Download or read book The Imprint of Another Life written by Margaret Homans and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibilityaddresses a series of questions about common beliefs about adoption. Underlying these beliefs is the assumption that human qualities are innate and intrinsic, an assumption often held by adoptees and their families, sometimes at great emotional cost. This book explores representations of adoption—transracial, transnational, and domestic same-race adoption—that reimagine human possibility by questioning this assumption and conceiving of alternatives. Literary scholar Margaret Homans examines fiction making’s special relationship to themes of adoption, an “as if” form of family making, fabricated or fictional instead of biological or “real.” Adoption has tended to generate stories rather than uncover bedrock truths. Adoptive families are made, not born; in the words of novelist Jeanette Winterson, “adopted children are self-invented because we have to be.” In attempting to recover their lost histories and identities, adoptees create new stories about themselves. While some believe that adoptees cannot be whole unless they reconnect with their origins, others believe that privileging biology reaffirms hierarchies (such as those of race) that harm societies and individuals. Adoption is lived and represented through an irresolvable tension between belief in the innate nature of human traits and belief in their constructedness, contingency, and changeability. The book shows some of the ways in which literary creation, and a concept of adoption as a form of creativity, manages this tension. The texts examined include fiction (e.g., classic novels such as Silas Marner, What Maisie Knew, and Beloved); memoirs by adoptees, adoptive parents, and birthmothers; drama, documentary films, advice manuals, social science writing; and published interviews with adoptees, parents, and birth parents. Along the way the book tracks the quests of adoptees who, whether or not they meet their original families, must construct their own stories rather than finding them; follows transnational adoptees as they return, hopes held high, to Korea and China; looks over the shoulders of a generation of girls adopted from China as they watch Disney’s iconic Mulan, with its alluring story of destiny written on the skin; and listens to birthmothers as they struggle to tell painful secrets held for decades. This book engages in debates within adoption studies, women’s and gender studies, transnational studies, and ethnic studies; it will appeal to literary scholars and critics, including specialists in memoir or narrative theory, and to general readers interested in adoption and in race.
Download or read book Meet Me in Another Life written by Catriona Silvey and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International Bestseller! Soon to be a major motion picture starring Gal Gadot! “Inventive, bold and surprising . . . Builds in suspense and emotion, revealing itself page by page, layer by layer. Cleverly constructed and highly entertaining.” — CHARLES YU Recommended by Popsugar • Bustle • Goodreads • Tor • Mashable • BookBub • io9 Gizmodo • Lambda Literary • BookRiot • CrimeReads • The Nerd Daily • and many more! For fans of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue and Life After Life, a poignant genre-bending debut novel about a man and woman who must discover why they continue to meet in different versions of their lives—a thrilling and imaginative exploration of the infinite forms of love and how our choices can change everything. Thora and Santi have met before. Two strangers in a foreign city, Thora and Santi meet in a chance encounter. At once, they recognize in each other a kindred spirit—someone who is longing for more in life than the cards they’ve been dealt. Before their friendship can blossom, though, a tragic accident cuts their story short. They will meet again. But this is only one of the many connections they share. Like satellites trapped in orbit around each other, Thora and Santi will find each other again: as husband and wife; teacher and student; caretaker and patient; cynic and believer. In recurring lifetimes they become friends, partners, lovers, and enemies. Only they can make sure it’s not for the last time. As strange patterns and blurred memories compound, Thora and Santi come to a shocking revelation. They must work together to discover the true reason behind their repeating realities . . . before their many lives come to one, final end.
Download or read book The Imprint of Another Life written by Margaret Homans and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How adoption and its literary representations shed new light on notions of value, origins, and identity
Download or read book Another Life written by Derek Walcott and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2014-09-09 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his longest and most ambitious poem, Derek Walcott reaches beyond an evocative portrayl of his native West Indies to create a moving elegy on himself and on man. The fascinating and complex matrix of the author's life is illuminated with our candor, verve, and strength. Over four thousand lines of verse are grouped into four parts. He evokes scenes of his divided childhood, in which children live in shacks while fine khaki-clothed Englishmen drink tea. He depicts the influence of three intimate friends, including his first love, Anna, on his emergence as a man and artist. He chronicles the mixed remorse and resolution of maturity. He recalls of his youth: "We were blessed with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam's task of giving things their names..." Yet in retrospect he acknowledges the irony of his artistic reliance on metaphor to transform reality--his search for "another life" When the author's most recent collection of poetry, The Gulf, was published, Selden Rodman wrote in The New York Times Book Review: "Now, with the publication of his fourth book of verse, Walcott's stature in the front rank of all contemporary poets using English should be apparent." Chad Walsh in Book World said: "I am convinced one of the half-dozen most imporant poets now writing in English. He may prove to be the best." Another Life helps to fulfill this prophecy.
Download or read book Evolving Households written by Jeremy Greenwood and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformative effect of technological change on households and culture, seen from a macroeconomic perspective through simple economic models. In Evolving Households, Jeremy Greenwood argues that technological progress has had as significant an effect on households as it had on industry. Taking a macroeconomic perspective, Greenwood develops simple economic models to study such phenomena as the rise in married female labor force participation, changes in fertility rates, the decline in marriage, and increased longevity. These trends represent a dramatic transformation in everyday life, and they were made possible by advancements in technology. Greenwood also addresses how technological progress can cause social change. Greenwood shows, for example, how electricity and labor-saving appliances freed women from full-time household drudgery and enabled them to enter the labor market. He explains that fertility dropped when higher wages increased the opportunity cost of having children; he attributes the post–World War II baby boom to a combination of labor-saving household technology and advances in obstetrics and pediatrics. Marriage rates declined when single households became more economically feasible; people could be more discriminating in their choice of a mate. Technological progress also affects social and cultural norms. Innovation in contraception ushered in a sexual revolution. Labor-saving technological progress at home, together with mechanization in industry that led to an increase in the value of brain relative to brawn for jobs, fostered the advancement of women's rights in the workplace. Finally, Greenwood attributes increased longevity to advances in medical technology and rising living standards, and he examines healthcare spending, the development of new drugs, and the growing portion of life now spent in retirement.
Download or read book The Primal Wound written by Nancy Newton Verrier and published by British Association for Adoption and Fostering (Ba. This book was released on 2009 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1993, this classic piece of literature on adoption has revolutionised the way people think about adopted children. Nancy Verrier examines the life-long consequences of the 'primal wound' - the wound that is caused when a child is separated from its mother - for adopted people. Her argument is supported by thorough research in pre- and perinatal psychology, attachment, bonding and the effects of loss.
Download or read book Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal written by Jeanette Winterson and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller: The “magnificent” memoir by one of the bravest and most original writers of our time—“A tour de force of literature and love” (Vogue). One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years” Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. Her internationally best-selling debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, and has become a staple of required reading in contemporary fiction classes. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a “singular and electric” memoir about a life’s work to find happiness (The New York Times). It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, rose to haunt the author later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also a book about the power of literature, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, or a life raft that supports us when we are sinking. Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded story of the search for belonging—for love, identity, home, and a mother.
Download or read book Another Life written by Michael Korda and published by Delta. This book was released on 2000-05-09 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From world leaders to Mafia dons, from Hollywood stars to the literary world's most eccentric writers, the notable and notorious alike have entrusted their life's work to Simon & Schuster's preeminent editor, Michael Korda. In this masterful memoir, Korda reveals the unforgettable cast of characters and outrageous anecdotes behind four decades of blockbuster publishing, bringing us face-to-face with dozens of larger-than-life figures: Richard Nixon, who maintained his "presidential" persona long after his public life was over; Joan Crawford, whose autobiography reflected a life she would have liked to have lived but did not; Joseph Bonanno, the retired Mafia don who'd do anything to keep from being killed by the reviewers. And in a revelatory account that reads as compulsively as fiction, Another Life paints a vivid picture of publishing's glitterati, including Jacqueline Susann, who liberated women's fiction--and terrorized a publishing house, and Tennessee Williams, who nourished his genius on four-course vodka lunches. A veritable Who's Who of stage, screen, and letters, Another Life is the deft interweaving of publishing at it most fascinating--and storytelling at its finest.
Download or read book Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction written by Helga Ramsey-Kurz and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction engages urgently with wealth, testing current assumptions of inequality in order to push beyond reductive contemporary readings of the gaping abyss between rich and poor. Shifting away from longstanding debates in postcolonial criticism focused on poverty and abjection, the book marshals fresh perspectives on material, spiritual, and cultural prosperity as found in the literatures of formerly colonized spaces. The chapters ‘follow the money’ to illuminate postcolonial fiction’s awareness of the ambiguities of ‘wealth’, acquired under colonial capitalism and transmuted in contemporary neoliberalism. They weigh idealistic projections of individual and collective wellbeing against the stark realities of capital accumulation and excessive consumption. They remain alert to the polysemy suggested by “Uncommon Wealths,” both registering the imperial economic urge to ensure common wealth and referencing the unconventional or non-Western, the unusual, even fictitious and contrasting privately coveted and exclusively owned wealth with visions of a shared good. Arranged into four sections centred on aesthetics, injustice, indigeneity, and cultural location, the individual chapters show how writers of postcolonial fiction, including Aravind Adiga, Amit Chau-dhuri, Anita Desai, Patricia Grace, Mohsin Hamid, Stanley Gazemba, Tomson Highway, Lebogang Matseke, Zakes Mda, Michael Ondaatje, Kim Scott, and Alexis Wright, employ prosperity and affluence as a lens through which to re-examine issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and family, the cultural value of heritage, land, and social cohesion, and such conflicting imperatives as economic growth, individual fulfilment, social and environmental responsibility, and just distribution. CONTRIBUTORS Francesco Cattani, Sheila Collingwood–Whittick, Paola Della Valle, Sneja Gunew, Melissa Kennedy, Neil Lazarus, John McLeod, Eva–Maria Müller, Helga Ramsey–Kurz, Geoff Rodoreda, Sandhya Shetty, Cheryl Stobie, Helen Tiffin, Alex Nelungo Wanjala, David Waterman
Download or read book Adoption Memory and Cold War Greece written by Gonda Van Steen and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a committed quest to unravel and document the postwar adoption networks that placed more than 3,000 Greek children in the United States, in a movement accelerated by the aftermath of the Greek Civil War and by the new conditions of the global Cold War. Greek-to-American adoptions and, regrettably, also their transactions and transgressions, provided the blueprint for the first large-scale international adoptions, well before these became a mass phenomenon typically associated with Asian children. The story of these Greek postwar and Cold War adoptions, whose procedures ranged from legal to highly irregular, has never been told or analyzed before. Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece answers the important questions: How did these adoptions from Greece happen? Was there any money involved? Humanitarian rescue or kid pro quo? Or both? With sympathy and perseverance, Gonda Van Steen has filled a decades-long gap in our understanding, and provided essential information to the hundreds of adoptees and their descendants whose lives are still affected today.
Download or read book How to Meditate on the Stages of the Path written by Kathleen McDonald and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-11-12 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deepen your meditation by diving into the practices of the lamrim—the stages of the path to enlightenment. Buddhist tradition tells us that enlightenment is possible for each and every one of us. It’s actually the best thing we can do for others and for the world, but also the best thing we can do for ourselves, because it means being free from all misery, pain, depression, dissatisfaction, and negative emotions, and abiding forever in peace, joy, love, and compassion. What could be more wonderful than that? Kathleen McDonald (Sangye Khadro), a Western nun with decades of experience and author of the bestselling book How to Meditate, guides us through the next step in our meditation practice: the transformative meditations on the Tibetan lamrim stages to enlightenment. She helps us see that the whole purpose of meditation is to transform our mind in a constructive way. For this to happen, we need to become so thoroughly familiar with the lamrim topics that they become our natural way of thinking and living our life. This warm and encouraging guide takes us through meditations on these lamrim topics, such as: - impermanence - refuge - karma - the four noble truths - bodhichitta - the six perfections: giving, ethics, patience, joyous effort, concentration, and wisdom How to Meditate on the Stages of the Path offers practical advice, support, and step-by-step guidance on how to meditate on the stages of the path to enlightenment that will transform the practice of new meditators and seasoned practitioners alike.
Download or read book How Black Was My Valley written by Brad Evans and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2024-04-09 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a searing insight and honest portrayal of post-industrial communities ravaged by decades of abandonment, How Black Was My Valley is the story of lives defined by poverty, catastrophe and the fading dreams of better futures. How Black Was My Valley is a people's history of the former mining communities of South Wales. Weaving together the personal with the political, it offers a damning depiction of the hardship and suffering, the tragedy and pain, as a politically abandoned people went from powering the British Empire and the Great Wars, to a broken post-industrial community, lost in time. It travels with devastating and yet humane insight across the dark shadows of the valley’s history. In doing so, it deals with disaster and resistance; memory and landscapes of despair; the brutal past and the neglected present; hardship and poverty; unemployment and isolation; lack of opportunity and the normalisation of hopelessness; death and suffering; structural violence and everyday subjugation; onto the crises of white male subjectivity and the exponential rise in drug abuse and personal suicide, whose troubling effects can no longer be easily contained within its mountainous walls. This is not a story of resilience. Instead, readers are taken on a journey into an open wound, whose once silent screams can no longer be ignored.
Download or read book The Divine Engine written by Michael P. Williams and published by Author House. This book was released on 2014-07-26 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A past filled with sexual and emotional abuse has left Marcus Quincy, as he would often say, "One more childhood trauma away from becoming the next Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy." Due to his tumultuous past, Marcus has frequently been exposed to the cruelty and ignorance of others and has slowly distanced himself from the outside world and all of the people in it. All, that is, but his beautiful wife Anna and their twin daughters Tara and Tori. Marcus loves his family more than life itself and he will do anything for them! Marcus struggles with the concept of becoming the savior of a world he has spent his life hiding from, a world he has grown to despise. He reflects on his past, how ridicule and discrimination had molded him into a potential time bomb of violence and hatred, and how choice and the unconditional bond of love he shares with his family had saved him from that dark path. Guided by a being of light and hunted by a psychotic version of himself from another reality, Marcus embarks on a journey throughout the multiple realities of Heaven, Hell, and the known universe in search of the pieces to the Divine Engine, mankind's only hope of stopping Armageddon. The story unveils Marcus' struggles with his past and his faith, humanity and all its frailties, the possible existence of Heaven and Hell, and above all else, the ripple effect a single choice can have on future events. Will Marcus find the faith within himself and all of humanity to gather the knowledge and power to confront pure evil? And can Marcus make the ultimate sacrifice to save the human race?
Download or read book Green Religion written by Sylvester L. Steffen and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Deep-heart cosmic communication radiates truths of relationships in-common and the fact that "common ground" is wave/ particle pulsation sustaining and transforming all at the same time. The "light of the world" is wave/ particle, electromagnetic photon. We are the shining self-understanding of the cosmos, the scintillating light of Divine Instance in nature. Shine on. Shine on, Oh Cosmic Christ. The common anointing of universal priesthood is the Christic consciousness of universal transformation. "Green" religion is the essential consciousness of existence-in-common and the human distinction of self-aware purpose in transformation and in the fleeting reality of individual existence. The beauty, the glory, this ictus in time is to be savored in the moment, for all individual realization is in the moment. The past is non-reality, the future is non-reality; reality is in the moment; accomplishments and failures of the past project into the future. The ascendant consciousness of self-reflection is the conscionable responsibility of living mindfully, in the moment, grateful for the beauty and the glory of being a crowning achievement of the past as well as the hope for the future. The "cultural spectrum" is nothing other than the grand evolution of the electromagnetic spectrum-the ground-being and becoming of life. The greening of religion is about the florescence of all life, always in process of self-justification. Conscionable living is justified living.
Download or read book The Convoluted Universe Book 3 written by Dolores Cannon and published by Ozark Mountain Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 662 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This sequel to The Convoluted Universe - Book Two provides metaphysical information obtained through numerous subjects by hypnotic past-life regression.
Download or read book Margaret Daughter of Destiny written by Christine Lynch and published by Austin Macauley Publishers. This book was released on 2023-09-15 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The damage done tonight will resound down the generations!” These words, spoken in anger by an outraged mother in the year 1904, will prove prophetic. Fourteen years later, a child enters the world, innocent, yet blighted by the repercussions of a distant crime, committed on a summer night, in remote Western Australia. From the beginning, the odds are stacked against Margaret as she is robbed of her childhood. In due course, Margaret reaches adulthood and to her horror, finds herself powerless to prevent the outcome she most dreads. The malevolent forces of destiny reach down to a further generation and into the lives of her children. This story is a tribute to the courage and tenacity of a mother’s love. It plays out against the backdrop of a period spanning two world wars, a great depression and the dawn of a new millenium. Through all of this, Margaret faces the additional challenges of being a single mother in an unforgiving era. The story follows the relentless power of generational forces, pitted against the strength of the human spirit. It relives one woman’s heroic struggle to change the future. Margaret forges a path – ultimately – to release and redemption. Margaret’s story is told by the person who shared so closely in this journey of struggle and redemption: her daughter.
Download or read book Another Life written by I︠U︡riĭ Trifonov and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Beyond their acute depiction of life in the Soviet Union, Yuri Trifonov's novellas offer an extraordinarily rich literary encounter in the tradition of great nineteenth-century Russian writing. "Another Life" is the story of Olga, a woman suddenly widowed and attempting to grasp the memory of her brilliant, erratic husband and to understand their life together. Possessed with a passion for truth, able to appreciate how the past affects the present, he could not hope to flourish in a society where intrigue and moral compromise were the norm." "A sharp, satirical portrait of an academic opportunist, "The House on the Embankment" is paradoxically laced with compassion and humor. Vadim Alexandrovich Glebov rises from shabby origins to become an apparatchik yet in so doing suffers his share of oppression - from society, from former friends, and, most significantly, from his total inability to make decisions." --Book Jacket.
