Download or read book Dear Sir I Intend to Burn Your Book written by Lawrence Hill and published by University of Alberta. This book was released on 2013-03-20 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Censorship and book burning are still present in our lives. Lawrence Hill shares his experiences of how ignorance and the fear of ideas led a group in the Netherlands to burn the cover of his widely successful novel, The Book of Negroes, in 2011. Why do books continue to ignite such strong reactions in people in the age of the Internet? Is banning, censoring, or controlling book distribution ever justified? Hill illustrates his ideas with anecdotes and lists names of Canadian writers who faced censorship challenges in the twenty-first century, inviting conversation between those on opposite sides of these contentious issues. All who are interested in literature, freedom of expression, and human rights will enjoy reading Hill's provocative essay.
Download or read book Dear Sir I Intend to Burn Your Book written by Lawrence Hill and published by University of Alberta. This book was released on 2013-03-20 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Back Cover In 2011, Canadian writer Lawrence Hill received an email from a man in the Netherlands stating that he intended to burn The Book of Negroes, Hill's internationally acclaimed novel. Soon, the threat was international news, affecting Hill's publishers and readers. In this provocative essay, Hill shares his private response to that moment and the controversy that followed, examining his reaction to the threats, while attempting to come to terms with the book burner's motives and complaints. Drawing on other instances of book banning and burning, Hill maintains that censorship is still alive and well, even in this age of access to information. All who are interested in literature, freedom of expression and human rights will appreciate this passionate defence of the freedom to read and write. Front Flap "In June of 2011, less than a month after launching the Dutch edition of my novel, The Book of Negroes, in The Netherlands, I received the most surprising email of my life. It is worth quoting verbatim: 'Dear Sir Lawrence Hill, We, descendants of enslaved in the former Dutch colony Suriname, want let you know that we do not accept a book with the title "The book of Negroes." We struggle for a long time to let the word "nigger" disappears from Dutch language and now you set up your book of Negroes! A real shame! That's why we make the decision to burn this book on the 22nd of June 2011.. Sincerely, Roy Groenberg, Chairman Foundation Honor and Restore Victims of Slavery in Suriname' I wrote a reply that, in retrospect, seems outrageously Canadian in its politeness and tact." Back Flap: Lawrence Hill is a Canadian novelist and writer of non-fiction. His best-known work, The Book of Negroes, won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Roger's Writer's Trust Prize, and CBC's Canada Reads; internationally it was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. It has sold more than 600,000 copies in Canada alone. In 2012, he received the Freedom to Read Award from the Writers' Union of Canada. Lawrence Hill lives in Hamilton, Ontario. Visit him at www.lawrencehill.com.
Download or read book The Illegal A Novel written by Lawrence Hill and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-01-25 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A gripping political thriller readers may find hard to put down.”—Dallas Morning News Keita Ali is an elite runner living in Zantoroland, a poor, fictional island that is erupting in political violence. When his father, a journalist, is murdered, Keita escapes to the wealthy nation of Freedom State—an imagined country much like our own. A stateless refugee without documentation, Keita must hide from the authorities even as he races marathons to support himself and ransom his sister who has been kidnapped. This tension-filled novel by the best-selling author of Someone Knows My Name is an astute exploration of dislocation, starting all over again, and the desperate need for home and community.
Download or read book A Burning written by Megha Majumdar and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-06-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK! A New York Times Notable Book For readers of Tommy Orange, Yaa Gyasi, and Jhumpa Lahiri, an electrifying debut novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise—to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies—and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India. In this National Book Award Longlist honoree and “gripping thriller with compassionate social commentary” (USA Today), Jivan is a Muslim girl from the slums, determined to move up in life, who is accused of executing a terrorist attack on a train because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir is an opportunistic gym teacher who hitches his aspirations to a right-wing political party, and finds that his own ascent becomes linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely—an irresistible outcast whose exuberant voice and dreams of glory fill the novel with warmth and hope and humor—has the alibi that can set Jivan free, but it will cost her everything she holds dear. Taut, symphonic, propulsive, and riveting from its opening lines, A Burning has the force of an epic while being so masterfully compressed it can be read in a single sitting. Majumdar writes with dazzling assurance at a breakneck pace on complex themes that read here as the components of a thriller: class, fate, corruption, justice, and what it feels like to face profound obstacles and yet nurture big dreams in a country spinning toward extremism. An extraordinary debut.
Download or read book Someone Knows My Name A Novel written by Lawrence Hill and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-11-17 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreaming of escaping her life of slavery in South Carolina and returning to her African home, slave Aminata Diallo is thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War, during which she helps create a list of black people who have been honored for their service to the king.
Download or read book The Book of Negroes written by Lawrence Hill and published by Random House. This book was released on 2010 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abducted from her West African village at the age of eleven and sold as a slave in the American South, Aminata Diallo thinks only of freedom - and of finding her way home again.After escaping the plantation, torn from her husband and child, she passes through Manhattan in the chaos of the Revolutionary War, is shipped to Nova Scotia, and then joins a group of freed slaves on a harrowing return odyssey to Africa. Lawrence Hill's epic novel, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, spans three continents and six decades to bring to life a dark and shameful chapter in our history through the story of one brave and resourceful woman.
Download or read book The Deserter s Tale written by Joshua Key and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2007-02-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joshua Key's critically acclaimed memoir, The Deserter's Tale, is the first account from a soldier who deserted from the war in Iraq, and a vivid and damning indictment of how the war is being waged. In spring 2003, young Oklahoman Joshua Key was sent to Ramadi as part of a combat engineer company with the U.S. military. The war he found himself participating in was not the campaign against terrorists and evildoers he had expected. Key saw Iraqi civilians beaten, shot, and killed for little or no provocation. After six months in Iraq, Key was home on leave and knew he could not return. So he took his family and went underground in the United States, finally seeking asylum in Canada. In clear-eyed, compelling prose crafted with the help of award-winning Canadian novelist and journalist Lawrence Hill, The Deserter's Tale tells the story of a man who went into the war believing unquestioningly in his government and who was transformed into a person who ethically, morally, and physically could no longer serve his country.
Download or read book Blood written by Lawrence Hill and published by House of Anansi. This book was released on 2013-09-28 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected for The Globe 100 Books in 2013. With the 2013 CBC Massey Lectures, bestselling author Lawrence Hill offers a provocative examination of the scientific and social history of blood, and on the ways that it unites and divides us today. Blood runs red through every person’s arteries and fulfills the same functions in every human being. The study of blood has advanced our understanding of biology and improved medical treatments, but its cultural and social representations have divided us perennially. Blood pulses through religion, literature, and the visual arts. Every time it pools or spills, we learn a little more about what brings human beings together and what pulls us apart. For centuries, perceptions of difference in our blood have separated people on the basis of gender, race, class, and nation. Ideas about blood purity have spawned rules about who gets to belong to a family or cultural group, who enjoys the rights of citizenship and nationality, what privileges one can expect to be granted or denied, whether you inherit poverty or the right to rule over the masses, what constitutes fair play in sport, and what defines a person’s identity. Blood: The Stuff of Life is a bold meditation on blood as an historical and contemporary marker of identity, belonging, gender, race, class, citizenship, athletic superiority, and nationhood.
Download or read book Beatrice and Croc Harry written by Lawrence Hill and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-01-11 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of Canada’s most celebrated author’s debut novel for young readers Beatrice, a young girl of uncertain age, wakes up all alone in a tree house in the forest. How did she arrive in this cozy dwelling, stocked carefully with bookshelves and oatmeal accoutrements? And who has been leaving a trail of clues, composed in delicate purple handwriting? So begins the adventure of a brave and resilient Black girl’s search for identity and healing in bestselling author Lawrence Hill’s middle-grade debut. Though Beatrice cannot recall how or why she arrived in the magical forest of Argilia—where every conceivable fish, bird, mammal and reptile coexist, and any creature with a beating heart can communicate with any other—something within tells her that beyond this forest is a family that is waiting anxiously for her return. Just outside her tree-house door lives Beatrice’s most unlikely ally, the enormous and mercurial King Crocodile Croc Harry, who just may have a secret of his own. As they form an unusual truce and work toward their common goal, Beatrice and Croc Harry will learn more about their forest home than they ever could have imagined. And what they learn about themselves may destroy Beatrice’s chances of returning home forever.
Download or read book Some Great Thing written by Lawrence Hill and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disillusioned and apathetic after four years of college, fledgling reporter Mahatma Grafton returns to his hometown to begin work at a local newspaper. The eccentric commitment of an unlikely welfare crusader, an exchange student from Cameroon and a French language rights activist begins to consume him. When a peaceful demonstration escalates into a full-scale riot and police cover-up, Mahatma discovers the principles that have always eluded him. Intelligent and comic, Some Great Thing exposes the internal realities of a newspaper's editorial desk, and treats social issues such as race, gender, language and the rights of the poor with sensitivity and courage.
Download or read book A Pleasure to Burn written by Ray Bradbury and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 is an enduring masterwork of twentieth-century American literature—a chilling vision of a dystopian future built on the foundations of ignorance, censorship, and brutal repression. The origins and evolution of Bradbury’s darkly magnificent tale are explored in A Pleasure to Burn, a collection of sixteen selected shorter works that prefigure the grand master’s landmark novel. Classic, thematically interrelated stories alongside many crucial lesser-known ones—including, at the collection’s heart, the novellas “Long After Midnight” and “The Fireman”—A Pleasure to Burn is an indispensable companion to the most powerful work of America’s preeminent storyteller, a wondrous confirmation of the inimitable Bradbury’s brilliance, magic . . . and fire.
Download or read book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster written by Bill Gates and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions—suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.
Download or read book Why We Sleep written by Matthew Walker and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life, wellness, and longevity ... An explosion of scientific discoveries in the last twenty years has shed new light on this fundamental aspect of our lives. Now ... neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker gives us a new understanding of the vital importance of sleep and dreaming"--Amazon.com.
Download or read book When Breath Becomes Air written by Paul Kalanithi and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living? NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • People • NPR • The Washington Post • Slate • Harper’s Bazaar • Time Out New York • Publishers Weekly • BookPage Finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction and the Books for a Better Life Award in Inspirational Memoir At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality. What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir. Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. “I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything,” he wrote. “Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’” When Breath Becomes Air is an unforgettable, life-affirming reflection on the challenge of facing death and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a brilliant writer who became both.
Download or read book Any Known Blood written by Lawrence Hill and published by HarperCollins Publishers. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Langston Cane V is thirty-eight, divorced and working as a government speechwriter, until he’s fired for sabotaging the minister’s speech. It seems the perfect time for Langston, the son of a white mother and prominent black father, to embark on a quest for his family’s past--and his own sense of self. Any Known Blood follows five generations of an African-Canadian-American family in a compelling story that slips effortlessly from the slave trade of 19th-century Virginia to the modern, predominantly white suburbs of Oakville, Ontario--once a final stop on the Underground Railroad. By turns elegant and sensuous, wry and witty, Any Known Blood is an engrossing tale about one man’s attempt to find himself through unearthing and giving voice to those who came before him.
Download or read book If I Ran the Zoo written by Dr. Seuss and published by RH Childrens Books. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals abound in Dr. Seuss’s Caldecott Honor–winning picture book If I Ran the Zoo. Gerald McGrew imagines the myriad of animals he’d have in his very own zoo, and the adventures he’ll have to go on in order to gather them all. Featuring everything from a lion with ten feet to a Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill, this is a classic Seussian crowd-pleaser. In fact, one of Gerald’s creatures has even become a part of the language: the Nerd!
Download or read book A Room of One s Own written by Virginia Woolf and published by Diamond Pocket Books Pvt Ltd. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Room of One’s Own is an essay written by Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1929 and is based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at two colleges for women at Cambridge. In this famous essay, Woolf addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular. In this essay, the author also asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. According to Woolf, women’s creativity has been curtailed due to centuries of prejudice and financial and educational disadvantages. To emphasize her view, she offers the example of an imaginary gifted but uneducated sister of William Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all eventually kills herself. Woolf celebrates the work of women who have overcome that tradition and become writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. In the final section Woolf suggests that great minds are neutral and argues that intellectual freedom requires financial freedom. The author entreats her audience to write not only fiction but poetry, criticism, and scholarly works as well.
