Download or read book The Distant Land of My Father written by Bo Caldwell and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2002 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anna had a charmed childhood in 1930s Shanghai with her smuggler father. Anna and her mother fled the Japanese occupation and settled in California, but her father stayed behind. Fifteen years later, Anna is grown with a family of her own in Los Angeles when her father reappears.
Download or read book The Distant Land of My Father written by Bo Caldwell and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2011-04-29 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious man and his adoring daughter are separated and estranged by an ocean and by the tides of history in this “marvelous” novel (Los Angeles Times). For Anna Schoene, growing up in the magical world of Shanghai in the 1930s creates a special bond between her and her father. He is the son of missionaries, a smuggler, and a millionaire who leads a charmed but secretive life. When the family flees to Los Angeles in the face of the Japanese occupation, he chooses to stay, believing his connections and luck will keep him safe. He’s wrong—but he survives, only to again choose Shanghai over his family during the Second World War. Anna and her father reconnect late in his life, when she finally has a family of her own, but it is only when she discovers his extensive journals that she is able to fully understand him and the reasons for his absences. The Distant Land of My Father is a “beautiful” novel “for everyone who has ever felt himself in exile from any beloved place, or a time that can never return” (The Washington Post Book World). “Seamlessly weaves together Anna’s own memories with those of her father, gleaned from the journals . . . An elegant, refined story of families, wartime, and the mystique of memory.” —Kirkus Reviews “Vivid with details of prewar Shanghai and Los Angeles.” —Publishers Weekly “Lush and epic.” —San Jose Mercury News “Remarkable . . . A moving tale of love and the possibility of forgiveness.” —Library Journal
Download or read book Distant Land of My Father Proof written by Bo Caldwell and published by Heinemann Young Books. This book was released on 2001-07-12 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dreams from My Father written by Barack Obama and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-01-09 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • ONE OF ESSENCE’S 50 MOST IMPACTFUL BLACK BOOKS OF THE PAST 50 YEARS In this iconic memoir of his early days, Barack Obama “guides us straight to the intersection of the most serious questions of identity, class, and race” (The Washington Post Book World). “Quite extraordinary.”—Toni Morrison In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father—a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man—has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey—first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance. Praise for Dreams from My Father “Beautifully crafted . . . moving and candid . . . This book belongs on the shelf beside works like James McBride’s The Color of Water and Gregory Howard Williams’s Life on the Color Line as a tale of living astride America’s racial categories.”—Scott Turow “Provocative . . . Persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”—The New York Times Book Review “Obama’s writing is incisive yet forgiving. This is a book worth savoring.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here “One of the most powerful books of self-discovery I’ve ever read, all the more so for its illuminating insights into the problems not only of race, class, and color, but of culture and ethnicity. It is also beautifully written, skillfully layered, and paced like a good novel.”—Charlayne Hunter-Gault, author of In My Place “Dreams from My Father is an exquisite, sensitive study of this wonderful young author’s journey into adulthood, his search for community and his place in it, his quest for an understanding of his roots, and his discovery of the poetry of human life. Perceptive and wise, this book will tell you something about yourself whether you are black or white.”—Marian Wright Edelman
Download or read book Los Arabes of New Mexico written by Monika Ghattas and published by Sunstone Press. This book was released on 2016-09-05 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the outset, Los Arabes (Arabic-speaking individuals) were peddlers, carrying a variety of wares that often included exotic items from the Holy Land. These skilled cross-cultural traders expected to strike it rich in the United States and then return to
Download or read book City of Tranquil Light written by Bo Caldwell and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-09-28 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What ardent, dazzling souls emerge from these American missionaries in China . . . A beautiful, searing book that leaves an indelible presence in the mind." —Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist's Daughter Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when, having felt a call from God, he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth-century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary, Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war. As the couple works to improve the lives of the people of Kuang P'ing Ch'eng— City of Tranquil Light, a place they come to love—and face incredible hardship, will their faith and relationship be enough to sustain them? Told through Will and Katherine's alternating viewpoints—and inspired by the lives of the author's maternal grandparents—City of Tranquil Light is a tender and elegiac portrait of a young marriage set against the backdrop of the shifting face of a beautiful but torn nation. A deeply spiritual book, it shows how those who work to teach others often have the most to learn, and is further evidence that Bo Caldwell writes "vividly and with great historical perspective" (San Jose Mercury News).
Download or read book Everywhere You Don t Belong written by Gabriel Bump and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2020 Winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence “A comically dark coming-of-age story about growing up on the South Side of Chicago, but it’s also social commentary at its finest, woven seamlessly into the work . . . Bump’s meditation on belonging and not belonging, where or with whom, how love is a way home no matter where you are, is handled so beautifully that you don’t know he’s hypnotized you until he’s done.” —Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review In this alternately witty and heartbreaking debut novel, Gabriel Bump gives us an unforgettable protagonist, Claude McKay Love. Claude isn’t dangerous or brilliant—he’s an average kid coping with abandonment, violence, riots, failed love, and societal pressures as he steers his way past the signposts of youth: childhood friendships, basketball tryouts, first love, first heartbreak, picking a college, moving away from home. Claude just wants a place where he can fit. As a young black man born on the South Side of Chicago, he is raised by his civil rights–era grandmother, who tries to shape him into a principled actor for change; yet when riots consume his neighborhood, he hesitates to take sides, unwilling to let race define his life. He decides to escape Chicago for another place, to go to college, to find a new identity, to leave the pressure cooker of his hometown behind. But as he discovers, he cannot; there is no safe haven for a young black man in this time and place called America. Percolating with fierceness and originality, attuned to the ironies inherent in our twenty-first-century landscape, Everywhere You Don’t Belong marks the arrival of a brilliant young talent.
Download or read book Sun of a Distant Land written by Bouchet David and published by Esplanade Books. This book was released on 2017-04-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve-year-old Souleye has just immigrated to Montreal from Senegal with his family. He wants to become "from here" as quickly as possible, but Canada and Senegal prove to be two completely different worlds, and their new lives don't unfold as planned. Beyond the daily grind of finding an apartment, schools, and jobs, young Souleye (whose only friend renames him "Soleil" - Sun) has to contend with what it means to be black in a predominantly white society, a foreigner among the locals. And that's all before his father's mind begins to fall apart... Poignantly translated from the French by Claire Holden Rothman, David Bouchet's Sun of a Distant Land is by turns charming and tragic, an epic contemporary vision of what it means to be uprooted, and what it takes to plant roots in a new land.
Download or read book Chasing the Hawk written by Andrew Sheehan and published by Delta. This book was released on 2002-10-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I have always chased my father, chased after his love, chased him through his many changes. I chased him even when I thought I was running in the other direction. Today, even though he is gone, I chase him still. I know he is the key to my freedom.” To runners around the world, Dr. George Sheehan, author of the landmark New York Times bestseller Running and Being, was nothing short of a guru — the country’s “greatest philosopher of sport.” But to his son Andrew, who had spent his entire boyhood longing for the attention and approval of an emotionally distant father, he was an incomprehensible paradox: a lifelong loner, who was now sunning himself in the spotlight of the nation’s press; a hero to millions, who seemed to have no time for his own son. The events that transformed George Sheehan from doctor to family man to bestselling author and media magnet began at the depths of what we would now call a midlife crisis, when he rediscovered an old love — running. Twenty-five years after his days on a high school cross-country team, he remembered how running made him feel free, and began beating a solitary path down his suburban streets. With running as his new religion, the formerly quiet, withdrawn man became an unlikely evangelist, converting a sedentary nation to the theology of fitness, and in the process becoming an internationally known figure. But the freedom he found in running was not enough, and one day he left his family, having decided that life was “an experiment of one,” and it was time for him to start living it. Angry and disillusioned after years of enduring his father’s self-absorption, and hurt by his apparent indifference, Andrew had long since begun the search for his own version of freedom, looking first to drugs and later to alcohol. By his twenties he was a confirmed alcoholic. By his thirties his marriage had fallen apart and he was drinking more heavily than ever. It was at that moment that his father threw him a lifeline. Although he was struggling with the cancer that would eventually end his life, Dr. Sheehan was the first to notice his son’s pain, and to reach out to him. In this stunningly candid book, Andrew Sheehan describes the process through which these two men carefully and lovingly rebuilt their relationship. And in the effort to understand and forgive the dark side of his father’s psyche, Andrew shows how he came to understand, and to transcend, his own. A gracefully written paean to the healing power of forgiveness, a memoir that will resonate with any “fallible” parent or child, Chasing the Hawk traces the arduous steps that carry father and son down the hard road to resolution, healing, and love.
Download or read book The Distant Lands written by Julien Green and published by Marion Boyars Publishers. This book was released on 1996-07-01 with total page 905 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume of Julian Green's autobiography. "A compelling drama of the 1850s South. . . A delicious immersion into time and place." -Booklist. "There lurks in the shade of each magnolia and is heard rustling in every crinoline the South's impendin
Download or read book That Distant Land written by Wendell Berry and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 2005, That Distant Land brings together twenty–three stories from the Port William Membership. Arranged in their fictional chronology, the book is not an anthology so much as it is a coherent temporal mapping of this landscape over time, revealing Berry’s mastery of decades of the life lived alongside this clutch of interrelated characters bound by affection and followed over generations. This volume combines the stories found in The Wild Birds (1985), Fidelity (1992), and Watch with Me (1994), together with a map and a charting of the complex and interlocking genealogies.
Download or read book Clap When You Land written by Elizabeth Acevedo and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a novel-in-verse that brims with grief and love, National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Acevedo writes about the devastation of loss, the difficulty of forgiveness, and the bittersweet bonds that shape our lives. Camino Rios lives for the summers when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people… In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal’s office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash. Separated by distance—and Papi’s secrets—the two girls are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered. And then, when it seems like they’ve lost everything of their father, they learn of each other. Great for summer reading or anytime! Clap When You Land is a Today show pick for “25 children’s books your kids and teens won’t be able to put down this summer!" Plus don't miss Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X and With the Fire on High!
Download or read book My Father at 100 written by Ron Reagan and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A moving memoir of the beloved fortieth president of the United States, by his son. February 6, 2011, is the one hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth. To mark the occasion, Ron Reagan has written My Father at 100, an intimate look at the life of his father-one of the most popular presidents in American history-told from the perspective of someone who knew Ronald Reagan better than any adviser, friend, or colleague. As he grew up under his father's watchful gaze, he observed the very qualities that made the future president a powerful leader. Yet for all of their shared experiences of horseback rides and touch football games, there was much that Ron never knew about his father's past, and in My Father at 100, he sets out to understand this beloved, if often enigmatic, figure who turned his early tribulations into a stunning political career. Since his death in 2004, President Reagan has been a galvanizing force that personifies the values of an older America and represents an important era in national history. Ron Reagan traces the sources of these values in his father's early years and offers a heartfelt portrait of a man and his country-and his personal memories of the president he knew as "Dad."
Download or read book You Bring the Distant Near written by Mitali Perkins and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This elegant young adult novel captures the immigrant experience for one Indian-American family with humor and heart. Told in alternating teen voices across three generations, You Bring the Distant Near explores sisterhood, first loves, friendship, and the inheritance of culture--for better or worse. From a grandmother worried that her children are losing their Indian identity to a daughter wrapped up in a forbidden biracial love affair to a granddaughter social-activist fighting to preserve Bengali tigers, award-winning author Mitali Perkins weaves together the threads of a family growing into an American identity. Here is a sweeping story of five women at once intimately relatable and yet entirely new.
Download or read book The Distant Dead written by Heather Young and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel * Nominated for the ITW Thriller Award for Best Young Adult Novel A BookPage Best Book of the Year * A People Magazine Best Book of Summer* A Parade Best Book of Summer * A Crime Reads Most Anticipated Book of Summer "Powerful...a breathtaking read, with flawed and authentic characters who hit so close to home that at times it is impossible not to root for them." — San Francisco Chronicle A body burns in the high desert hills. A boy walks into a fire station, pale with the shock of discovery. A middle school teacher worries when her colleague is late for work. By day’s end, when the body is identified as local math teacher Adam Merkel, a small Nevada town will be rocked to its core. Adam Merkel left a university professorship in Reno to teach middle school in Lovelock seven months before he died. A quiet, seemingly unremarkable man, he connected with just one of his students: Sal Prentiss, a lonely sixth grader who lives with his uncles on a desolate ranch in the hills. The two outcasts developed a tender, trusting friendship that brought each of them hope in the wake of tragedy. But it is Sal who finds Adam’s body, charred almost beyond recognition, half a mile from his uncles’ compound. Nora Wheaton, the middle school’s social studies teacher, dreamed of a life far from Lovelock only to be dragged back on the eve of her college graduation to care for her disabled father, a man she loves but can’t forgive. She sensed in the new math teacher a kindred spirit--another soul bound to Lovelock by guilt and duty. After Adam’s death, she delves into his past for clues to who killed him and finds a dark history she understands all too well. But the truth about his murder may lie closer to home. For Sal Prentiss’s grief seems heavily shaded with fear, and Nora suspects he knows more than he’s telling about how his favorite teacher died. As she tries to earn the wary boy’s trust, she finds he holds not only the key to Adam’s murder, but an unexpected chance at the life she thought she’d lost. Weaving together the last months of Adam’s life, Nora’s search for answers, and a young boy’s anguished moral reckoning, this unforgettable thriller brings a small American town to vivid life, filled with complex, flawed characters wrestling with the weight of the past, the promise of the future, and the bitter freedom that forgiveness can bring.
Download or read book The Lost Children written by Carolyn Cohagan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twelve-year-old Josephine Russing lives alone with her father. Mr. Russing is a distant, cold man best known for his insistence that every member of their town wear gloves at all times, just as he does--even at home--and just as he forces his daughter to do as well. Then one day Josephine meets a boy named Fargus. But when she tries to follow him, he mysteriously disappears and Josephine finds herself in another world called Gulm. Gulm is ruled by the "Master," a terrifying villain who has taken all the children of Gulm. With Fargus by her side, and joined by Fargus's friend Ida, Josephine must try to find her way home. As the trio attempt to evade the Master, they encounter numerous adventures and discover the surprising truth about the land of Gulm, and Josephine's own life back home.
Download or read book My Father Before Me written by Chris Forhan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning poet’s “beautifully written” (The Seattle Times) portrait of an American family and his own coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of his father’s suicide. This memoir “belongs on the special shelves we keep for the books we cannot quite forget” (George Hodgman). The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of secrets. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn’t come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but unspoken. And on a cold night just before Christmas 1973, long after dinner, the rest of the family asleep, Forhan’s father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later, Forhan “excavates both his lost father and a lost era in American history” (Bookpage). At the heart of this “fiercely honest” (Nick Flynn) investigation is Forhan’s father, a man whose crisp suits and gelled hair belied a darkness he could not control, a man whose striking dichotomy embodied the ethos of an era. Weaving together the lives of his ancestors, his parents, and his own coming of age in the 60s and 70s, Forhan paints an “achingly beautiful” (Buffalo News) portrait of a family “in the tradition of Geoffrey Wolff” (Booklist). “Poignant…affecting…Forhan describes his family’s healing and acceptance with warmth, humor, and an admirable lack of bitterness” (Kirkus Reviews). A family history, an investigation into a death, and a stirring portrait of an Irish Catholic childhood, all set against a backdrop of America from the Great Depression to the Ramones, My Father Before Me is “an exquisite example of the power of honesty” (Jeannette Walls), “a wonderfully engrossing book…essential for all parents and children, that is, all people” (Library Journal, starred review).
