Download or read book Unsheltered written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller • Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, O: The Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek “Kingsolver brilliantly captures both the price of profound change and how it can pave the way not only for future generations, but also for a radiant, unexpected expansion of the heart.” — O: The Oprah Magazine The acclaimed author of The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees, and recipient of numerous literary awards—including the National Humanities Medal, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the Orange Prize—returns with a story about two families, in two centuries, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future. How could two hardworking people do everything right in life, a woman asks, and end up destitute? Willa Knox and her husband followed all the rules as responsible parents and professionals, and have nothing to show for it but debts and an inherited brick house that is falling apart. The magazine where Willa worked has folded; the college where her husband had tenure has closed. Their dubious shelter is also the only option for a disabled father-in-law and an exasperating, free-spirited daughter. When the family’s one success story, an Ivy-educated son, is uprooted by tragedy he seems likely to join them, with dark complications of his own. In another time, a troubled husband and public servant asks, How can a man tell the truth, and be reviled for it? A science teacher with a passion for honest investigation, Thatcher Greenwood finds himself under siege: his employer forbids him to speak of the exciting work just published by Charles Darwin. His young bride and social-climbing mother-in-law bristle at the risk of scandal, and dismiss his worries that their elegant house is unsound. In a village ostensibly founded as a benevolent Utopia, Thatcher wants only to honor his duties, but his friendships with a woman scientist and a renegade newspaper editor threaten to draw him into a vendetta with the town’s powerful men. A timely and "utterly captivating" novel (San Francisco Chronicle), Unsheltered interweaves past and present to explore the human capacity for resiliency and compassion in times of great upheaval.

Download or read book Unsheltered written by Clare Moleta and published by . This book was released on 2021-05-05 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the resourceful, relentless Li tracks her lost daughter across a disintegrating country, the journey will test the limits of her trust, her hope and her love. Unsheltered will leave you wrung out and gasping. Relentlessly propulsive and profoundly moving, Unsheltered taps into some of our worst fears and most implacable motivations, marking the emergence of a fully-formed and urgent literary voice. Against a background of social breakdown and destructive weather, Unsheltered tells the story of a woman's search for her daughter. Li never wanted to bring a child into a world like this but now that eight-year-old Matti is missing, she will stop at nothing to find her. As she crosses the great barren country alone and on foot, living on what she can find and fuelled by visions of her daughter just out of sight ahead, Li will have every instinct tested. She knows the odds against her: an uncompromising landscape, an uncaring system, time running out, and the risks of any encounters on the road. But her own failings and uncertainty might be the greatest obstacle of all. Because even if she finds her, how can she hope to shield Matti from the future? At times tender, at times terrifying, Unsheltered is an engrossing, unpredictable novel that keeps the reader in suspense all the way to the end. A brilliant feat of imagination that asks if our humanity is the only protection we have left, Unsheltered will affect you in ways a book hasn't done in years.

Download or read book Pigs in Heaven written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Picking up where her modern classic The Bean Trees left off, Barbara Kingsolver’s bestselling Pigs in Heaven continues the tale of Turtle and Taylor Greer, a Native American girl and her adoptive mother who have settled in Tucson, Arizona, as they both try to overcome their difficult pasts. Taking place three years after The Bean Trees, Taylor is now dating a musician named Jax and has officially adopted Turtle. But when a lawyer for the Cherokee Nation begins to investigate the adoption—their new life together begins to crumble. Depicting the clash between fierce family love and tribal law, poverty and means, abandonment and belonging, Pigs in Heaven is a morally wrenching, gently humorous work of fiction that speaks equally to the head and the heart. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from Barbara Kingsolver, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

Download or read book The Lords of the Valley written by LaVerne Hanners and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lord and Hanners both describe a way of life that demanded toughness - stoicism, commitment, and humor when possible - but their recollections take an interesting counterpoint. Following the branding and castration of a thousand young bulls, Lord insists that the entire town came with buckets to carry the testicles home - "They were really meat hungry." Hanners insists, however, that cooking and eating mountain oysters was "strictly a masculine endeavor," pursued by the men after the women had vacated the kitchen. When Lord matter-of-factly describes being left alone at a young age to trail cattle in Indian Territory, Hanners observes that "sixteen seems pitifully young to be so far away front home, broke and hungry," while agreeing that necessity often required such things.

Download or read book The Book on Ending Homelessness written by Iain De Jong and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2019-10-25 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Book on Ending Homelessness provides insights for those in the industry, elected officials, policy makers, funders, public servants and the general public on the best ways to move from managing homelessness to ending homelessness. While ending homelessness may seem to be a whacky or even preposterous idea, Iain De Jong takes more than two decades of experience as an award winning industry leader to lay out how and why homelessness can be ended in very practical ways. This book will provoke and teach, serving as both inspiration and an instruction manual for those serious about combatting one of the most important social issues of our time. The book will reshape how you think about homelessness, as well as how strategies like sheltering, street outreach and day services all play a role in ending homelessness when operated with a housing-focused lens and the right service orientation. No doubt the book will reassure some that their thinking and actions regarding homelessness are bang on, while challenging others to think and respond differently in what they do and how they invest their money. Many of the ideas in the book elaborate upon ideas that Iain shares in his blog, keynote speeches and conference presentations, as well as the training series that Iain and his team have been offering for the past decade. If you are involved in homelessness issues or concerned about homelessness, this book is essential reading.

Download or read book Student Power Democracy and Revolution in the Sixties written by Nick Licata and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-25 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses humour and personal insight to weave tales, analysis, and history in this insider account of an enlightened populist student movement. The students involved took their citizenship seriously by asking the authorities who they were benefiting and who they were ignoring. They altered the prevailing culture by asking, “why not do something different”? Unlike other books on the Sixties, this book shows how predominantly working middle-class white students in a very conservative region initiated radical changes. They ushered in a new era of protecting women and minorities from discriminatory practices. This vivid account of bringing conservative students around to support social justice projects illustrates how step-by-step democratic change results in reshaping a nation’s character. Across the globe, students are seeking change. In the US, over 80 percent believe they have the power to change the country, and 60 percent think they’re part of that movement. This book’s portrayal of such efforts in the Sixties will inspire and guide those students.

Download or read book The Girl s Guide to Homelessness written by Brianna Karp and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2011-04-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brianna Karp entered the workforce at age ten, supporting her mother and sister throughout her teen years in Southern California. Although her young life was scarred by violence and abuse, Karp stayed focused on her dream of a steady job and a home of her own. By age twenty-two her dream became reality. Karp loved her job as an executive assistant and signed the lease on a tiny cottage near the beach. And then the Great Recession hit. Karp, like millions of others, lost her job. In the six months between the day she was laid off and the day she was forced out onto the street, Karp scrambled for temp work and filed hundreds of job applications, only to find all doors closed. When she inherited a thirty-foot travel trailer after her father's suicide, Karp parked it in a Walmart parking lot and began to blog about her search for work and a way back.

Download or read book Extreme Domesticity written by Susan Fraiman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domesticity gets a bad rap. We associate it with stasis, bourgeois accumulation, banality, and conservative family values. Yet in Extreme Domesticity, Susan Fraiman reminds us that keeping house is just as likely to involve dislocation, economic insecurity, creative improvisation, and queered notions of family. Her book links terms often seen as antithetical: domestic knowledge coinciding with female masculinity, feminism, and divorce; domestic routines elaborated in the context of Victorian poverty, twentieth-century immigration, and new millennial homelessness. Far from being exclusively middle-class, domestic concerns are shown to be all the more urgent and ongoing when shelter is precarious. Fraiman's reformulation frees domesticity from associations with conformity and sentimentality. Ranging across periods and genres, and diversifying the archive of domestic depictions, Fraiman's readings include novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Sandra Cisneros, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Feinberg, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka; Edith Wharton's classic decorating guide; popular women's magazines; and ethnographic studies of homeless subcultures. Recognizing the labor and know-how needed to produce the space we call "home," Extreme Domesticity vindicates domestic practices and appreciates their centrality to everyday life. At the same time, it remains well aware of domesticity's dark side. Neither a romance of artisanal housewifery nor an apology for conservative notions of home, Extreme Domesticity stresses the heterogeneity of households and probes the multiplicity of domestic meanings.

Download or read book Do Something for Nothing Seeing Beneath the Surface of Homelessness through the Simple Act of a Haircut written by Joshua Coombes and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the simple act of a haircut, readers are taken on a geographical and emotional journey into the lives of humans experiencing homelessness in different cities across the world. “In this uplifting book, Coombes deftly illustrates how reaching out and listening can break down barriers in an often indifferent world.” —Booklist Online “Joshua’s stories show the power that empathy and compassion have to turn a common, everyday act into something transformative. They are the revelations of connection.” —Michael Sheen, actor and activist When you're on the fringes of society, being noticed can mean everything. In 2015, while working at a London hair salon, Joshua Coombes took to the streets with his scissors to build relationships with people sleeping rough in the capital. This inspired him to begin posting transformative images on social media to amplify their voices. These stories resonated and thousands of people got involved in their own way. #DoSomethingForNothing was born--a movement that encourages people to connect their skills and time to those who need it. Via the simple act of a haircut, readers are taken on a geographical and emotional journey into the lives of humans experiencing homelessness in different cities across the world. Featuring never-before-seen photographs and all-new writing, Do Something for Nothing explores themes of love, acceptance, shame, and perseverance, while inviting us to see ourselves in one another and dissolve the negative stigmas surrounding homelessness. Additionally, a portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to organizations dedicated to assisting unsheltered people.

Download or read book San Fransicko written by Michael Shellenberger and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National bestselling author of APOCALYPSE NEVER skewers progressives for the mishandling of America’s faltering cities. Progressives claimed they knew how to solve homelessness, inequality, and crime. But in cities they control, progressives made those problems worse. Michael Shellenberger has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for thirty years. During that time, he advocated for the decriminalization of drugs, affordable housing, and alternatives to jail and prison. But as homeless encampments spread, and overdose deaths skyrocketed, Shellenberger decided to take a closer look at the problem. What he discovered shocked him. The problems had grown worse not despite but because of progressive policies. San Francisco and other West Coast cities — Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland — had gone beyond merely tolerating homelessness, drug dealing, and crime to actively enabling them. San Fransicko reveals that the underlying problem isn’t a lack of housing or money for social programs. The real problem is an ideology that designates some people, by identity or experience, as victims entitled to destructive behaviors. The result is an undermining of the values that make cities, and civilization itself, possible.

Download or read book Summary of Unsheltered written by Paul Adams / Bookhabits and published by Blurb. This book was released on 2019-01-09 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unsheltered: A Novel by Barbara Kingsolver: Conversation Starters Two families live in the same house in Vineland, New Jersey. Thatcher Greenwood and his family live in the house during the post- Civil War while Willa's family live in the same house in modern-day America. Willa, a freelance journalist who feels increasingly stressed with the economically challenging times, learns that her house needs a major repair. The house once belonged to Thatcher Greenwood, a man who lived in the 1870s. Greenwood is a science teacher who, like Willa, is caught in difficult circumstances during his time. He is excited by Charles Darwin's recently published work but is forbidden to talk about it. How do their lives echo each other? Unsheltered is authored by Kingsolver whose novels are known for tackling social and political issues. Her 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible, is a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Her other books include Flight Behavior; and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. A Brief Look Inside: EVERY GOOD BOOK CONTAINS A WORLD FAR DEEPER than the surface of its pages. The characters and their world come alive, and the characters and its world still live on. Conversation Starters is peppered with questions designed to bring us beneath the surface of the page and invite us into the world that lives on. These questions can be used to.. Create Hours of Conversation: - Promote an atmosphere of discussion for groups - Foster a deeper understanding of the book - Assist in the study of the book, either individually or corporately - Explore unseen realms of the book as never seen before Disclaimer: This book you are about to enjoy is an independent resource meant to supplement the original book. If you have not yet read the original book, we encourage you to before purchasing this unofficial Conversation Starters.

Download or read book The Ministry for the Future written by Kim Stanley Robinson and published by Orbit. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR “The best science-fiction nonfiction novel I’ve ever read.” —Jonathan Lethem "If I could get policymakers, and citizens, everywhere to read just one book this year, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future." —Ezra Klein (Vox) The Ministry for the Future is a masterpiece of the imagination, using fictional eyewitness accounts to tell the story of how climate change will affect us all. Its setting is not a desolate, postapocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us. Chosen by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of the year, this extraordinary novel from visionary science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson will change the way you think about the climate crisis. "One hopes that this book is read widely—that Robinson’s audience, already large, grows by an order of magnitude. Because the point of his books is to fire the imagination."―New York Review of Books "If there’s any book that hit me hard this year, it was Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, a sweeping epic about climate change and humanity’s efforts to try and turn the tide before it’s too late." ―Polygon (Best of the Year) "Masterly." —New Yorker "[The Ministry for the Future] struck like a mallet hitting a gong, reverberating through the year ... it’s terrifying, unrelenting, but ultimately hopeful. Robinson is the SF writer of my lifetime, and this stands as some of his best work. It’s my book of the year." —Locus "Science-fiction visionary Kim Stanley Robinson makes the case for quantitative easing our way out of planetary doom." ―Bloomberg Green

Download or read book Animal Dreams written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An emotional masterpiece . . . A novel in which humor, passion, and superb prose conspire to seize a reader by the heart and by the soul.” —New York Daily News From Barbara Kingsolver, the acclaimed author of Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Bean Trees, and other modern classics, Animal Dreams is a passionate and complex novel about love, forgiveness, and one woman’s struggle to find her place in the world "Animals dream about the things they do in the daytime just like people do. If you want sweet dreams, you've got to live a sweet life." So says Loyd Peregrina, a handsome Apache trainman and latter-day philosopher. But when Codi Noline returns to her hometown, Loyd's advice is painfully out of her reach. Dreamless and at the end of her rope, Codi comes back to Grace, Arizona, to confront her past and face her ailing, distant father. What she finds is a town threatened by a silent environmental catastrophe, some startling clues to her own identity, and a man whose view of the world could change the course of her life. Blending flashbacks, dreams, and Native American legends, Animal Dreams is a suspenseful love story and a moving exploration of life's largest commitments. This edition includes a P.S. section with additional insights from Barbara Kingsolver, background material, suggestions for further reading, and more.

Download or read book The Poisonwood Bible written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller • Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • An Oprah's Book Club Selection “Powerful . . . [Kingsolver] has with infinitely steady hands worked the prickly threads of religion, politics, race, sin and redemption into a thing of terrible beauty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review The Poisonwood Bible, now celebrating its 25th anniversary, established Barbara Kingsolver as one of the most thoughtful and daring of modern writers. Taking its place alongside the classic works of postcolonial literature, it is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in Africa. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. The novel is set against one of the most dramatic political chronicles of the twentieth century: the Congo's fight for independence from Belgium, the murder of its first elected prime minister, the CIA coup to install his replacement, and the insidious progress of a world economic order that robs the fledgling African nation of its autonomy. Against this backdrop, Orleanna Price reconstructs the story of her evangelist husband's part in the Western assault on Africa, a tale indelibly darkened by her own losses and unanswerable questions about her own culpability. Also narrating the story, by turns, are her four daughters—the teenaged Rachel; adolescent twins Leah and Adah; and Ruth May, a prescient five-year-old. These sharply observant girls, who arrive in the Congo with racial preconceptions forged in 1950s Georgia, will be marked in surprisingly different ways by their father's intractable mission, and by Africa itself. Ultimately each must strike her own separate path to salvation. Their passionately intertwined stories become a compelling exploration of moral risk and personal responsibility.

Download or read book The Lacuna written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2009-11-05 with total page 680 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **NOW INCLUDING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF DEMON COPPERHEAD** TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION FROM THE WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR 'Lush.' Sunday Times 'Superb.' Daily Mail 'Elegantly written.' Sunday Telegraph From award-winning and internationally bestselling author of Demon Copperhead and Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna is the heartbreaking story of a man torn between the warm heart of Mexico and the cold embrace of 1950s America in the shadow of Senator McCarthy. Born in America and raised in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd is a liability to his social-climbing flapper mother, Salome. When he starts work in the household of Mexican artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo - where the Bolshevik leader, Lev Trotsky, is also being harboured as a political exile - he inadvertently casts his lot with art, communism and revolution. A compulsive diarist, he records and relates his colourful experiences of life with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Trotsky in the midst of the Mexican revolution. A violent upheaval sends him back to America; but political winds continue to throw him between north and south, in a plot that turns many times on the unspeakable breach - the lacuna - between truth and public presumption.

Download or read book How to Fly written by Barbara Kingsolver and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: **NOW INCLUDING THE FIRST CHAPTER OF DEMON COPPERHEAD** FROM THE WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR> The poems of How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) find breath and lightness in the common business of living. Barbara Kingsolver's generous collection is divided into thematic sections that loop and interweave to form a carefully patterned whole: a series of 'How to' poems that smartly balance tongue-in-cheek pragmatism with revelatory wisdom, a complicated yet affirmative family pilgrimage to Italy, cherished childhood memories, the perils and pleasures of being a [female] writer, elegies to lost loved ones, and elegies to the planet. Blending resourcefulness and wonder with all the compassionate humanity of her prose, How to Fly will both delight Kingsolver's devoted readership and welcome a host of new readers to her startling verse, while revealing an intimate side to her creative practice as yet unseen.

Download or read book A Supposedly Fun Thing I ll Never Do Again written by David Foster Wallace and published by Back Bay Books. This book was released on 2009-11-23 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These widely acclaimed essays from the author of Infinite Jest -- on television, tennis, cruise ships, and more -- established David Foster Wallace as one of the preeminent essayists of his generation. In this exuberantly praised book -- a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner -- David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.