and humane investigation of dementia that explores both the journeys of the people who live with the condition and those of their loved ones After a diagnosis of dementia, Nicci Gerrard’s father, John, continued to live life on his own terms, alongside the disease. But when an isolating hospital stay precipitated a dramatic turn for the worse, Gerrard, an award-winning journalist and author, recognized that it was not just the disease, but misguided protocol and harmful practices that cause such pain at the end of life. Gerrard was inspired to seek a better course for all who suffer because of the disease. The Last Ocean is Gerrard’s investigation into what dementia does to both the person who lives with the condition and to their caregivers. Dementia is now one of the leading causes of death in the West, and this necessary book will offer both comfort and a map to those walking through it. While she begins with her father’s long slip into forgetting, Gerrard expands to examine dementia writ large. Gerrard gives raw but literary shape both to the unimaginable loss of one’s own faculties, as well as to the pain of their loved ones. Her lens is unflinching, but Gerrard honors her subjects and finds the beauty and the humanity in their seemingly diminished states. In so doing, she examines the philosophy of what it means to have a self, as well as how we can offer dignity and peace to those who suffer with this terrible disease. Not only will it aid those walking with dementia patients, The Last Ocean will prompt all of us to think on the nature of a life well lived.

Download or read book Everything Left to Remember written by Steph Jagger and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This will cast a spell on fans of Cheryl Strayed and Glennon Doyle." - Publishers Weekly Between Two Kingdoms meets Wild. In this heart wrenching and inspirational memoir a woman and her mother, who is suffering from dementia, embark on a road trip through national parks, revisiting the memories, and the mountains, that made them who they are. Steph Jagger lost her mother before she lost her. Her mother, stricken with an incurable disease that slowly erases all sense of self, struggles to remember her favorite drink, her favorite song, and—perhaps most heartbreaking of all—Steph herself. Steph watches as the woman who loved and raised her slips away before getting the chance to tell her story, and so Steph makes a promise: her mother will walk it and she will write it. Too aware of her mother’s waning memory, Steph proposes that the two take a camping trip out to Montana—which her mother, on the urging of Steph’s father, agrees to embark upon. An adventure full of horseback riding, hiking, and “tenting” out West quickly turns into one woman’s reflection on childhood, motherhood, personhood—and what it means to love someone who doesn’t quite remember the person she spent her lifetime becoming. A staggeringly beautiful examination of how stories are passed down through generations and from Mother Nature, Everything Left to Remember brings us the wisdom of who our memories make us under the constellations of the vast Montana sky.

Download or read book The Robber of Memories written by Michael Jacobs and published by Granta Books. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Running through the heart of Colombia is a river emblematic of the fascination and tragedy of South America, the Magdalena. Considered by some to be the most dangerous place in the world, travellers along the river - for centuries the only route into the vast South American interior - were at the mercy of tropical disease, dangerous animals and precarious barges. A third of the victims of 'la violencia', Colombia's period of civil conflict which began in the 1950s, ended up in its waters. Townships alongside it have experienced some of the worst massacres in South American history. In 2011, Michael Jacobs travelled its whole length to the river's source high up in Andean moorlands controlled by guerrillas. In spellbinding prose, he charts the dangers he negotiated - including a terrifying three day encounter with the FARC - while uncovering the river's history of pioneering explorations, environmental decline and political violence. As Jacobs delves into the history of destruction and decay along the river, he also makes a deeply personal exploration into memory and its loss: not far from the river's banks lies a group of townships with the highest incidence of early onset Alzheimer's in the world. Jacobs reflects on the lives of his father, and his mother - sufferers respectively from Alzheimer's and dementia - as he travels upstream towards what comes to seem like a heartland of mystery, magic and darkness.

Download or read book Memories of Eden written by Violette Shamash and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and for millennia, Jews resided peacefully in metropolitan Baghdad. Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through the recollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born in Baghdad in 1912, sent to her daughter Mira Rocca and son-in-law, the British journalist Tony Rocca. The result is a deeply textured memoir—an intimate portrait of an individual life, yet revealing of the complex dynamics of the Middle East in the twentieth century. Toward the end of her long life, Violette Shamash began writing letters, notes, and essays and sending them to the Roccas. The resulting book begins near the end of Ottoman rule and runs through the British Mandate, the emergence of an independent Iraq, and the start of dictatorial government. Shamash clearly loved the world in which she grew up but is altogether honest in her depiction of the transformation of attitudes toward Baghdad’s Jewish population. Shamash’s world is finally shattered by the Farhud, the name given to the massacre of hundreds of Iraqi Jews over three days in 1941. An event that has received very slight historical coverage, the Farhud is further described and placed in context in a concluding essay by Tony Rocca.

Download or read book Repressed Memories written by Renee Fredrickson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1992-07 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Buried memories of sexual abuse can have a devastating impact on a victim's relationships, work, and health. Using case histories, Renee Fredrickson stresses the importance of recovering these memories as a crucial step in healing, and she explains various therapeutic processes used in memory retrieval.

Download or read book Breath Eyes Memory written by Edwidge Danticat and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2015-02-24 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 20th anniversary edition of Edwidge Danticat's groundbreaking debut, now an established classic--revised and with a new introduction by the author, and including extensive bonus materials At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished Haitian village to New York to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti—to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence. In her stunning literary debut, Danticat evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti—and the enduring strength of Haiti’s women—with vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people’s suffering and courage.

Download or read book The Memory Thief written by Lauren Mansy and published by Blink. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thrilling YA fantasy debut follows seventeen-year-old Etta Lark as she navigates the underworld of Craewick to pull off the heist of a lifetime. A YALSA (The Young Adult Library Services Association) Teens' Top Ten Book for 2020, Mansy crafts a grim reality where memories are worth their weight in gold. In the city of Craewick, memories reign. The power-obsessed ruler of the city, Madame, has cultivated a society in which memories are currency, citizens are divided by ability, and Gifted individuals can take memories from others through touch as they please. Seventeen-year-old Etta Lark is desperate to live outside of the corrupt culture, but she grapples with the guilt of an accident that has left her mother bedridden in the city's asylum. When Madame threatens to put her mother up for auction, a Craewick practice in which a "criminal's" memories are sold to the highest bidder before being killed, Etta will do whatever it takes to save her. Even if it means rejoining the Shadows, the rebel group she swore off in the wake of the accident years earlier. To rescue her mother, Etta must prove her allegiance to the Shadows by stealing a memorized map of the Maze, a formidable prison created by the bloodthirsty ruler of a neighboring Realm. Etta faces startling attacks, unexpected romance, and, above all, her own past as she uncovers a conspiracy that challenges everything she knew about herself and the world around her. In a place where nothing is what it seems, can Etta ever become more than a memory thief? Perfect for fans of high-stakemagical heists such as: Leigh Bardugo (Six of Crows) Victoria Aveyard (Red Queen) Roshani Chokshi (The Gilded Wolves) "Mansy's debut will delight fantasy readers who revel in fully developed settings and unusual powers."- Booklist "A welcome addition to the YA fantasy canon, The Memory Thief is a suspenseful page-turner, delightfully chock full of unexpected twists and turns."- Shelf Awareness

Download or read book Highlanders written by Yo'av Karny and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-12-05 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the region, told by an intrepid journalist Many dire predictions followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, but nowhere have they materialized as dramatically as in the Caucasus: insurrection, civil wars, ethnic conflicts, economic disintegration, and up to two million refugees. Moreover, in the 1990s Russia twice went to war in the Caucasus, and suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of a nation so tiny that it could fit into a single district of Moscow. What is it about the Caucasus that makes the region so restless, so unpredictable, so imbued with heroism but also with fanaticism and pain? In Highlanders, Yo'av Karny offers a better understanding of a region described as a "museum of civilizations," where breathtaking landscapes join with an astounding human diversity. Karny has spent many months among members of some of the smallest ethnic groups on earth, all of them living in the grim shadow of an unhappy empire. But his book is a journey not only to a geographic region but also to darker sides of the human soul, where courage vies with senseless vindictiveness; where honor and duty require people to share the present with long-dead ancestors, some real, some imaginary; and where an ancient way of life is drawing to an end under the combined weight of modernity and intolerance.

Download or read book The Journey Through Grief written by Alan D. Wolfelt and published by Companion Press. This book was released on 2003-09-01 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This spiritual companion for mourners affirms their need to mourn and invites them to journey through their very unique and personal grief. Detailed are the six needs that all mourners must yield to and eventually embrace if they are to go on to find continued meaning in life and living, including the need to remember the deceased loved one and the need for support from others. Short explanations of each mourning need are followed by brief, spiritual passages that, when read slowly and reflectively, help mourners work through their unique thoughts and feelings. Also included in this revised edition are journaling sections for mourners to write out their personal responses to each of the six needs. This replaces 1879651114.

Download or read book Chasing Dreamtime written by Neva Sullaway and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gritty memoir of a sea-going hitchhiker, Sullaway journeys through the South Pacific. After nearly two years at sea and imprisonment, shark attacks, and other near-death experiences, she pedals a "push bike" deep into the heart of the Australian outback, a desolate and scarcely inhabited area populated by few outside of the indigenous tribes. It is here that she catches a glimpse of the aboriginal concept of Dreamtime, an elusive spiritual interpretation that helps both Sullaway and the reader understand the journey's events.

Download or read book Trace written by Lauret Savoy and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With a New Preface by the Author Through personal journeys and historical inquiry, this PEN Literary Award finalist explores how America’s still unfolding history and ideas of “race” have marked its people and the land. Sand and stone are Earth’s fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life–defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent’s past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her—paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land—lie largely eroded and lost. A provocative and powerful mosaic that ranges across a continent and across time, from twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” and the U.S.–Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons. Gifted with this manifold vision, and graced by a scientific and lyrical diligence, she delves through fragmented histories—natural, personal, cultural—to find shadowy outlines of other stories of place in America. "Every landscape is an accumulation," reads one epigraph. "Life must be lived amidst that which was made before." Courageously and masterfully, Lauret Savoy does so in this beautiful book: she lives there, making sense of this land and its troubled past, reconciling what it means to inhabit terrains of memory—and to be one.

Download or read book Legendary Route 66 written by Michael Karl Witzel, Gyvel Young-Witzel and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It started in the heartland and originally ended in Los Angeles (not, contrary to myth, at the ocean). It carried truckers crossing the country, Okies fleeing the Dust Bowl, vacationers seeking the sun. It was Americas Main Street, the Mother Road, the Will Rogers Highway, and, at its dangerous curves, Bloody 66. Get your kicks on Route 66 with this wonderfully illustrated tribute to the best-loved highway in this car-loving nation. Michael Witzel shares his expertise and wealth of personal, archive, collector, and contributing photographer images in these pages, offering a nostalgic tour of the charms and oddities of this road through American cultural history. Starting in Chicago and running to Santa Monica, this book highlights the sights along the highway with historic and current photos in then-and-now pairings, and includes Route 66 postcards, road signs, trinkets, maps, brochures, and advertisements. Here we see Route 66 as it was in its heyday and as it is now, the neon glamour of yesterday versus the ghost towns of today. Witzel and his wife, Gyvel Young-Witzel, recount the highways history, its role in popular culture, and its demise, as well as the individual stories of famous sights. Several profiles of those with close ties to the Mother Road, including the woman who played Ruthie Joad in the The Grapes of Wrath film, are included.

Download or read book In Memory of Memory written by Maria Stepanova and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2021-02-09 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Download or read book Imaginal Remembering written by Dodson and published by . This book was released on 2017-04-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you ever wonder why people remember shared past events differently? Have you ever been astonished by a memory that suddenly appears, with vivid detail, in your mind's eye? Rather than accepting memories as fixed reruns of prior life experiences, Daphne Dodson suggests we open ourselves to the notion that memories are imagistic expressions of the psyche that may offer much wisdom. In this book, you will... Explore how our memories are formed and informed by our imaginations. Meet eight people who engaged with their memories imaginally and found gifts of healing and creativity. Discover how imaginal remembering may enable you to gaze upon the images of your memories with renewed wonder and receptivity. Learn the principles and processes of imaginal remembering so you can practice it on your own and/or with a friend or guide. "Daphne Dodson's work on the autonomy of living memory images and imaginal remembering is a breakthrough in our approach to memory. Her stories are captivating. I heartily recommend this book." Lionel Corbett, M.D. author of "Psyche and the Sacred: Spirituality Beyond Religion"

Download or read book Memory Wall written by Anthony Doerr and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-07-13 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wise and beautiful second collection from the acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize-winning #1 New York Times bestselling author of All the Light We Cannot See, and Cloud Cuckoo Land, "Doerr writes about the big questions, the imponderables, the major metaphysical dreads, and he does it fearlessly" (The New York Times Book Review). Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr's new stories are about memory, the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others. Every hour, says Doerr, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear. Yet at the same time children, surveying territory that is entirely new to them, push back the darkness, form fresh memories, and remake the world. In the luminous and beautiful title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman's secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In "The River Nemunas," a teenage orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. "Village 113," winner of an O'Henry Prize, is about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the seed keeper who guards the history of a village soon to be submerged. And in "Afterworld," the radiant, cathartic final story, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson. Every story in Memory Wall is a reminder of the grandeur of life--of the mysterious beauty of seeds, of fossils, of sturgeon, of clouds, of radios, of leaves, of the breathtaking fortune of living in this universe. Doerr's language, his witness, his imagination, and his humanity are unparalleled in fiction today.

Download or read book Map of Memory Lane written by Francesca Arnoldy and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-06 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children are naturally curious. Sometimes they have BIG questions. MAP OF MEMORY LANE is a heartwarming story that gently introduces the topic of loss while celebrating the simple moments we share with those we love.