Download or read book All Strangers Are Kin written by Zora O'Neill and published by HMH. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American woman determined to learn the Arabic language travels to the Middle East to pursue her dream in this “witty memoir” (Us Weekly). The shadda is the key difference between a pigeon (hamam) and a bathroom (hammam). Be careful, our professor advised, that you don’t ask a waiter, ‘Excuse me, where is the pigeon?’—or, conversely, order a roasted toilet . . . If you’ve ever studied a foreign language, you know what happens when you first truly and clearly communicate with another person. As Zora O’Neill recalls, you feel like a magician. If that foreign language is Arabic, you just might feel like a wizard. They say that Arabic takes seven years to learn and a lifetime to master. O’Neill had put in her time. Steeped in grammar tomes and outdated textbooks, she faced an increasing certainty that she was not only failing to master Arabic, but also driving herself crazy. She took a decade-long hiatus, but couldn’t shake her fascination with the language or the cultures it had opened up to her. So she decided to jump back in—this time with a new approach. In this book, she takes us along on her grand tour through the Middle East, from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates to Lebanon and Morocco. She’s packed her dictionaries, her unsinkable sense of humor, and her talent for making fast friends of strangers. From quiet, bougainvillea-lined streets to the lively buzz of crowded medinas, from families’ homes to local hotspots, she brings a part of the world thousands of miles away right to your door—and reminds us that learning another tongue leaves you rich with so much more than words. “You will travel through countries and across centuries, meeting professors and poets, revolutionaries, nomads, and nerds . . . [A] warm and hilarious book.” —Annia Ciezadlo, author of Day of Honey “Her tale of her ‘Year of Speaking Arabic Badly’ is a genial and revealing pleasure.” —The Seattle Times

Download or read book Strangers and Kin written by Barbara MELOSH and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Strangers and Kin is the history of adoption. An adoptive mother herself, Barbara Melosh tells the story of how married couples without children sought to care for and nurture other people's children as their own. Taking this history into the early twenty-first century, Melosh offers unflinching insight to the contemporary debates that swirl around adoption: the challenges to adoption secrecy; the ethics and geopolitics of international adoption; and the conflicts over transracial adoption.

Download or read book KIN written by Kealan Patrick Burke and published by Kealan Patrick Burke. This book was released on 2012-01-04 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel by the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of THE TURTLE BOY. On a scorching hot summer day in Elkwood, Alabama, Claire Lambert staggers naked, wounded, and half-blind away from the scene of an atrocity. She is the sole survivor of a nightmare that claimed her friends, and even as she prays for rescue, the killers -- a family of cannibalistic lunatics -- are closing in. A soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder returns from Iraq to the news that his brother is among the murdered in Elkwood. In snowbound Detroit, a waitress trapped in an abusive relationship gets an unexpected visit that will lead to bloodshed and send her back on the road to a past she has spent years trying to outrun. And Claire, the only survivor of the Elkwood Massacre, haunted by her dead friends, dreams of vengeance... a dream which will be realized as grief and rage turn good people into cold-blooded murderers and force alliances among strangers. It's time to return to Elkwood. In the spirit of such iconic horror classics as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Deliverance, Kin begins at the end and studies the possible aftermath for the survivors of such traumas upon their return to the real world -- the guilt, the grief, the thirst for revenge -- and sets them on an unthinkable journey... back into the heart of darkness.

Download or read book Random Families written by Rosanna Hertz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2018-11-16 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The ready availability of donated sperm and eggs has made possible an entirely new form of family. Children of the same donor and their families, with the help of the internet, can now locate each other and make contact. Sometimes this network of families form meaningful connections that blossom into longstanding groups, and close friendships. This book is about unprecedented families that have grown up at the intersection of new reproductive technologies, social media and the human desire for belonging. Random Families asks: Do shared genes make you a family? What do couples do when they discover that their children shares half their DNA with a dozen or more other offspring from the same sperm donor? What do kids find in common with their donor siblings? What becomes of these chance networks once parents and donor siblings find one another? Based on over 350 interviews with children (ages 10-28) and their parents from all over the U.S., Random Families chronicles the chain of choices that couples and single mothers make from what donor to use to how to participate (or not) in donor sibling networks. Children reveal their understanding of a donor, the donor's spot on the family tree and the meaning of their donor siblings. Through rich first-person accounts of network membership, the book illustrates how these extraordinary relationships -- woven from bits of online information and shared genetic ties -- are transformed into new possibilities for kinship. Random Families offers down-to-earth stories from real families to highlight just how truly distinctive these contemporary new forms of family are." -- Publisher's description

Download or read book Strangers in Blood written by Jennifer S. H. Brown and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For two centuries (1670-1870), English, Scottish, and Canadian fur traders voyaged the myriad waterways of Rupert's Land, the vast territory charted to the Hudson's Bay Company and later splintered among five Canadian provinces and four American states. The knowledge and support of northern Native peoples were critical to the newcomer's survival and success. With acquaintance and alliance came intermarriage, and the unions of European traders and Native women generated thousands of descendants. Jennifer Brown's Strangers in Blood is the first work to look systematically at these parents and their children. Brown focuses on Hudson's Bay Company officers and North West Company wintering partners and clerks-those whose relationships are best known from post journals, correspondence, accounts, and wills. The durability of such families varied greatly. Settlers, missionaries, European women, and sometimes the courts challenged fur trade marriages. Some officers' Scottish and Canadian relatives dismissed Native wives and "Indian" progeny as illegitimate. Traders who took these ties seriously were obliged to defend them, to leave wills recognizing their wives and children, and to secure their legal and social status-to prove that they were kin, not "strangers in blood." Brown illustrates that the lives and identities of these children were shaped by factors far more complex than "blood." Sons and daughters diverged along paths affected by gender. Some descendants became Métis and espoused Métis nationhood under Louis Riel. Others rejected or were never offered that course-they passed into white or Indian communities or, in some instances, identified themselves (without prejudice) as "half breeds." The fur trade did not coalesce into a single society. Rather, like Rupert's Land, it splintered, and the historical consequences have been with us ever since.

Download or read book Strangers in Their Own Land written by Arlie Russell Hochschild and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller that became a guide and balm for a country struggling to understand the election of Donald Trump "A generous but disconcerting look at the Tea Party. . . . This is a smart, respectful and compelling book." —Jason DeParle, The New York Times Book Review When Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, "Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed portraits . . . reveal a gulf between Hochchild's 'strangers in their own land' and a new elite." Already a favorite common read book in communities and on campuses across the country and called "humble and important" by David Brooks and "masterly" by Atul Gawande, Hochschild's book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others. The paperback edition features a new afterword by the author reflecting on the election of Donald Trump and the other events that have unfolded both in Louisiana and around the country since the hardcover edition was published, and also includes a readers' group guide at the back of the book.

Download or read book Kin to the Wind written by Moro Buddy Bohn and published by Travelers' Tales. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kin to the Wind is the memoir of Moro, a gifted virtuoso guitarist and composer, who first played (and wrote his first composition) when he was six and performed his first of many concerts when he was twelve. The book recounts his journeys as he traveled the world as a troubadour, using only his guitar performances as currency. This talented former member of the world-famous New Christy Minstrels played in over 50 countries—in royal palaces, African casbahs, and even on a British warship in trade for his passage across the Indian Ocean. Bedouin smugglers took him across the Arabian Desert in their camel caravan, listening to his music beneath desert stars. While he was in Bangkok giving a command performance for Their Majesties King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit of Thailand, the U.S. military invited him to play for the troops at their jungle camps. And he became the first entertainer to perform for American forces in the Vietnam conflict. He was also the first entertainer to appear at Paul Newman's famous 1960s exclusive Hollywood discotheque, THE FACTORY, where he played nightly. He followed that with an engagement at Howard Hughes' CABARET ROOM in Las Vegas where Mr. Hughes personally came to hear him. An Italian duchess who found him performing with a street-dancing flamenco troupe of gypsies in 1961 assisted him in obtaining a visa for Algeria where he then toured—during the violent Seven Years' War—and S.A.O. terrorists captured and held him. He played for them, literally for his life, whereupon they gave him money and let him go. Moro's memoir is an account of life's magic, suffused with an almost childlike innocence in his pursuit of dreams and his belief in the goodness of people the world over.

Download or read book Stranger Care written by Sarah Sentilles and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • “A powerful, heartbreaking, necessary masterpiece.”—Cheryl Strayed, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild The moving story of what one woman learned from fostering a newborn—about injustice, about making mistakes, about how to better love and protect people beyond our immediate kin May you always feel at home. After their decision not to have a biological child, Sarah Sentilles and her husband, Eric, decide to adopt via the foster care system. Despite knowing that the system’s goal is the child’s reunification with the birth family, Sarah opens their home to a flurry of social workers who question them, evaluate them, and ultimately prepare them to welcome a child into their lives—even if it means most likely having to give the child back. After years of starts and stops, and endless navigation of the complexities and injustices of the foster care system, a phone call finally comes: a three-day-old baby girl named Coco, in immediate need of a foster family. Sarah and Eric bring this newborn stranger home. “You were never ours,” Sarah tells Coco, “yet we belong to each other.” A love letter to Coco and to the countless children like her, Stranger Care chronicles Sarah’s discovery of what it means to mother—in this case, not just a vulnerable infant but the birth mother who loves her, too. Ultimately, Coco’s story reminds us that we depend on family, and that family can take different forms. With prose that Nick Flynn has called “fearless, stirring, rhythmic,” Sentilles lays bare an intimate, powerful story with universal concerns: How can we care for and protect one another? How do we ensure a more hopeful future for life on this planet? And if we’re all related—tree, bird, star, person—how might we better live?

Download or read book Becoming Kin written by Patty Krawec and published by Broadleaf Books . This book was released on 2022-09-27 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We find our way forward by going back. The invented history of the Western world is crumbling fast, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec says, but we can still honor the bonds between us. Settlers dominated and divided, but Indigenous peoples won't just send them all "home." Weaving her own story with the story of her ancestors and with the broader themes of creation, replacement, and disappearance, Krawec helps readers see settler colonialism through the eyes of an Indigenous writer. Settler colonialism tried to force us into one particular way of living, but the old ways of kinship can help us imagine a different future. Krawec asks, What would it look like to remember that we are all related? How might we become better relatives to the land, to one another, and to Indigenous movements for solidarity? Braiding together historical, scientific, and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and the vivid threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning, forceful call to "unforget" our history. This remarkable sojourn through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality helps us retrace our steps and pick up what was lost along the way: chances to honor rather than violate treaties, to see the land as a relative rather than a resource, and to unravel the history we have been taught.

Download or read book Saints and Strangers written by George Willison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A great deal has been written about the Pilgrims, perhaps more than any other small group in American history. Yet they continue to be extravagantly praised for accomplishing what they never attempted or intended, and they are even more foolishly abused for possessing attitudes and attributes foreign to them. In the popular mind they are still generally confused, to their great disadvantage, with the Puritans who settled to the north of them around Boston Bay. The purpose of the Willison narrative is to allow the Pilgrims to tell their own story, insofar as possible, in their own words and deeds. Saints and Strangers brings back to life men and women who were among the most stalwart of American ancestors. George F. Willison destroys the myth that too long has been created in the American mind: that Pilgrims, while pious and much to be admired, were a drab, stern people dedicated to prudery. Nothing could be further from the facts. These were lusty English people who were well aware of good food, drink, and pleasurable living. They were also an adventurous, hardheaded community united in their campaign for freedom of worship. The book takes the reader from the Puritan exile in Holland, their long and troubled voyage from old Europe to new America, and the hazardous period of settling on a strange, bleak coast. The Puritans were comprised of weavers, smiths, carpenters, printers, tailors, and working people--with scarcely a blue blood among them. It was a long trek to Plymouth Rock from English village life. Willison has produced a realistic picture of these people who often have been inaccurately portrayed with little appreciation of their substantial place in the history of a New World.

Download or read book Engaging with Strangers written by Debra McDougall and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The civil conflict in Solomon Islands (1998-2003) is often blamed on the failure of the nation-state to encompass culturally diverse and politically fragmented communities. Writing of Ranongga Island, the author tracks engagements with strangers across many realms of life—pre-colonial warfare, Christian conversion, logging and conservation, even post-conflict state building. She describes startling reversals in which strangers become attached to local places, even as kinspeople are estranged from one another and from their homes. Against stereotypes of rural insularity, she argues that a distinctive cosmopolitan openness to others is evident in the rural Solomons in times of war and peace.

Download or read book Cognitive Kin Moral Strangers Linking Animal Cognition Animal Ethics Animal Welfare written by Judith Benz-Schwarzburg and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-10-14 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cognitive Kin, Moral Strangers?, Judith Benz-Schwarzburg reveals the scope and relevance of cognitive kinship between humans and non-human animals. She presents a wide range of empirical studies on culture, language and theory of mind in animals and then leads us to ask why such complex socio-cognitive abilities in animals matter. Her focus is on ethical theory as well as on the practical ways in which we use animals. Are great apes maybe better described as non-human persons? Should we really use dolphins as entertainers or therapists? Benz-Schwarzburg demonstrates how much we know already about animals’ capabilities and needs and how this knowledge should inform the ways in which we treat animals in captivity and in the wild.

Download or read book The Kindness of Strangers written by Michael E. McCullough and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A fine achievement."--Peter Singer, author of The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do A sweeping psychological history of human goodness -- from the foundations of evolution to the modern political and social challenges humanity is now facing. How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care about others? Since Darwin, scientists have tried to answer this question using evolutionary theory. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael E. McCullough shows why they have failed and offers a new explanation instead. From the moment nomadic humans first settled down until the aftermath of the Second World War, our species has confronted repeated crises that we could only survive by changing our behavior. As McCullough argues, these choices weren't enabled by an evolved moral sense, but with moral invention -- driven not by evolution's dictates but by reason. Today's challenges -- climate change, mass migration, nationalism -- are some of humanity's greatest yet. In revealing how past crises shaped the foundations of human concern, The Kindness of Strangers offers clues for how we can adapt our moral thinking to survive these challenges as well.

Download or read book In the Country of Women written by Susan Straight and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of NPR's Best Books of the Year “Straight’s memoir is a lyric social history of her multiracial clan in Riverside that explores the bonds of love and survival that bind them, with a particular emphasis on the women’s stories . . . The aftereffect of all these disparate stories juxtaposed in a single epic is remarkable. Its resonance lingers for days after reading.” —San Francisco Chronicle In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self–proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close–knit Sims family, Straight—and eventually her three daughters—heard for decades the stories of Dwayne’s female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post–slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight’s mother–in–law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan’s family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward—from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California. A Pakistani word, biraderi, is one Straight uses to define a complex system of kinship and clan—those who become your family. An entire community helped raise her daughters. Of her three girls, now grown and working in museums and the entertainment industry, Straight writes, “The daughters of our ancestors carry in their blood at least three continents. We are not about borders. We are about love and survival.” “Certain books give off the sense that you won’t want them to end, so splendid the writing, so lyrical the stories. Such is the case with Southern California novelist Susan Straight’s new memoir, In the Country of Women . . . Her vibrant pages are filled with people of churned–together blood culled from scattered immigrants and native peoples, indomitable women and their babies. Yet they never succumb . . . Straight gives us permission to remember what went before with passion and attachment.” ––Los Angeles Times

Download or read book Refuge Reimagined written by Mark R. Glanville and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2021-02-16 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark R. Glanville and Luke Glanville offer a new approach to compassion for displaced people: a biblical ethic of kinship. Challenging the fear-based ethic that often motivates Christian approaches, they demonstrate how this ethic is consistently conveyed throughout the Bible and can be practically embodied today.

Download or read book The WEIRDest People in the World written by Joseph Henrich and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A Bloomberg Best Non-Fiction Book of 2020 A Behavioral Scientist Notable Book of 2020 A Human Behavior & Evolution Society Must-Read Popular Evolution Book of 2020 A bold, epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that has profoundly shaped the modern world. Perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. If so, you’re rather psychologically peculiar. Unlike much of the world today, and most people who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist, and analytical. They focus on themselves—their attributes, accomplishments, and aspirations—over their relationships and social roles. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically distinct? What role did these psychological differences play in the industrial revolution and the global expansion of Europe during the last few centuries? In The WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich draws on cutting-edge research in anthropology, psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology to explore these questions and more. He illuminates the origins and evolution of family structures, marriage, and religion, and the profound impact these cultural transformations had on human psychology. Mapping these shifts through ancient history and late antiquity, Henrich reveals that the most fundamental institutions of kinship and marriage changed dramatically under pressure from the Roman Catholic Church. It was these changes that gave rise to the WEIRD psychology that would coevolve with impersonal markets, occupational specialization, and free competition—laying the foundation for the modern world. Provocative and engaging in both its broad scope and its surprising details, The WEIRDest People in the World explores how culture, institutions, and psychology shape one another, and explains what this means for both our most personal sense of who we are as individuals and also the large-scale social, political, and economic forces that drive human history. Includes black-and-white illustrations.

Download or read book Noli s Story written by Peter Dickinson and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After she and Suth rescue four small children following an attack on Good Place about 200,000 years ago, Noli heeds the warnings of Moonhawk and leads the group to safety.