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The looting machine : warlords, oligarchs, corporations, smugglers, and the theft of Africa's wealth / by Burgis, Tom.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.A curse of riches -- Futungo, Inc. -- "It is forbidden to piss in the park" -- Incubators of poverty -- Guanxi -- when elephants fight, the grass gets trampled -- A bridge to Beijing -- Finance and cyanide -- God has nothing to do with it -- Black gold -- the new money kings -- Complicity.The trade in oil, gas, gems, metals and rare earth minerals wreaks havoc in Africa. During the years when Brazil, India, China and the other "emerging markets" have transformed their economies, Africa's resource states remained tethered to the bottom of the industrial supply chain. While Africa accounts for about 30 per cent of the world's reserves of hydrocarbons and minerals and 14 per cent of the world's population, its share of global manufacturing stood in 2011 exactly where it stood in 2000: at 1 percent. In his first book, The Looting Machine , Tom Burgis exposes the truth about the African development miracle: for the resource states, it's a mirage. The oil, copper, diamonds, gold and coltan deposits attract a global network of traders, bankers, corporate extractors and investors who combine with venal political cabals to loot the states' value. And the vagaries of resource-dependent economies could pitch Africa's new middle class back into destitution just as quickly as they climbed out of it. The ground beneath their feet is as precarious as a Congolese mine shaft; their prosperity could spill away like crude from a busted pipeline. This catastrophic social disintegration is not merely a continuation of Africa's past as a colonial victim. The looting now is accelerating as never before. As global demand for Africa's resources rises, a handful of Africans are becoming legitimately rich but the vast majority, like the continent as a whole, is being fleeced. Outsiders tend to think of Africa as a great drain of philanthropy. But look more closely at the resource industry and the relationship between Africa and the rest of the world looks rather different.LSC
Subjects: Mineral industries; Mines and mineral resources;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Albion : a novel / by Hope, Anna,1974-author.;
"A finely crafted, propulsive, and nuanced story of family, inheritance, and accountability that shakes the country house novel to its foundations from the internationally acclaimed author of Expectation. The Brookes are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home-twenty bedrooms of carved Sussex sandstone-to bury their patriarch, Philip. Father, grandfather, husband, landowner, one-time hippy, long-time philanderer, Philip was the blinding sun around which the family has orbited their entire lives. Eldest daughter Frannie, inheritor of a thousand acres of English countryside, mother to a daughter whose future she fears for, dreams of rewilding and returning the estate to nature: a last line of defense against the coming climate catastrophe. Her brother Milo envisages a treetop haven for the super-rich where, under the influence of psychedelic drugs, a new ruling class will be reborn to create a better world. Each believes their father has given them his blessing and are set on a collision course with the other. Isa, Philip's estranged youngest child, only hopes to reconnect with her childhood love who still lives on the estate, to discover if her feelings for him are creating the fault lines in her marriage. Grace, bruised and diminished after fifty years in a loveless marriage, is at a crossroads, wondering whether she may finally have the strength to choose between freedom and duty. And then there is Clara, who arrives from America, shrouded in secrets and bearing a truth that will fracture the dreams on which they've built their lives. Beautifully layered and utterly compelling, Anna Hope's multigenerational saga is a bold, brilliant, and deeply contemporary examination of family dynamics, colonial legacies, and class, set against the backdrop of the climate crisis"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Novels.; Families; Family secrets; Inheritance and succession; Secrecy; Siblings;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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A coastline is an immeasurable thing : a memoir across three continents / by Daniel, Mary-Alice,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."Mary-Alice Daniel's family moved from West Africa to England when she was a very young girl, leaving behind the vivid culture of her native land in the Nigerian savanna. They arrived to a blanched, cold world of prim suburbs and unfamiliar customs. So began her family's series of travels across three continents in search of places of belonging. A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing ventures through the physical and mythical landscapes of Daniel's upbringing. Against the backdrop of a migratory adolescence, she reckons with race, religious conflict, culture clash, and a multiplicity of possible identities. Daniel lays bare the lives and legends of her parents and past generations, unearthing the tribal mythologies that shaped her kin and her own way of being in the world. The impossible question of which tribe to claim as her own is one she has long struggled with: the Nigerian government recognizes her as Longuda, her father's tribe; according to matrilineal tradition, Daniel belongs to her mother's tribe, the nomadic Fulani; and the language she grew up speaking is that of the Hausa tribe. But her strongest emotional connection is to her adopted home: California, the final place she reveals to readers through its spellbinding history. Daniel's approach is deeply personal: in order to reclaim her legacies, she revisits her unsettled childhood and navigates the traditions of her ancestors. Her layered narratives invoke the contrasting spiritualities of her tribes: Islam, Christianity, and magic. A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing is a powerful cultural distillation of mythos and ethos, mapping the far-flung corners of the Black diaspora that Daniel inherits and inhabits. Through lyrical observation and deep introspection, she probes the bonds and boundaries of Blackness, from bygone colonial empires to her present home in America"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Daniel, Mary-Alice.; African American poets; African American women poets; Nigerian Americans; Poets; Women poets;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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The limits / by Freudenberger, Nell,author.;
From Mo'orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obsessed with saving Polynesia's imperiled coral reefs sends her teenage daughter to live with her ex-husband in New York. By the time fifteen-year-old Pia arrives at her father Stephen's luxury apartment in Manhattan and meets his new, younger wife, Kate, she has been shuttled between her parents' disparate lives -- her father's consuming work as a surgeon at an overwhelmed New York hospital, her mother's relentless drive against a ticking ecological clock -- for most of her life. Fluent in French, intellectually precocious, moving between cultures with seeming ease, Pia arrives in New York poised for a rebellion, just as COVID sends her and her stepmother together into near total isolation. A New York City schoolteacher, Kate struggles to connect with a teenager whose capacity for destruction seems exceeded only by her privilege. Even as Kate fails to parent Pia -- and questions her own ability to become a mother -- one of her sixteen-year-old students is already caring for a toddler full time. Athyna's love for her nephew, Marcus, is a burden that becomes heavier as she struggles to finish her senior year online. Juggling her manifold responsibilities, Athyna finds herself more and more anxious every time she leaves the house. Just as her fear of what is waiting for her outside her Staten Island community feels insupportable, an incident at home makes her desperate to leave. When their lives collide, Pia and Athyna spiral toward parallel but inescapably different tragedies. Moving from a South Pacific "paradise," where rage still simmers against the colonial government and its devastating nuclear tests, to the extreme inequalities of twenty-first century New York City, The Limits is an unforgettably moving novel about nation, race, class, and family. Heart-wrenching and humane, a profound work from one of America's most prodigiously gifted novelists.
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Novels.; Dysfunctional families; Motherhood; Teenagers; COVID-19 Pandemic, 2020-;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Reconciling : a lifelong struggle to belong / by Grant, Larry(Musqueam Elder),author.; Steedman, Scott,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A celebration and in-depth exploration of Canada's West Coast through an Indigenous and immigrant lens. Reconciling weaves together personal tales and tough histories for guiding steps toward true understanding. A personal and historical story of identity, place, and belonging from a Musqueam-Chinese Elder caught between cultures. It's taken most of Larry Grant's long life for his extraordinary heritage to be appreciated. He was born in a hop field outside Vancouver in 1936, the son of a Musqueam cultural leader and an immigrant from a village in Guangdong, China. In 1940, when the Indian agent discovered that their mother had married a non-status man, Larry and his two siblings were stripped of their status, suddenly labeled "bastard children." With one stroke of the pen, they were no longer recognized as Indigenous. In Reconciling, Larry tells the story of his life, including his thoughts on reconciliation and the path forward for First Nations and Canada. His life echoes the barely known story of Vancouver -- and most cities in the Americas, from Cusco to Mexico City, from New York to Toronto. It combines Indigenous traditions with key events of the last two centuries, including Chinese immigration and the Head Tax, the ravages of residential school, and now Indigenous revival and the accompanying change in worldview. Each chapter takes the form of a series of conversations between Larry and writer Scott Steedman and is built around one pivotal geographical place and its themes, including the Musqueam reserve, Chinatown, the site of the Mission Residential School, the Vancouver docks, and the University of British Columbia. When Larry talks about reconciliation, he uses the verb reconciling, an ongoing, unfinished process we're all going through, Indigenous and settler, immigrant and Canadian-born. 'I have been reconciling my whole life, with my inner self,' he explains. 'To not belong was forced upon me by the colonial society that surrounded me. But reconciling with myself is part of all that.'"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Grant, Larry (Musqueam Elder); Chinese Canadians; First Nations; Musqueam;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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Five seasons of Charlie Francis / by Roache, Danica,author.;
"A bold, refreshing, and darkly funny debut novel about a mixed-ancestry Mi'kmaw woman balancing academia, grief, love, and new motherhood, for fans of Fleabag and Amanda Peters. When the tides in the Cobequid Bay went out and left stretches of mudflats, I could walk halfway to the other shore. Sometimes the mud engulfed my feet, right up to my ankles, and made it hard to move. The longer you stayed stuck, the harder it was to keep going.​​ Charlie Francis's five-year plan has gone to shit. She was supposed to greet the new millennium by diving head-first into a master's degree, but her thesis has ground to a halt, Y2K was a bust, her rambunctious family and claustrophobic hometown are driving her around the bend--and the maybe-love-of-her-life, Adam, keeps joking about her moving home to marry him and have his babies. When Charlie's beloved uncle--the same person who told her to get out of town and never look back--dies suddenly, Charlie leans into her independence, breaking Adam's heart and rushing headlong into an academic career despite the baked-in racism of the predominantly white institution. When she unexpectedly becomes pregnant, she has to navigate being a (mostly) single mother on top of everything else. Charlie finds herself at a crossroads--and only so much stress-baking can keep reality at bay. How can she reconcile being a student of history within the colonial system that exploited her ancestors? How can she be a good mother when she can barely afford groceries? And how can she be a proud Mi'kmaw woman when the world seems determined to keep her down? Maybe it's time for a new five-year plan. With grit, humour, a lovable cast, and the nostalgia of the early aughts, this bold and refreshing novel from a powerful new voice in Indigenous fiction explores grief, the complex bonds of family, and cultural identity."--
Subjects: Bildungsromans.; Domestic fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Grief; Identity (Psychology); Indigenous women; Single mothers; Women college teachers; Mi'kmaq;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
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In winter I get up at night / by Urquhart, Jane,author.;
Includes bibliographical references.In the early morning dark, Emer McConnell rises for a day of teaching music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. While she travels the snowy roads in the gathering light, she begins another journey, one of recollection and introspection, and one that, through the course of Jane Urquhart's brilliant new novel, will leave the reader forever changed. Moving as effortlessly through time as the drift of memory itself, In Winter I Get Up at Night brings Emer and her singular story to life. At the age of 11, she is terribly injured in an enormous prairie storm--the "great wind" that shifts her trajectory forever. As she recovers, separated from her family in a children's ward, Emer gets to know her fellow patients, a memorable group including a child performer who stars in a travelling theatre company, the daughter of a Dukhobor community, and the son of a leftist Jewish farm collective. The children are tended to by three nursing sisters and two doctors, whom the ever-imaginative Emer comes to call Doctor Angel and Doctor Carpenter. Emer's tale grows outwards from that ward, reaching through time and space in a dreamlike fashion, recounting the stories of her mother's entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher; her brother's dawning spirituality, which eventually leads him to the priesthood; the remarkable lives of the nuns who care for her; and the passionate yet distant love affair of Emer and an enigmatic man she calls Harp--a brilliant scientist whose great discovery has forever altered millions of lives around the world. In luminous prose, and with exhilarating nuance and depth, Jane Urquhart charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the twentieth century--colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines. In Winter I Get Up at Night is a major work of imagination and self-exploration from one of the greatest writers of our time.
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Country life; Families; Interpersonal relations; Life change events; Recollection (Psychology); Women teachers; Women;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 2
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1666 : a novel / by Chilton, Lora,author.;
Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-200)."The survival story of the Patawomeck Tribe of Virginia has been remembered within the tribe for generations, but the massacre of Patawomeck men and the enslavement of women and children by land hungry colonists in 1666 has been mostly unknown outside of the tribe until now. Author Lora Chilton, a member of the tribe through the lineage of her father, has created this powerful fictional retelling of the survival of the tribe through the lives of three women. 1666: After the Massacre is the imagined story of the indigenous Patawomeck women who lived through the decimation of their tribe in the summer of 1666. Told in first person point of view, this historical novel is the harrowing account of the Patawomeck women who were sold and transported to Barbados via slave ship. The women are separated and bought by different sugar plantations, and their experiences as slaves diverge as they encounter the decadence and clashing cultures of the Anglican, Quaker, Jewish and African populations living in sugar rich "Little England" in the 1660's. The book explores the Patawomeck customs around food, family and rites of passage that defined daily life before the tribe was condemned to "utter destruction" by vote of the Virginia General Assembly. The desire to return to the land they call home fuels the women as they bravely plot their escape from Barbados. With determination and guile, Ah'SaWei WaTaPaAnTam (Golden Fawn) and NePa'WeXo (Shining Moon) are able to board separate ships and make their way back to Virginia to be reunited with the remnant of the tribe that remained. It is because of these women that the tribe is in existence to this day. This work of historical fiction is based on oral tradition, written colonial records and extensive research by the author, including study of the language. The book uses indigenous names for the characters and some of the Patawomeck language to honor the culture and heritage that was erased when European colonization of the Americans began in the 16th century. The book includes a glossary for readers unfamiliar with the language and names"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Novels.; Enslaved persons; Indigenous peoples; Indigenous women; Indigenous women; Massacres; Potomac Indians;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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Everything the light touches : a novel / by Pariat, Janice,author.;
Everything the Light Touches is Janice Pariat's magnificent epic of travelers, of discovery, of time, of science, of human connection, and of the impermanent nature of the universe and life itself--a bold and brilliant saga that unfolds through the adventures and experiences of four intriguing characters. Shai is a young woman in modern India. Lost and drifting, she travels to her country's Northeast and rediscovers, through her encounters with indigenous communities, ways of being that realign and renew her. Evelyn is a student of science in Edwardian England. Inspired by Goethe's botanical writings, she leaves Cambridge on a quest to wander the sacred forests of the Lower Himalayas. Linnaeus, a botanist and taxonomist who famously declared "God creates; Linnaeus organizes," sets off on an expedition to an unfamiliar world, the far reaches of Lapland in 1732. Goethe is a philosopher, writer, and one of the greatest minds of his age. While traveling through Italy in the 1780s, he formulates his ideas for "The Metamorphosis of Plants," a little-known, revelatory text that challenges humankind's propensity to reduce plants--and the world--into immutable parts. Drawn richly from scientific and botanical ideas, Everything the Light Touches is a swirl of ever-expanding themes: the contrasts between modern India and its colonial past, urban and rural life, capitalism and centuries-old traditions of generosity and gratitude, script and "song and stone." Pulsating at its center is the dichotomy between different ways of seeing, those that fix and categorize and those that free and unify. Pariat questions the imposition of fixity--of our obsession to place permanence on plants, people, stories, knowledge, land--where there is only movement, fluidity, and constant transformation. "To be still," says a character in the book, "is to be without life." Everything the Light Touches brings together, with startling and playful novelty, people and places that seem, at first, removed from each other in time and place. Yet as it artfully reveals, all is resonance; all is connection.
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Nature fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1749-1832; Linné, Carl von, 1707-1778; Botany; Women;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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An Accidental Villain A Soldier's Tale of War, Deceit and Exile [electronic resource] : by MacIntyre, Linden.aut; CloudLibrary;
From the bestselling, prize-winning author Linden MacIntyre comes an engrossing, page-turning exploration of the little-known life of Sir Hugh Tudor. Appointed by his friend Winston Churchill to lead the police in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, Tudor met civil strife and domestic terrorism with indiscriminate state-sanctioned murder—changing the course of Irish history. After distinguishing himself on the battlefields of the First World War, Major-General Sir Hugh Tudor could have sought a respectable retirement in England, his duty done. But in 1920, his old friend Winston Churchill, Minister of War in Lloyd George’s cabinet, called on Tudor to serve in a very different kind of conflict—one fought in the Irish streets and countryside against an enemy determined to resist British colonial authority to the death. And soon Tudor was directing a police force waging a brutal campaign against rebel “terrorists,” one he was determined to win at all costs—including utilizing police death squads and inflicting brutal reprisals against IRA members and supporters and Sinn Féin politicians. Tudor left few traces of his time in Ireland. No diary or letters that might explain his record as commander of the notorious Black and Tans. Nothing to justify his role in Bloody Sunday, November 21, 1920, when his men infamously slaughtered Irish football fans. And why did a man knighted for his efforts in Ireland leave his family and homeland in 1925, moving across the sea to Newfoundland? Linden MacIntyre has spent four years tracking Tudor through archives, contemporaries’ diaries and letters, and the body count of that Irish war. In An Accidental Villain, he delivers a consequential and fascinating account of how events can bring a man to the point where he acts against his own training, principles and inclination in the service of a cause—and ends up on a long journey toward personal oblivion.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Ireland; Post-Confederation (1867-);
© 2025., Random House of Canada,
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