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The Probability of Everything
Par Sarah Everett. 2023
“One of the best books I have read this year (maybe ever).” —Colby Sharp, Nerdy Book ClubNPR Books We Love…
2023 | Publishers Weekly Best of 2023 | Winner of the Governor General's Literary Awards for Young People's LiteratureA heart-wrenching middle grade debut about Kemi, an aspiring scientist who loves statistics and facts, as she navigates grief and loss at a moment when life as she knows it changes forever.Eleven-year-old Kemi Carter loves scientific facts, specifically probability. It's how she understands the world and her place in it. Kemi knows her odds of being born were 1 in 5.5 trillion and that the odds of her having the best family ever were even lower. Yet somehow, Kemi lucked out.But everything Kemi thought she knew changes when she sees an asteroid hover in the sky, casting a purple haze over her world. Amplus-68 has an 84.7% chance of colliding with earth in four days, and with that collision, Kemi’s life as she knows it will end.But over the course of the four days, even facts don’t feel true to Kemi anymore. The new town she moved to that was supposed to be “better for her family” isn’t very welcoming. And Amplus-68 is taking over her life, but others are still going to school and eating at their favorite diner like nothing has changed. Is Kemi the only one who feels like the world is ending?With the days numbered, Kemi decides to put together a time capsule that will capture her family’s truth: how creative her mother is, how inquisitive her little sister can be, and how much Kemi's whole world revolves around her father. But no time capsule can change the truth behind all of it, that Kemi must face the most inevitable and hardest part of life: saying goodbye."My heart hurt as I raced through the last chapters of this unique book that shines a light on family, friends, grief, and love." —Lisa Yee, author of Maizy Chen's Last ChanceThe Afro-Latin Diaspora: Awakening Ancestral Memory, Avoiding Cultural Amnesia
Par Jameelah Xochitl Medina. 2004
This bookis Jameelah's contribution to avoiding Afro-Latin American cultural andhistorical amnesia. This book highlights the many contributions of theseforgotten people…
of Latin America, including African and Afro-Latin Americanheroes and freedom-fighters, religious and cultural traditions, and currentsocial issues of ethnic and cultural identity.This book charts the journey of British General Practitioners (GPs) towards professional self-realisation through the development of a political consciousness…
manifested in a series of bruising encounters with government. GPs are an essential part of the social fabric of modern Britain but as a group have always felt undervalued, clashing with successive governments over the terms on which they offered their services to the public. Explaining the background to these disputes and the motives of GPs from a sociological perspective, this research casts new light on some defining moments in the creation of the modern British state, from National Health Insurance to the National Health Service, and the history of the British medical profession. It examines these events from the point of view of the professionals intimately involved in and affected by them, using both established sources, like Ministry of Health records, an in-depth analysis of rarely studied records of professional bodies, and previously unresearched archive material. The result is a fascinating account of conflict and cooperation, and of heroic, and less-than-heroic, defiance of political authority, involving interactions between complex personalities and competing ideologies. Scholarly yet readable, this book will be of interest to the general reader as much as to medical practitioners and historians.American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century
Par Shannon Lee Dawdy. 2021
A mesmerizing trip across America to investigate the changing face of death in contemporary lifeDeath in the United States is…
undergoing a quiet revolution. You can have your body frozen, dissected, composted, dissolved, or tanned. Your family can incorporate your remains into jewelry, shotgun shells, paperweights, and artwork. Cremations have more than doubled, and DIY home funerals and green burials are on the rise. American Afterlives is Shannon Lee Dawdy’s lyrical and compassionate account of changing death practices in America as people face their own mortality and search for a different kind of afterlife.As an anthropologist and archaeologist, Dawdy knows that how a society treats its dead yields powerful clues about its beliefs and values. As someone who has experienced loss herself, she knows there is no way to tell this story without also reexamining her own views about death and dying. In this meditative and gently humorous book, Dawdy embarks on a transformative journey across the United States, talking to funeral directors, death-care entrepreneurs, designers, cemetery owners, death doulas, and ordinary people from all walks of life. What she discovers is that, by reinventing death, Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection across generations. She also confronts the seeming contradiction that American death is becoming at the same time more materialistic and more spiritual.Written in conjunction with a documentary film project, American Afterlives features images by cinematographer Daniel Zox that provide their own testament to our rapidly changing attitudes toward death and the afterlife.Summary and Analysis of Victoria: Based on the Book by Julia Baird (Smart Summaries)
Par Worth Books. 2016
So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Victoria: The Queen tells you what you need to…
know—before or after you read Julia Baird&’s book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and gives you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. This short summary and analysis of Victoria: The Queen includes: Historical contextChapter-by-chapter overviewsProfiles of the main charactersDetailed timeline of key eventsImportant quotesFascinating triviaGlossary of termsSupporting material to enhance your understanding of the original workAbout Victoria:The Queen by Julia Baird: Julia Baird explores and unpacks the legend of Victoria: long-reigning monarch, wife, mother, and symbol of the British Empire. Rather than contributing to the myths surrounding this fascinating and complex woman, Baird describes Victoria as she really was: passionate, strong-willed, hot-tempered, hard-working, and desperate to hold on to power and govern her nation while remaining the loyal wife to her beloved Prince Albert. Baird&’s biography takes readers through Queen Victoria&’s life and long reign, giving a clear and lucid analysis of often complex political events and relationships, as well as the personal dynamics of her household, and providing a thorough understanding of a transformative era in British history. The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.Cleanse Their Souls: Peace-Keeping in Bosnia's Civil War, 1992–1993
Par Monty Woolley. 2004
A memoir of the lethal conflict in the former Yugoslavia, by a British soldier who was on the front lines.…
This is a young cavalry lieutenant&’s moving and shocking account of front line service in the cauldron of war. His troop of Scimitar light-armored vehicles was attached to the 1 CHESHIRE Battle Group, under the charismatic command of Colonel Bob Stewart. Fresh from Germany, he and his men found themselves in a highly political and lethally dangerous civil war. They witnessed appalling atrocities and human tragedy on a giant scale. Yet both soldiers and civilians showed massive courage and resilience. Thanks to the author's diary, we have here an extraordinary, spontaneous, and important account of British troops performing vital military and humanitarian tasks, described by war correspondent and MP Martin Bell as &“earning its place among the impartial narratives of the Bosnian War.&”Women of the Third Reich: From Camp Guards to Combatants
Par Tim Heath. 2019
“An intriguing, but also shocking insight into the thoughts of those young German women and how they saw their part…
in Hitler’s thousand-year Reich.” —ArmoramaThe women of the Third Reich were a vital part in a complex and vilified system. What was their role within its administration, the concentration camps, and the Luftwaffe and militia units and how did it evolve in the way it did?We hear from women who issued typewritten dictates from above through to those who operated telephones, radar systems, fought fires as the cities burned around them, drove concentration camp inmates to their deaths like cattle, fired Anti-Aircraft guns at Allied aircraft and entered the militias when faced with the impending destruction of what should have been a one thousand-year Reich.Every testimony is unique, each person a victim of circumstance entwined within the thorns of an ideological obligation. In an interview with Traudl Junge, Hitler’s private secretary, she remembers: ‘There was so much hatred within it’s hard to understand how the state functioned . . . I am convinced all this infighting and competition from the males in Hitler’s circle was highly detrimental to its downfall’.Women of the Third Reich provides an intriguing, humorous, brutal, shocking and unrelenting narrative journey into the half lights of the hell of human consciousness—sometimes at its worst.“Tim Heath investigated the experiences of women in Nazi Germany before and during World War II . . . What is special is that women speak candidly about their experiences, which were sometimes violent.” —Traces of War“A fascinating book, chilling at times.” —Books MonthlyBeyond Coal and Steel: A Social History of Western Europe after the Boom
Par Lutz Raphael. 2023
In the 1970s, the economic and social foundations of Western Europe underwent an unprecedented transformation. Old industries like coal and…
steel disappeared, millions of people lost their jobs and formerly flourishing towns and cities went into decline. Traditional political agendas gave way to new social problems and concerns. What happened to industrial citizens – their workplaces, their careers and their homes? How did social rights and political participation of workers change when markets became global, management lean and financial capital dominant? How did companies change and how were personal skills and work tasks reinvented under the impact of new technologies? How did workers – men and women – live through these decades of uncertainty and upheaval? Lutz Raphael reconstructs the highly variegated story of deindustrialization in Western Europe with a particular focus on Britain, France and West Germany. Extending over three decades, this transformation was accompanied by significant rises in productivity and consumerism, but it also came at a heavy cost, ushering in many low-income jobs, growing inequality and a crisis of democratic representation. Its legacy is everywhere around us today – it is the transformation that has shaped our world.The Republic of China: 1912 to 1949
Par Xavier Paules. 2023
The declaration of the Republic of China in 1912 signalled an entirely new era. Not only did the revolution of…
1911–12 bring about the fall of the Qing dynasty: it also brought an end to the entire series of dynasties that had marked Chinese history for over two millennia. Radical reforms since 1901 had culminated in the ending of the political status quo and the rejection of the very idea of empire. Drawing on the most recent historical research, Xavier Paulès provides a comprehensive account of the crucial but chaotic period that stretched from the founding of the Republic of China in 1912 to the civil war of 1945–9, which ended with the victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the establishment of the People's Republic of China. Paulès challenges various common claims about this period. It is often assumed that the CCP was instrumental in bringing about key events by skilfully mobilizing the population to serve its ends. Paulès argues, by contrast, that the CCP took advantage of fortunate circumstances and that, even then, it was only in a position to challenge the supremacy of the Guomindang as late as 1944. His analysis takes a broad view by considering the importance of political actors both within and external to the revolutionary movement, enabling him to offer a balanced interpretation of the republican period which sheds new light on China’s political, cultural and economic development.Historical Research, Creative Writing, and the Past: Methods of Knowing (Routledge New Textual Studies in Literature)
Par Kevin A. Morrison, Pälvi Rantala. 2023
Although historical research undertaken in different disciplines often requires speculation and imagination, it remains relatively rare for scholars to foreground…
these processes explicitly as a knowing method. Historical Research, Creative Writing, and the Past brings together researchers in a wide array of disciplines, including literary studies and history, ethnography, design, film, and sound studies, who employ imagination, creativity, or fiction in their own historical scholarship or who analyze the use of imagination, creativity, or fiction to make historical claims by others. This volume is organized into four topical sections related to representations of the past—textual and conceptual approaches; material and emotional approaches; speculative and experiential approaches; and embodied methodologies—and covers a variety of temporal periods and geographical contexts. Reflecting on the methodological, theoretical, and ethical underpinnings of writing history creatively or speculatively, the essays situate themselves within current debates over epistemology and interdisciplinarity. They yield new insights into historical research methods, including archival investigations and source criticisms, while offering readers tangible examples of how to do history differently.Pactos de silencio: La historia del caso Lejderman
Par Sofía Tupper Coll. 2023
Investigación periodística sobre el caso de Ernesto Lejderman, huérfano de ejecutados por la dictadura. El 8 de diciembre de 1973,…
Ernesto Lejderman Ávalos, de dos años, fue testigo de cómo una patrulla de militares mató a sus padres en Vicuña, en la región de Coquimbo. Terminó aquel día en un convento de monjas en La Serena, al que fue llevado por el futuro "General de la Transición", Juan Emilio Cheyre. Allí permaneció por tres meses al cuidado de una monja hasta que, gracias a las gestiones de sus abuelos argentinos, salió a Buenos Aires, ciudad donde aún vive, el 8 de enero. La historia del caso Lejderman presenta una investigación acuciosa en la cual Sofía Tupper relata, en el mejor estilo de la crónica latinoamericana, la vida de la familia Lejderman y la lucha vital de aquel niño por obtener verdad y justicia, cuestionando los relatos oficiales y yendo contra toda burocracia. Un caso emblemático de las violaciones a los derechos humanos en dictadura, en particular del feroz paso de la Caravana de la Muerte por la región de Coquimbo. Un libro que se vale de la tragedia de la familia Lejderman Ávalos para dar cuenta, también, de la historia reciente de los derechos humanos en nuestro país.A Kid's Guide to Anime & Manga: Exploring the History of Japanese Animation and Comics
Par Patrick Macias, Samuel Sattin. 2023
Explore the incredible world of anime and manga with this comprehensive, accessible handbook for kids.Celebrate your okatu spirit with this…
inclusive, illustrated guide to anime and manga. Whether you're watching anime on Netflix and Crunchyroll or bringing home stacks of manga from the library, A Kid's Guide to Anime & Manga is THE guide to help you navigate this exciting, growing world.Written by fans, writers and reviewers Samuel Sattin and Patrick Macias, A Kid's Guide to Anime & Manga includes chapters on:§ The history and importance of anime and manga§ How anime and manga are made§ Recommendations of popular series and films to enjoy§ Pro-tips on how to create your own anime and manga and how to get involved in cosplay communitiesComplete with a history of anime and manga, inspiring interviews, pro tips on what to watch and read and ideas for kickstarting your own creativity, A Kid's Guide to Anime & Manga will tell you everything you need to know - and more!A Nasty Little War: The West's Fight to Reverse the Russian Revolution
Par Anna Reid. 2023
'A vivid and sparkling account, full of colour and dark drama' The Observer'Chillingly original' Max Hastings, 'Pick of the Week',…
The Times'Brilliantly depicts a disastrous failure' Antony Beevor'Witty and elegant . . . Excellent background to today's events' Anne Applebaum'Britain's most forgotten war, brilliantly remembered' Simon Jenkins'Vivid and remarkably timely' Martin Sixsmith From the bestselling author of Borderland: A Journey Through the History of UkraineThe extraordinary story of how the West tried to reverse the Russian Revolution. In the closing months of the First World War, Britain, America, France and Japan sent arms and 180,000 soldiers to Russia, with the aim of tipping the balance in her post-revolutionary Civil War. From Central Asia to the Arctic and from Poland to the Pacific, they joined anti-Bolshevik forces in trying to overthrow the new men in the Kremlin, in an astonishingly ambitious military adventure known as the Intervention.Fresh, in the case of the British, from the trenches, they found themselves in a mobile, multi-sided conflict as different as possible from the grim stasis of the Western Front. Criss-crossing the shattered Russian empire in trains, sleds and paddlesteamers, they bivouacked in snowbound cabins and Kirghiz yurts, torpedoed Red battleships from speedboats, improvised new currencies and the world's first air-dropped chemical weapons, got caught up in mass retreats and a typhus epidemic, organised several coups and at least one assassination. Taking tea with warlords and princesses, they also turned a blind eye to their Russian allies' numerous atrocities.Two years later they left again, filing glumly back onto their troopships as port after port fell to the Red Army. Later, American veterans compared the humiliation to Vietnam, and the politicians and generals responsible preferred to trivialise or forget. Drawing on previously unused diaries, letters and memoirs, A Nasty Little War brings an episode with echoes down the century since vividly to life.The Story of Everything
Par Neal Layton. 2023
Discover the mind-blowing story of how everything came to be with award-winning illustrator and author Neal Layton.With a unique collage…
art style, and quirky, engaging text, The Story of Everything explores big ideas in a way that will grip even the most reluctant reader. From the Big Bang theory and the beginnings of life on Earth, through to the evolution of humans, the Ice Age and the building of towns and cities, children will be gripped by the real-life action adventure that is EVERYTHING!The Race to the Future: The Adventure that Accelerated the Twentieth Century
Par Kassia St Clair. 2023
10 June 1907, Peking. Five cars set off in a desperate race across two continents on the verge of revolution.An…
Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a conman and various journalists battle over steep mountain ranges and across the arid vastness of the Gobi Desert. The contestants need teams of helpers to drag their primitive cars up narrow gorges, lift them over rough terrain and float them across rivers. Petrol is almost impossible to find, there are barely any roads, armed bandits and wolves lurk in the forests. Updates on their progress, sent by telegram, are eagerly devoured by millions in one of the first ever global news stories. Their destination: Paris. More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris provided the impetus for profound change. The world of 1907 is poised between the old and the new: communist regimes will replace imperial ones in China and Russia; the telegraph is transforming modern communication and the car will soon displace the horse. In this book bestselling author Kassia St Clair traces the fascinating stories of two interlocking races - setting the derring-do (and sometimes cheating) of one of the world's first car races against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological rush to the future, as the rivalry grows between countries and empires, building up to the cataclysmic event that changed everything - the First World War. The Race to the Future is the incredible true story of the quest against the odds that shaped the world we live in today.PRAISE FOR KASSIA ST CLAIR'Excellent, innovative and idiosyncratic history that will colour your thinking . . . St Clair writes with style, energy and knowledge' SPECTATOR'Hugely ambitious, sparklingly erudite and wonderfully engaging' PETER FRANKOPAN, HISTORY TODAYBorgata: A History of the American Mafia
Par Louis Ferrante. 2010
The American mafia has long held powerful sway over our collective cultural imagination. But how many of us truly understand…
how a clandestine Sicilian criminal organisation came to exert its influence over nearly every level of American society?In BORGATA: RISE OF EMPIRE, former mafia member Louis Ferrante pulls back the curtain on the criminal organisation that transformed America. From the potent political cauldron of nineteenth-century Sicily to American cities such as New Orleans, New York and the gangster's paradise of Las Vegas, Ferrante traces the social, economic and political forces that powered the mafia's unstoppable rise. We follow the early mob as they provide alcohol to the American public during prohibition, aid U. S. Naval Intelligence during the Second World War, establish a gambling mecca in the Nevada desert - and unofficially take control of the island of Cuba.Ferrante's vivid portrayal of early American mobsters - among them Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky - fills in crucial gaps of mafia history to deliver the most comprehensive account yet of the world's most famous criminal fraternity.This volume is the first in a groundbreaking new trilogy from a man who has seen it all from the inside. Ferrante's masterful account journeys from the group's inauspicious beginnings to the height of their power as the most influential organised criminal network in America.We're Going Home: A True Story of Life and Death
Par Cynthia Thayer. 2023
They were an unlikely pair: a “fast and frantic” woman and a steady, “pickin’ at it” man. And even though…
both had been raised in cities and knew nothing about farming, Bill and Cynthia Thayer moved to Maine, started an organic farm, and made it work for more than forty years. Then a mysterious disaster strikes and Bill is found lying in the road. In We’re Going Home, Cynthia relates the aftermath of the accident, interspersed with recollections of her life with her beloved “Farmer Bill,” from their first meeting to their final goodbye—and her life beyond.When Cats Reigned Like Kings: On the Trail of the Sacred Cats
Par Georgie Anne Geyer. 2009
“A lively blend of travel, autobiography and insights . . . explores connections between the royal felines of ancient civilizations and domestic cats.”…
—Midwest Book ReviewChasing an irresistible mystery across the globe, journalist Georgie Anne Geyer conducted exhaustive research into the little-known puzzle of how cats came to occupy their unique position in the lives of humans. Treated with the tenacity, resourcefulness, and narrative instinct of a seasoned foreign correspondent, the investigation yielded unexpected answers—and posed tantalizing new questions. The result is a remarkable book, bound to delight and amaze cat fanciers and adventure seekers.It was Geyer’s curiosity about her own cats that inspired her to study the history of human-feline relations and especially cats’ exalted status among the ancients as royal or sacred beings. Her quest spanned the earth. In Egypt, Geyer learned of the cat-goddess, Bastet, and of the cat’s role in the transmigration of souls. In Myanmar, she saw Leonardo DiCaprio, Ricky Martin, and the other incongruously named cats of the Nga Phe Kyaung monastery, trained by the monks to jump through hoops. She even met a family who dutifully guards the heritage of the Japanese bobtail, cultivating the line in—of all places—rural Virginia.Richly illustrated with photos of Geyer’s journeys and historical cat images, When Cats Reigned Like Kings also presents a Family of Cat section that describes the origins and characteristics of the 38–40 recognized modern cat breeds, including photos of each. “A fascinating trip into the cat world from one cool-cat writer.” —Paul Duke, veteran journalist and moderator of PBS’s Washington Week in Review“[A] charming blend of reportage and personal history.” —Publishers WeeklyBlood in the Forest: The End of the Second World War in the Courland Pocket
Par Vincent Hunt. 2017
With original research and interviews with survivors, a journalist reveals the brutal yet forgotten battles in Latvia during the final…
months of WWII. While the eyes of the world were on Hitler&’s bunker, more than half a million men fought six cataclysmic battles in the fields and forests of Western Latvia known as the Courland Pocket. Just an hour from the capital Riga, German forces bolstered by Latvian Legionnaires were trapped with their backs to the Baltic. Forced into uniform by Nazi and Soviet occupiers, Latvian fought Latvian – sometimes brother against brother. Hundreds of thousands of men died for little territorial gain in unimaginable slaughter. When the Germans capitulated, thousands of Latvians continued a war against Soviet rule from the forests for years afterwards. An award-winning documentary journalist, Vincent Hunt travels through the modern landscape gathering eye-witness accounts, piecing together the stories of those who survived. He meets veterans who fought in the Latvian Legion, former partisans and a refugee who fled the Soviet advance to later become President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga. A survivor of the little-known concentration camp at Popervale details his escape from a death march and subsequent survival in the forests with a Soviet partisan group - and a German deserter. With detailed maps and expert contributions alongside rare newspaper archives, photographs from private collections and extracts from diaries translated from Latvian, German and Russian, Hunt assembles a ghastly picture of death and desperation in a nation both gripped by war and at war with itself.There Is No Blue
Par Martha Baillie. 2023
THE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father's…
life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time. Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author’s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother’s. And then, the shocking death of the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life."Martha Baillie’s novels are thrillingly, joyously singular, that rare combination of sui generis and just plain generous. That There Is No Blue, her memoir, is all of those things too, is no surprise; still, she has gone somewhere extraordinary. This triptych of essays, which exquisitely unfolds the “disobedient tale” of the lives and deaths of her mother, her father, and her sister, is a meditation on the mystery and wonder of grief and art making and home and memory itself. It made me think of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repair, in which the mending is not hidden but featured and beautifully illuminated. Baillie’s variety of attention, carved out of language, is tenderness, is love." – Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women"This is a stunning memoir, intense and meticulous in its observations of family life. Baillie subtly interrogates and conveys the devastating mistranslations that take place in childhood, the antagonism and porousness of siblings, and the tragedy of schizophrenia as it unfolds. I couldn’t put it down." – Dr. Lisa Appignanesi, author of Mad, Bad and Sad and Everyday Madness"Exquisite." – Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife"I am grateful for this profound meditation on family and loss.” – Charlie Kaufman, filmmaker"This strange, unsettling memoir of outer life and inner life and their bizarre twining captures the author’s identity by way of her mother’s death, her sister’s failing battle with mental illness, and the mysterious figure of her father. It combines anguished guilt, deep tenderness, and bemused affection in highly evocative, often disturbing prose. Its brave honesty is amplified by a persistent lyricism; its undercurrent of fear is uplifted by a surprising, resilient hopefulness. It is both a plea for exoneration and an act of exoneration, an authentic meditation on the terrible difficulty of being human." – Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon