Download or read book Notes from No Man s Land written by Eula Biss and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood. As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman's schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television shows. These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it."
Download or read book Notes from No Man s Land written by Eula Biss and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize Acclaimed for its frank and fascinating investigation of racial identity, and reissued on its ten-year anniversary, Notes from No Man’s Land begins with a series of lynchings, ends with a list of apologies, and in an unsettling new coda revisits a litany of murders that no one seems capable of solving. Eula Biss explores race in America through the experiences chronicled in these essays—teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting from an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and rereading Laura Ingalls Wilder in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago. What she reveals is how families, schools, communities, and our country participate in preserving white privilege. Notes from No Man’s Land is an essential portrait of America that established Biss as one of the most distinctive and inventive essayists of our time.
Download or read book On Immunity written by Eula Biss and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Best Seller A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book of the Year A Facebook "Year of Books" Selection One of the Best Books of the Year * National Book Critics Circle Award finalist * The New York Times Book Review (Top 10) * Entertainment Weekly (Top 10) * New York Magazine (Top 10)* Chicago Tribune (Top 10) * Publishers Weekly (Top 10) * Time Out New York (Top 10) * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus * Booklist * NPR's Science Friday * Newsday * Slate * Refinery 29 * And many more... Why do we fear vaccines? A provocative examination by Eula Biss, the author of Notes from No Man's Land, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Upon becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear-fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what is in your child's air, food, mattress, medicine, and vaccines. She finds that you cannot immunize your child, or yourself, from the world. In this bold, fascinating book, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. As she hears more and more fears about vaccines, Biss researches what they mean for her own child, her immediate community, America, and the world, both historically and in the present moment. She extends a conversation with other mothers to meditations on Voltaire's Candide, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond. On Immunity is a moving account of how we are all interconnected-our bodies and our fates.
Download or read book Having and Being Had written by Eula Biss and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME , NPR, INSTYLE, AND GOOD HOUSEKEEPING “A sensational new book [that] tries to figure out whether it’s possible to live an ethical life in a capitalist society. . . . The results are enthralling.” —Associated Press A timely and arresting new look at affluence by the New York Times bestselling author, “one of the leading lights of the modern American essay.” —Financial Times “My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,” Eula Biss writes, “the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.” Having just purchased her first home, the poet and essayist now embarks on a provocative exploration of the value system she has bought into. Through a series of engaging exchanges—in libraries and laundromats, over barstools and backyard fences—she examines our assumptions about class and property and the ways we internalize the demands of capitalism. Described by the New York Times as a writer who “advances from all sides, like a chess player,” Biss offers an uncommonly immersive and deeply revealing new portrait of work and luxury, of accumulation and consumption, of the value of time and how we spend it. Ranging from IKEA to Beyoncé to Pokemon, Biss asks, of both herself and her class, “In what have we invested?”
Download or read book Notes from Toyota land written by Darius Mehri and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1996, Darius Mehri traveled to Japan to work as a computer simulation engineer within the Toyota production system. Once there, he found a corporate experience far different from what he had expected. Notes from Toyota-land, based on a diary that Mehri kept during his three years at an upper-level Toyota group company, provides a unique insider's perspective on daily work life in Japan and charts his transformation from a wide-eyed engineer eager to be part of the "Japanese Miracle" to a social critic, troubled by Japanese corporate practices. Mehri documents the sophisticated "culture of rules" and organizational structure that combine to create a profound control over workers. The work group is cynically used to encourage employees to work harder and harder, he found, and his other discoveries confirmed his doubts about the working conditions under the Japanese Miracle. For example, he learned that male employees treated their female counterparts as short-term employees, cheap labor, and potential wives. Mehri also describes a surprisingly unhealthy work environment, a high rate of injuries due to inadequate training, fast line speeds, crowded factories, racism, and lack of team support. And in conversations with his colleagues, he uncovered a culture of intimidation, subservience, and vexed relationships with many aspects of their work and surroundings. As both an engaging memoir of cross-cultural misunderstanding and a primer on Japanese business and industrial practices, Notes from Toyota-land will be a revelation to everyone who believes that Japanese business practices are an ideal against which to measure success.
Download or read book No Man s Land written by Harold Pinter and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The work of our best living playwright in its command of the language and its power to erect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay.' The TimesDo Hirst and Spooner really know each other, or are they performing an elaborate charade? The ambiguity - and the comedy - intensify with the arrival of Briggs and Foster. All four inhabit a no-man's-land between time present and a time remembered, between reality and imagination.No Man's Land was first presented at the National Theatre at the Old Vic, London, in 1975, revived at the Almeida Theatre, London, with Harold Pinter as Hirst and revived by the National Theatre, directed by Harold Pinter, in 2001.
Download or read book Tales of Two Americas written by John Freeman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty-six major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided America—including Anthony Doerr, Ann Patchett, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Hector Tobar, Joyce Carol Oates, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Russo, Eula Bliss, Karen Russell, and many more America is broken. You don’t need a fistful of statistics to know this. Visit any city, and evidence of our shattered social compact will present itself. From Appalachia to the Rust Belt and down to rural Texas, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest stretches to unimaginable chasms. Whether the cause of this inequality is systemic injustice, the entrenchment of racism in our culture, the long war on drugs, or immigration policies, it endangers not only the American Dream but our very lives. In Tales of Two Americas, some of the literary world’s most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation. Their extraordinarily powerful stories, essays, and poems demonstrate how boundaries break down when experiences are shared, and that in sharing our stories we can help to alleviate a suffering that touches so many people.
Download or read book How Much Land Does A Man Need written by Leo Tolstoy and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-02-26 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Although he feared death, he could not stop. 'If I stopped now, after coming all this way - well, they'd call me an idiot!' A pair of short stories about greed, charity, life and death from one of Russia's most influential writers and thinkers. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Tolstoy's works available in Penguin Classics are Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,The Cossacks and Other Stories, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, What is art?, Resurrection, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, Master and Man and Other Stories, How Much Land Does A Man Need? & Other Stories, A Confession and Other Religious Writings and Last steps: The Late Writings of Leo Tolstoy.
Download or read book No Man s Land written by David Baldacci and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After his father is accused of murder, combat veteran and Special Agent John Puller must investigate his past and learn the truth about his mother in this New York Times bestselling thriller--but someone hiding in the shadows wants revenge. Two men. Thirty years. John Puller's mother, Jackie, vanished thirty years ago from Fort Monroe, Virginia, when Puller was just a boy. Paul Rogers has been in prison for ten years. But twenty years before that, he was at Fort Monroe. One night three decades ago, Puller's and Rogers' worlds collided with devastating results, and the truth has been buried ever since. Until now. Military investigators, armed with a letter from a friend of Jackie's, arrive in the hospital room of Puller's father-a legendary three-star now sinking into dementia-and reveal that Puller Sr. has been accused of murdering his wife. Aided by his brother Robert Puller, an Air Force major, and Veronica Knox, who works for a shadowy U.S. intelligence organization, Puller begins a journey that will take him into his own past, to find the truth about his mother. Paul Rogers' time is running out. With the clock ticking, he begins his own journey, one that will take him across the country to the place where all his troubles began: a mysterious building on the grounds of Fort Monroe. There, thirty years ago, the man Rogers had once been vanished too, and was replaced with a monster. And now the monster wants revenge. And the only person standing in his way is John Puller.
Download or read book About a Mountain written by John D'Agata and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-02-07 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named One of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books Written by the New York Times Magazine, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Editors' Choice. When John D'Agata helps his mother move to Las Vegas one summer, he begins to follow a story about the federal government's plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain; the result is a startling portrait that compels a reexamination of the future of human life.
Download or read book Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
Download or read book CivilWarLand in Bad Decline written by George Saunders and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2016-04-26 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to discover or revisit a virtuosic, disturbingly prescient voice. Praise for George Saunders and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline “It’s no exaggeration to say that short story master George Saunders helped change the trajectory of American fiction.”—The Wall Street Journal “Saunders’s satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it’s also ferocious and very funny.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “George Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality, with a sure sense of his material and apparently inexhaustible resources of voice. [CivilWarLand in Bad Decline] is scary, hilarious, and unforgettable.”—Tobias Wolff “Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless.”—Jonathan Franzen “Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.”—Zadie Smith “An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.”—Thomas Pynchon
Download or read book All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque and published by Random House. This book was released on 2025-01-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic tale of a young soldier's harrowing experiences in the trenches, widely acclaimed as the greatest war novel of all time—featuring an Introduction by historian Norman Stone. Now a Netflix Film. When twenty-year-old Paul Bäumer and his classmates enlist in the German army during World War I, they are full of youthful enthusiam. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught to believe in shatters under the first brutal bombardment in the trenches. Through the ensuing years of horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another. Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel not only portrays in vivid detail the combatants' physical and mental trauma, but dramatizes as well the tragic detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home. Remarque's stated intention—“to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war"—remains as powerful and relevant as ever, a century after that conflict's end." Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Download or read book Factfulness written by Hans Rosling and published by Flatiron Books. This book was released on 2018-04-03 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “One of the most important books I’ve ever read—an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world.” – Bill Gates “Hans Rosling tells the story of ‘the secret silent miracle of human progress’ as only he can. But Factfulness does much more than that. It also explains why progress is so often secret and silent and teaches readers how to see it clearly.” —Melinda Gates "Factfulness by Hans Rosling, an outstanding international public health expert, is a hopeful book about the potential for human progress when we work off facts rather than our inherent biases." - Former U.S. President Barack Obama Factfulness: The stress-reducing habit of only carrying opinions for which you have strong supporting facts. When asked simple questions about global trends—what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school—we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers. In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective—from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse). Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases. It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most. Inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world and empower you to respond to the crises and opportunities of the future. --- “This book is my last battle in my life-long mission to fight devastating ignorance...Previously I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic learning style and a Swedish bayonet for sword-swallowing. It wasn’t enough. But I hope this book will be.” Hans Rosling, February 2017.
Download or read book Of Mice and Men written by John Steinbeck and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 1937 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells a story about the strange relationship of two migrant workers who are able to realize their dreams of an easy life until one of them succumbs to his weakness for soft, helpless creatures and strangles a farmer's wife.
Download or read book These Truths A History of the United States written by Jill Lepore and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Nothing short of a masterpiece.” —NPR Books A New York Times Bestseller and a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review), Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself—a devotion to facts, proof, and evidence—at the center of the nation’s history. The American experiment rests on three ideas—“these truths,” Jefferson called them—political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself, delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,” Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.
Download or read book The Education of Booker T Washington written by Michael Rudolph West and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006-01-04 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Booker T. Washington has long held an ambiguous position in the pantheon of black leadership. Lauded by some in his own lifetime as a black George Washington, he was also derided by others as a Benedict Arnold. In The Education of Booker T. Washington, Michael West offers a major reinterpretation of one of the most complex and controversial figures in American history. West reveals the personal and political dimensions of Washington's journey "up from slavery." He explains why Washington's ideas resonated so strongly in the post-Reconstruction era and considers their often negative influence in the continuing struggle for equality in the United States. West's work also establishes a groundwork for understanding the ideological origins of the civil rights movement and discusses Washington's views on the fate of race and nation in light of those of Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and others. West argues that Washington's analysis was seen as offering a "solution" to the problem of racial oppression in a nation professing its belief in democracy. That solution was the idea of "race relations." In practice, this theory buttressed segregation by supposing that African Americans could prosper within Jim Crow's walls and without the normal levers by which other Americans pursued their interests. Washington did not, West contends, imagine a way to perfect democracy and an end to the segregationist policies of southern states. Instead, he offered an ideology that would obscure the injustices of segregation and preserve some measure of racial peace. White Americans, by embracing Washington's views, could comfortably find a way out of the moral and political contradictions raised by the existence of segregation in a supposedly democratic society. This was (and is) Washington's legacy: a form of analysis, at once obvious and concealed, that continues to prohibit the realization of a truly democratic politics.
