Download or read book The Syringa Tree written by Pamela Gien and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this heartrending and inspiring novel set against the gorgeous, vast landscape of South Africa under apartheid, award-winning playwright Pamela Gien tells the story of two families–one black, one white–separated by racism, connected by love. Even at the age of six, lively, inquisitive Elizabeth Grace senses she’s a child of privilege, “a lucky fish.” Soothing her worries by raiding the sugar box, she scampers up into the sheltering arms of the lilac-blooming syringa tree growing behind the family’ s suburban Johannesburg home. Lizzie’s closest ally and greatest love is her Xhosa nanny, Salamina. Deeper and more elemental than any traditional friendship, their fierce devotion to each other is charged and complicated by Lizzie’s mother, who suffers from creeping melancholy, by the stresses of her father’s medical practice, which is segregated by law, and by the violence, injustice, and intoxicating beauty of their country. In the social and racial upheavals of the 1960s, Lizzie’s eyes open to the terror and inhumanity that paralyze all the nation’s cultures–Xhosa, Zulu, Jew, English, Boer. Pass laws requiring blacks to carry permission papers for white areas and stringent curfews have briefly created an orderly state–but an anxious one. Yet Lizzie’s home harbors its own set of rules, with hushed midnight gatherings, clandestine transactions, and the girl’s special task of protecting Salamina’s newborn child–a secret that, because of the new rules, must never be mentioned outside the walls of the house. As the months pass, the contagious spirit of change sends those once underground into the streets to challenge the ruling authority. And when this unrest reaches a social and personal climax, the unthinkable will happen and forever change Lizzie’s view of the world. When The Syringa Tree opened off-Broadway in 2001, theater critics and audiences alike embraced the play, and it won many awards. Pamela Gien has superbly deepened the story in this new novel, giving a personal voice to the horrors and hopes of her homeland. Written with lyricism, passion, and life-affirming redemption, this compelling story shows the healing of the heart of a young woman and the soul of a sundered nation.

Download or read book The Syringa Tree written by Pamela Gien and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2007-10-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this heartrending and inspiring novel set against the gorgeous, vast landscape of South Africa under apartheid, award-winning playwright Pamela Gien tells the story of two families–one black, one white–separated by racism, connected by love. Even at the age of six, lively, inquisitive Elizabeth Grace senses she’s a child of privilege, “a lucky fish.” Soothing her worries by raiding the sugar box, she scampers up into the sheltering arms of the lilac-blooming syringa tree growing behind the family’s suburban Johannesburg home. Lizzie’s closest ally and greatest love is her Xhosa nanny, Salamina. Deeper and more elemental than any traditional friendship, their fierce devotion to each other is charged and complicated by Lizzie’s mother, who suffers from creeping melancholy, by the stresses of her father’s medical practice, which is segregated by law, and by the violence, injustice, and intoxicating beauty of their country. In the social and racial upheavals of the 1960s, Lizzie’s eyes open to the terror and inhumanity that paralyze all the nation’s cultures–Xhosa, Zulu, Jew, English, Boer. Pass laws requiring blacks to carry permission papers for white areas and stringent curfews have briefly created an orderly state–but an anxious one. Yet Lizzie’s home harbors its own set of rules, with hushed midnight gatherings, clandestine transactions, and the girl’s special task of protecting Salamina’s newborn child–a secret that, because of the new rules, must never be mentioned outside the walls of the house. As the months pass, the contagious spirit of change sends those once underground into the streets to challenge the ruling authority. And when this unrest reaches a social and personal climax, the unthinkable will happen and forever change Lizzie’s view of the world. When The Syringa Tree opened off-Broadway in 2001, theater critics and audiences alike embraced the play, and it won many awards. Pamela Gien has superbly deepened the story in this new novel, giving a personal voice to the horrors and hopes of her homeland. Written with lyricism, passion, and life-affirming redemption, this compelling story shows the healing of the heart of a young woman and the soul of a sundered nation. Praise: A gripping first novel in the tradition of such great southern African writers as Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing. Spare beautiful prose builds to an unforgettable climax. --BOOKLIST, starred review Pamela Gien's novel is impressively affecting. She is a wonder. The Syringa Tree as a play was uniquely moving, but Gien has taken it beyond its walls, and given us remarkable writing that stands freely as a deeply affecting and fresh telling of this classic story. -—Lillian Ross The story of a young girl and her cherished caretaker is the story of a heartbroken country. Pamela Gien brings South Africa to vivid life, illuminating how the bonds of love are stronger than the forces of history. I read the end of the book through tears. -–Amanda Eyre Ward, author of How to Be Lost This book plunges us inside the skin of humanity and is suffused with a rare understanding. The Syringa Tree reminds us that every life can be a drop–and a great deal more–in the sea of history. -–Scott Simon, NPR, author of Pretty Birds and Home and Away Evocative and impassioned. Gien captures perfectly the voice of the child Elizabeth and the grown woman she becomes. --Baltimore Sun, Summer List Highly recommended...Gien here illuminates the shameful history of a country, by highlighting the juxtaposition of race, anti-Semitism, and class privilege. -Library Journal A spare, yet poetic account that steadily works its magic on the reader as both a portrait of individuals, and a country, in the tumultuous time of apartheid. --Seattle Post-Intelligencer Gien...renders South Africa...as a virtual paradise, which painfully contrasts with the blood spilled on its soil. She’s an expressive, fluent writer whose best passages are lyrical yet intimate, bringing you right into the room. --Seattle Weekly A gorgeous, hopeful, heartrending novel. . . . This uncommonly moving, deeply humane novel nearly dances in a reader's hands with the rhythms and the colors, the complicatedness and the inimitability of southern Africa."--O The Oprah Magazine

Download or read book The Syringa Tree written by Canadian Stage Theatre Archives (University of Guelph) and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Syringa Tree written by Cordelia Russell and published by . This book was released on 1999* with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Syringa Tree written by Matt Salinger and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Syringa Tree written by Cottesloe Theatre and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Syringa Tree written by Cordelia Russell and published by . This book was released on 1998-03-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lilacs written by John L. Fiala and published by Timber Press (OR). This book was released on 2002 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Father John L. Fiala devoted 10 years to this book, a unique treatise that is both a scholarly monograph and a personal tribute to the beauty of lilacs. Since going out of print, it has become almost impossible to obtain at a reasonable price. Sometime in the future a revision and expansion of his work will appear, but in the meantime we have released this facsimile paperback reprint in response to extraordinary demand. It includes the 398 color photographs from the first edition and makes Fr. Fiala's work again accessible.

Download or read book I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree written by Laura Hillman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-05-11 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "HANNELORE, YOUR PAPA IS DEAD." In the spring of 1942 Hannelore received a letter from Mama at her school in Berlin, Germany--Papa had been arrested and taken to a concentration camp. Six weeks later he was sent home; ashes in an urn. Soon another letter arrived. "The Gestapo has notified your brothers and me that we are to be deported to the East--whatever that means." Hannelore knew: labor camps, starvation, beatings...How could Mama and her two younger brothers bear that? She made a decision: She would go home and be deported with her family. Despite the horrors she faced in eight labor and concentration camps, Hannelore met and fell in love with a Polish POW named Dick Hillman. Oskar Schindler was their one hope to survive. Schindler had a plan to take eleven hundred Jews to the safety of his new factory in Czechoslovakia. Incredibly both she and Dick were added to his list. But survival was not that simple. Weeks later Hannelore found herself, alone, outside the gates of Auschwitz, pushed toward the smoking crematoria. I Will Plant You a Lilac Tree is the remarkable true story of one young woman's nightmarish coming-of-age. But it is also a story about the surprising possibilities for hope and love in one of history's most brutal times.

Download or read book Martha s Flowers written by Martha Stewart and published by Clarkson Potter. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essential resource from Martha Stewart, with expert advice and lessons on gardening and making the most of your spectacular blooms Martha Stewart's lifelong love of flowers began at a young age, as she dug in and planted alongside her father in their family garden, growing healthy, beautiful blooms, every year. The indispensable lessons she learned then--and those she has since picked up from master gardeners--form the best practices she applies to her voluminous flower gardens today. For the first time, she compiles the wisdom of a lifetime spent gardening into a practical yet inspired book. Learn how and when to plant, nurture, and at the perfect time, cut from your garden. With lush blooms in hand, discover how to build stunning arrangements. Accompanied by beautiful photographs of displays in Martha's home, bursting with ideas, and covering every step from seed to vase, Martha's Flowers is a must-have handbook for flower gardeners and enthusiasts of all skill levels.

Download or read book Lilacs written by John L. Fiala and published by Timber Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covers all aspects of the selection, growth, and propagation of lilacs along with information on their landscape use, companion plants, and the history and origin of each lilac species.

Download or read book Trees of Stanford and Environs written by Ronald Newbold Bracewell and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Glass Tree written by Laura Davies Foley and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. "Laura Davies Foley's THE GLASS TREE is a meditation on history and loss a husband's death, his history in Russia, and the speaker's own history with a beloved that leads her to eventually work with hospital patients and the homeless. Clear and compassionate, there is beauty to be found in the fragility and strength of THE GLASS TREE." Denise Duhamel "What is the spirit of elegy? It begins in sorrow and lament, of course, but in these poems we see how elegy opens out to ever-widening circles of consciousness. We witness a pinpoint and unflinching attention to the endpoints of life: the fact of illness, hospital beds, and graveside bewilderment. We also watch these poems enact with dignity and beauty our capacity to absorb such pain. They show us how we sometimes barely survive our losses, but in so doing find ourselves more and more aware of the resilient presence of the soul. Or, to put the spirit of elegy in Laura Davies Foley's own words near the end of THE GLASS TREE: 'I sense clarity, / a mind learning to see itself.'" Fred Marchant"

Download or read book The Casuarina Tree written by WILLIAM SOMERSET. MAUGHAM and published by E-Artnow. This book was released on 2023-08-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Casuarina Tree is a collection of short stories set in the Federated Malay States during the 1920s by W. Somerset Maugham. The stories are loosely based on Maugham's experiences traveling in the region for about a year. The strong thread running through the stories is alienation and contrast - between people and cultures. For most of the characters, after a crisis in their circumstances, life seems to take up where it left off and closes over the revelations that brought on the drama. Maugham was considered persona non grata among the expatriate British community in the Federated Malay States following the publication of The Casuarina Tree as he was felt to have betrayed confidences and to have painted the community in an unflattering light through his focus on scandal. The major themes are class division, racial difference, adultery, personal competitiveness, and human nature in reaction to fate. Contents: - Before the Party - P. & O. - The Outstation - The Force of Circumstance - The Yellow Streak - The Letter

Download or read book Heather Raffo s 9 Parts of Desire written by Heather Raffo and published by Dramatists Play Service, Inc.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Iraqi artist paints-into-life an astonishing generation of women, exposing their radical, sexy and ultimately human stories beneath. Nine Parts of Desire is inspired by live interviews and events of the last ten years on both sides of the Iraqi border.

Download or read book All Our Worldly Goods written by Irene Nemirovsky and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-12-17 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In haunting ways, this gorgeous novel prefigures Irène Némirovsky’s masterpieceSuite Française. Set in France between 1910 and 1940 and first published in France in 1947, five years after the author’s death, All Our Worldly Goods is a gripping story of war, family life and star-crossed lovers. Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and his grandfather, the tyrannical family patriarch. Their marriage provokes a family feud that cascades down the generations. This brilliant novel is full of drama, heartbreak, and the telling observations that have made Némirovsky’s work so beloved and admired.

Download or read book Stand Tall written by Joan Bauer and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-08-16 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tree, a six-foot-three-inch twelve-year-old, copes with his parents' recent divorce and his failure as an athlete by helping his grandfather, a Vietnam vet and recent amputee, and Sophie, a new girl at school.