Download or read book Running in the Family written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-23 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.
Download or read book Michael Ondaatje written by Lee Spinks and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Ondaatje is the first comprehensive and fully up-to-date study of Ondaatje’s entire oeuvre. Starting from Ondaatje’s beginnings as a poet, this volume offers an intensive account of each of his major publications, including The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, In The Skin of a Lion and The English Patient, drawing attention to the various contexts and intertexts that have informed his work. The book contains a broad overview of Ondaatje’s career for students and readers coming to his work for the first time. It also offers an original reading of his writing which significantly revises conventional accounts of Ondaatje as a postmodern or postcolonial writer. As the fullest account of Ondaatje’s work to date, Spinks’s approach draws on a range of postcolonial theory and, as well as being a landmark in Ondaatje scholarship, makes a distinctive contribution to debates about postcolonial literature and the poetics of postmodernism.
Download or read book Running the Family Firm written by Laura Clancy and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent decades, the global wealth of the rich has soared to leave huge chasms of wealth inequality. This book argues that we cannot talk about inequalities in Britain today without talking about the monarchy. Running the Family Firm explores the postwar British monarchy in order to understand its economic, political, social and cultural functions. Although the monarchy is usually positioned as a backward-looking, archaic institution and an irrelevant anachronism to corporate forms of wealth and power, the relationship between monarchy and capitalism is as old as capitalism itself. This book frames the monarchy as the gold standard corporation: The Firm. Using a set of case studies – the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle – it contends that The Firm’s power is disguised through careful stage management of media representations of the royal family. In so doing, it extends conventional understandings of what monarchy is and why it matters.
Download or read book Believers written by Lisa Wells and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An essential document of our time." —Charles D’Ambrosio, author of Loitering In search of answers and action, the award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change We find ourselves at the end of the world. How, then, shall we live? Like most of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by increasingly urgent news of climate change on an apocalyptic scale. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes, but she could not find practical answers. She embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking wisdom and paths to action from outliers and visionaries, pragmatists and iconoclasts. Believers tracks through the lives of these people who are dedicated to repairing the earth and seemingly undaunted by the task ahead. Wells meets an itinerant gardener and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists in rewilding the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico and another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming—guns into ploughshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach others how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in ways that acknowledge the fires will come again. Through empathic, critical portraits, Wells shows that these trailblazers are not so far beyond the rest of us. They have had the same realization, have accepted that we are living through a global catastrophe, but are trying to answer the next question: How do you make a life at the end of the world? Through this miraculous commingling of acceptance and activism, this focus on seeing clearly and moving forward, Wells is able to take the devastating news facing us all, every day, and inject a possibility of real hope. Believers demands transformation. It will change how you think about your own actions, about how you can still make an impact, and about how we might yet reckon with our inheritance.
Download or read book Run Like a Mother written by Dimity McDowell and published by Andrews McMeel Publishing. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two elite runners share inspirational advice and practical strategies to help multitasking women make running part of their busy lives. Dimitry McDowell and Sarah Bowen Shea understand how the forces of everyday life—both external and internal—can keep a wife, mother, or working woman from lacing up her shoes and going for a run. As multihyphenates themselves, they have faced the same challenges. In Run Like a Mother, they share their running expertise and real-world experience in ensuring that running is part of their lives. More than a simple running guide, Run Like a Mother is like a friendly conversation aimed at strengthening a woman's inner athlete. Real achievement is a healthy mix of inspiration and perspiration, which is why the authors have grounded Run Like a Mother in a host of practical tips on shoes, training, racing, nutrition, and injuries, all designed to help women balance running with their professional and personal lives./
Download or read book In The Shadow Of The Banyan written by Vaddey Ratner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning, powerful debut novel set against the backdrop of the Cambodian War, perfect for fans of Chris Cleave and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia's capital. Soon the family's world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as she endures the deaths of family members, starvation, and brutal forced labour, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of childhood - the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father. In a climate of systematic violence where memory is sickness and justification for execution, Raami fights for her improbable survival. Displaying the author's extraordinary gift for language, In the Shadow of the Banyanis testament to the transcendent power of narrative and a brilliantly wrought tale of human resilience. 'In the Shadow of the Banyanis one of the most extraordinary and beautiful acts of storytelling I have ever encountered' Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand 'Ratner is a fearless writer, and the novel explores important themes such as power, the relationship between love and guilt, and class. Most remarkably, it depicts the lives of characters forced to live in extreme circumstances, and investigates how that changes them. To read In the Shadow of the Banyan is to be left with a profound sense of being witness to a tragedy of history' Guardian 'This is an extraordinary debut … as beautiful as it is heartbreaking' Mail on Sunday
Download or read book Magic Lessons written by Alice Hoffman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1600s, Maria was abandoned in a snowy field in rural England as a baby. Under the care of Hannah Owens, who recognizes that Maria has a gift, she learns about the 'Unnamed Arts.' When Maria is abandoned by the man who has declared his love for her, she follows him to Salem, Massachusetts. She invokes a curse that will haunt her family for generations. And she learns the lesson that she will carry with her for the rest of her life: Love is the only thing that matters.
Download or read book Running with Scissors written by Augusten Burroughs and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling memoir from Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors, now a Major Motion Picture! Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs.... Running with Scissors is at turns foul and harrowing, compelling and maniacally funny. But above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.
Download or read book The Cat s Table written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-10-04 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the “cat’s table”—as far from the Captain’s Table as can be—with a ragtag group of “insignificant” adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure to another, bursting all over the place like freed mercury. But there are other diversions as well: one man talks with them about jazz and women, another opens the door to the world of literature. The narrator’s elusive, beautiful cousin Emily becomes his confidante, allowing him to see himself “with a distant eye” for the first time, and to feel the first stirring of desire. Another Cat’s Table denizen, the shadowy Miss Lasqueti, is perhaps more than what she seems. And very late every night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner, his crime and his fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever. As the narrative moves between the decks and holds of the ship and the boy’s adult years, it tells a spellbinding story—by turns poignant and electrifying—about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage.
Download or read book Divisadero written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-04-16 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. In the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is riven by an incident of violence—of both hand and heart—that sets fire to the rest of their lives. Divisadero takes us from the city of San Francisco to the raucous backrooms of Nevada’s casinos, and eventually to the landscape of south central France. It is here, outside a small rural village, that Anna becomes immersed in the life and the world of a writer from an earlier time—Lucien Segura. His compelling story, which has its beginnings at the turn of the century, circles around “the raw truth” of Anna’s own life, the one she’s left behind but can never truly leave. And as the narrative moves back and forth in time and place, we discover each of the characters managing to find some foothold in a present rough-hewn from the past. Breathtakingly evoked and with unforgettable characters, Divisadero is a multi-layered novel about passion, loss, and the unshakable past, about the often discordant demands of family, love, and memory.
Download or read book Running on Empty written by Jonice Webb and published by Morgan James Publishing. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A large segment of the population struggles with feelings of being detached from themselves and their loved ones. They feel flawed, and blame themselves. Running on Empty will help them realize that they're suffering not because of something that happened to them in childhood, but because of something that didn't happen. It's the white space in their family picture, the background rather than the foreground. This will be the first self-help book to bring this invisible force to light, educate people about it, and teach them how to overcome it.
Download or read book Anil s Ghost written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winning a Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Anil’s Ghost is another award-winning novel from Michael Ondaatje. Steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition, Sri Lanka has been ravaged in the late twentieth century by bloody civil war. Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka but educated in England and the U.S., is sent by an international human rights group to participate in an investigation into suspected mass political murders in her homeland. Working with an archaeologist, she discovers a skeleton whose identity takes Anil on a fascinating journey that involves a riveting mystery. What follows, in a novel rich with character, emotion, and incident, is a story about love and loss, about family, identity and the unknown enemy. And it is a quest to unlock the hidden past—like a handful of soil analyzed by an archaeologist, the story becomes more diffuse the farther we reach into history. A universal tale of the casualties of war, unfolding as a detective story, the book gradually gives way to a more intricate exploration of its characters, a symphony of loss and loneliness haunted by a cast of solitary strangers and ghosts. The atrocities of a seemingly futile, muddled war are juxtaposed against the ancient, complex and ultimately redemptive culture and landscape of Sri Lanka.
Download or read book Running Out of Time written by Margaret Peterson Haddix and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1995-10 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a diphtheria epidemic hits her 1840 village, thirteen-year-old Jessie discovers it is actually a 1996 tourist site under unseen observation by heartless scientists, and it's up to Jessie to escape the village and save the lives of the dying children.
Download or read book Warlight written by Michael Ondaatje and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • From the internationally acclaimed, Booker Prize-winning author of The English Patient: “an elegiac thriller [with] the immediate allure of a dark fairy tale” (The Washington Post) set in the decade after World War II that tells the dramatic story of two teenagers and an eccentric group of characters. In a narrative as beguiling and mysterious as memory itself—shadowed and luminous at once—we read the story of fourteen-year-old Nathaniel, and his older sister, Rachel. In 1945, just after World War II, they stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and they grow both more convinced and less concerned as they come to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? And what does it mean when the siblings' mother returns after months of silence without their father, explaining nothing, excusing nothing? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn't know and understand in that time, and it is this journey—through facts, recollection, and imagination—that he narrates in this masterwork from one of the great writers of our time.
Download or read book Swimming in the Monsoon Sea written by Shyam Selvadurai and published by Tundra Books. This book was released on 2012-12-04 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amrith comes to terms with his sexuality in this sweeping coming-of-age story set against the stormy backdrop of monsoon season in 1980s Sri Lanka. For fans of Call Me By Your Name. Shyam Selvadurai’s brilliant novels, Funny Boy and Cinnamon Gardens, have garnered him international acclaim. In his first young adult novel, he explores first love with clarity, humor and compassion. The setting is Sri Lanka, 1980, and it is the season of monsoons. Fourteen-year-old Amrith is caught up in the life of the cheerful, well-to-do household in which he is being raised by his vibrant Auntie Bundle and kindly Uncle Lucky. He tries not to think of his life “before,” when his doting mother was still alive. Amrith’s holiday plans seem unpromising: he wants to appear in his school’s production of Othello and he is learning to type at Uncle Lucky’s tropical fish business. Then, like an unexpected monsoon, his cousin arrives from Canada and Amrith’s ordered life is storm-tossed. He finds himself falling in love with the Canadian boy. Othello, with its powerful theme of disastrous jealousy, is the backdrop to the drama in which Amrith finds himself immersed.
Download or read book Michael Ondaatje written by Ed Jewinski and published by Canadian Biography. This book was released on 1996 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Ondaatje's life is as intense—and at times as dramatic—as his poetry and fiction. His writing is usually inspired by a single persistent image or vision—and no wonder, for as Ed Jewinski's biography reveals, much of Ondaatje's life has been a series of intense moments followed by ruptures and dislocations. This illustrated biography links Ondaatje's relationships with his family to the later mature works, such as Running in the Family and The English Patient (for which he won the Booker Prize).
Download or read book Running Away to Home written by Jennifer Wilson and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-10-11 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A middle class, Midwestern family in search of meaning uproot themselves and move to their ancestral village in Croatia. "We can look at this in two ways," Jim wrote, always the pragmatist. "We can panic and scrap the whole idea. Or we can take this as a sign. They're saying the economy is going to get worse before it gets better. Maybe this is the kick in the pants we needed to do something completely different. There will always be an excuse not to go..." And that, friends, is how a typically sane middle-aged mother decided to drag her family back to a forlorn mountain village in the backwoods of Croatia. So begins author Jennifer Wilson's journey in Running Away to Home. Jen, her architect husband, Jim, and their two children had been living the typical soccer- and ballet-practice life in the most Middle American of places: Des Moines, Iowa. They overindulged themselves and their kids, and as a family they were losing one another in the rush of work, school, and activities. One day, Jen and her husband looked at each other–both holding their Starbucks coffee as they headed out to their SUV in the mall parking lot, while the kids complained about the inferiority of the toys they just got–and asked themselves: "Is this the American dream? Because if it is, it sort of sucks." Jim and Jen had always dreamed of taking a family sabbatical in another country, so when they lost half their savings in the stock-market crash, it seemed like just a crazy enough time to do it. High on wanderlust, they left the troubled landscape of contemporary America for the Croatian mountain village of Mrkopalj, the land of Jennifer's ancestors. It was a village that seemed hermetically sealed for the last one hundred years, with a population of eight hundred (mostly drunken) residents and a herd of sheep milling around the post office. For several months they lived like locals, from milking the neighbor's cows to eating roasted pig on a spit to desperately seeking the village recipe for bootleg liquor. As the Wilson-Hoff family struggled to stay sane (and warm), what they found was much deeper and bigger than themselves.
