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Journey from the land of no : a girlhood caught in revolutionary Iran
Hakk¯akiy¯an, Ru'y¯a.
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2004; x, 245 p. : map ; 22 cm.
"In Journey from the Land of No Roya Hakakian recalls her childhood and adolescence in prerevolutionary Iran. The result is a coming-of-age story about one deeply intelligent and perceptive girl's attempt to find an authentic voice of her own at a time of cultural closing and repression. She manages to re-create a time and place dominated by religious fanaticism, violence, and fear with an open heart and often with great humor." "Hakakian was twelve years old in 1979 when the revolution swept through Tehran. The daughter of an esteemed poet, she grew up in a household that hummed with intellectual life. But the Hakakians were also part of the very small Jewish population in Iran who witnessed the iron fist of the Islamic fundamentalists increasingly tightening its grip. It is with the innocent confusion of youth that Roya describes her discovery of a swastika - "a plus sign gone awry, a dark reptile with four hungry claws" - painted on the wall near her home. As a schoolgirl she watched as friends accused of reading blasphemous books were escorted from class by Islamic Society guards, never to return. Only much later did Roya learn that she was spared a similar fate because her teacher admired her writing." "Hakakian relates in the most poignant, and at times painful, ways what life was like for women after the country fell into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who had declared an insidious war against them, but we see it all through the eyes of a strong, youthful optimist who somehow came up in the world believing that she was different, knowing she was special. At her loneliest, Roya discovers the consolations of writing while sitting on the rooftop of her house late at night. And she discovers the craft that would ultimately enable her to find her own voice and become her own person."--BOOK JACKET.
-- summary Produced by Blackwell's Book Services; distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (Terms of Use)
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Kaaterskill falls : a novel
Goodman, Allegra.
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1998; 324 p. cm.
In the summer of '76, the Shulmans and the Melishes migrate to Kaaterskill, the tiny town in upstate New York where Orthodox Jews and Yankee year-rounders live side by side from June through August. Elizabeth Shulman, a devout follower of Rav Elijah Kirshner and the mother of five daughters, is restless. She needs a project of her own, outside her family and her cloistered community. Across the street, Andras Melish is drawn to Kaaterskill by his adoring older sisters, bound to him by their loss and wrenching escape from the Holocaust. Both comforted and crippled by his sisters' love, Andras cannot overcome the ambivalence he feels toward his children and his own beautiful wife. At the top of the hill, Rav Kirshner is coming to the end of his life, and he struggles to decide which of his sons should succeed him: the pious but stolid Isaiah, or the brilliant but worldly Jeremy. Behind the scenes, alarmed as his beloved Kaaterskill is overdeveloped by Michael King, the local real estate broker, Judge Miles Taylor keeps an old secret in check, biding his time....
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Snow
Pamuk, Orhan, 1952-
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2004; 425 p. ; 25 cm.
"Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiosity - a frozen sea these many years - leads him to Kars, a far-off town near the Russian border and the epicenter of the suicides." "No sooner has he arrived, however, than we discover that Ka's motivations are not purely journalistic; for in Kars, once a province of Ottoman and then Russian glory, now a cultural gray-zone of poverty and paralysis, there is also Ipek, a radiant friend of Ka's youth, lately divorced, whom he has never forgotten. As a snowstorm, the fiercest in memory, descends on the town and seals it off from the modern, westernized world that has always been Ka's frame of reference, he finds himself drawn in unexpected directions: not only headlong toward the unknowable Ipek and the desperate hope for love - or at least a wife - that she embodies, but also into the maelstrom of a military coup staged to restrain the local Islamist radicals, and even toward God, whose existence Ka has never before allowed himself to contemplate. In this surreal confluence of emotion and spectacle, Ka begins to tap his dormant creative powers, producing poem after poem in untimely, irresistible bursts of inspiration. But not until the snows have melted and the political violence has run its bloody course will Ka discover the fate of his bid to seize a last chance for happiness."--BOOK JACKET.
-- summary Produced by Blackwell's Book Services; distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (Terms of Use)
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Nine suitcases : a memoir/ Béla Zsolt ; translated from the Hungarian by Ladislaus Löb.
Zsolt, Béla, 1895-1949.
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2004; x, 324 p. ; 24 cm.
Suppressed by the Communists for nearly forty years and never before published in English, Nine Suitcases is one of the first—and greatest—memoirs of the Holocaust ever written. Originally published in Hungary in weekly installments starting in 1946, it tells the harrowing story of Béla Zsolt’s experiences in the ghetto and as a forced laborer in the Ukraine. It gives not only a rare insight into Hungarian fascism, but also a shocking exposure to the cruelty, indifference, selfishness, cowardice and betrayal of which human beings—the victims no less than the perpetrators—are capable in extreme circumstances. Apart from being one of the earliest writers on the Holocaust, Zsolt is also one of the most powerful. He bears comparison with Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, or Imre Kertész. Both an accomplished novelist and a highly skilled journalist, he was reporting and analyzing these appalling events soon after they occurred with exceptional clarity and a devastating blend of angry despair and cool detachment. Zsolt was spared Auschwitz, but he witnessed and suffered some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust elsewhere; his nightmarish but meticulously realistic chronicle of smaller and larger crimes against humanity is as riveting as it is horrifying. The rediscovery and publication of Nine Suitcases is an event of great historical importance.
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Kindred
Butler, Octavia E.
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2003; 287 p. ; 21 cm.
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned across the years to save him. After this first summons, Dana is drawn back, again and again, to the plantation to protect Rufus and ensure that he will grow to manhood and father the daughter who will become Dana's ancestor. Yet each time Dana's sojourns become longer and more dangerous, until it is uncertain whether or not her life will end, long before it has even begun. Book jacket.
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The kite runner
Hosseini, Khaled.
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2003; 324 p. ; 24 cm.
"Taking us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds; Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant, is a Hazara, member of a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When the Soviets invade and Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him." "The Kite Runner is a novel about friendship, betrayal, and the price of loyalty. It is about the bonds between fathers and sons, and the power of fathers over sons - their love, their sacrifices, and their lies. Written against a backdrop of history that has not been told in fiction before. The Kite Runner describes the rich culture and beauty of a land in the process of being destroyed. But with the devastation, Khaled Hosseini also gives us hope: through the novel's faith in the power of reading and storytelling, and in the possibilities he shows for redemption."--BOOK JACKET.
-- summary Produced by Blackwell's Book Services; distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (Terms of Use)
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The known world
Jones, Edward P.
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2003; 388 p. ; 24 cm.
"Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor - William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation - as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend estate, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave "speculators" sell free black people into slavery, and rumors of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years."--BOOK JACKET.
-- summary Produced by Blackwell's Book Services; distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (Terms of Use)
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The laments : a novel
Hagen, George, 1958-
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2004; 370 p. ; 25 cm.
As odd as the globetrotting Lament family is, Hagen's feat is to make them universal through their restlessness, their responses to adversity, and especially their unwieldy love for each other.
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Murder on a kibbutz : a communal case
Gur, Batya.
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1994; 350 p. ; 21 cm.
In Gur's third mystery, clever, charming Israeli investigator Michael Ohayon, whom readers fell in love with in Saturday Morning Murder and Literary Murder, must once again put his skills to work to solve a murder, this time within the complex, closed society of a kibbutz.
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Love
Morrison, Toni.
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2003; 201 p. ; 25 cm.
"May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L: all women obsessed with Bill Cosey. The wealthy owner of the famous Cosey's Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is either the void in, or the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces - a troubles past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial." "This audacious exploration into the nature of love - its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread - is rich in characters, striking scenes, and a profound understanding of how alive the past can be."--BOOK JACKET.
-- summary Produced by Blackwell's Book Services; distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc. (Terms of Use)
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The loved one : an Anglo-American tragedy
Waugh, Evelyn, 1903-1966.
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1999; 164 p. : port. ; 20 cm.
Mr. Joyboy, an embalmer, and Aimee Thanatogenos, crematorium cosmetician, find their romance complicated by the appearance of a young English poet.
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Memento mori
Spark, Muriel.
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1959; 224 p. ; 20 cm.
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