Search:

Results 291 to 300 of 384 | « previous |

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
unAPI

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: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

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: 2 / Total copies: 2
unAPI

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
unAPI

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
unAPI

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,
unAPI

Betrayal / by Stockwin, Julian.;
Cape Colony is proving a tiresome assignment for Captain Kydd's commander-in-chief Commodore Popham. Rumours that Spain's South American colonies are in a ferment of popular unrest and of a treasure hoard of silver spur him to assemble a makeshift invasion fleet and launch a bold attack on the capital of the Viceroyalty, Buenos Aires.
Subjects: Sea stories.; Kydd, Thomas (Fictitious character); Seafaring life;
© 2012., Hodder & Stoughton,
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The Lies They Told [electronic resource] : by Wiseman, Ellen Marie.aut; CloudLibrary;
In rural 1930s Virginia, a young immigrant mother fights for her dignity and those she loves against America’s rising eugenics movement – when widespread support for policies of prejudice drove imprisonment and forced sterilizations based on class, race, disability, education, and country of origin – in this tragic and uplifting novel of social injustice, survival, and hope for readers of Susan Meissner, Kristin Hannah, and Christina Baker Kline. When Lena Conti—a young, unwed mother—sees immigrant families being forcibly separated on Ellis Island, she vows not to let the officers take her two-year old daughter. But the inspection process is more rigorous than she imagined, and she is separated from her mother and teenage brother, who are labeled burdens to society, denied entry, and deported back to Germany. Now, alone but determined to give her daughter a better life after years of living in poverty and near starvation, she finds herself facing a future unlike anything she had envisioned. Silas Wolfe, a widowed family relative, reluctantly brings Lena and her daughter to his weathered cabin in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains to care for his home and children. Though the hills around Wolfe Hollow remind Lena of her homeland, she struggles to adjust. Worse, she is stunned to learn the children in her care have been taught to hide when the sheriff comes around. As Lena meets their neighbors, she realizes the community is vibrant and tight knit, but also senses growing unease. The State of Virginia is scheming to paint them as ignorant, immoral, and backwards so they can evict them from their land, seize children from parents, and deal with those possessing “inferior genes.” After a social worker from the Eugenics Office accuses Lena of promiscuity and feeblemindedness, her own worst fears come true. Sent to the Virginia State Colony for the Feebleminded and Epileptics, Lena face impossible choices in hopes of reuniting with her daughter—and protecting the people, and the land, she has grown to love.General adult.
Subjects: Electronic books.; Literary; Historical; Coming of Age;
© 2025., Kensington Books,
unAPI

The decline and fall of the human empire : why our species is on the edge of extinction / by Gee, Henry,1962-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."By the award-winning author of A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: a history of humanity on the brink of decline. We are living through a period that is unique in human history. For the first time in more than ten thousand years, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. In the middle of this century population growth will stop, and the number of people on Earth will start to decline-fast. In this provocative book, award-winning science writer Henry Gee offers a concise, brilliantly-told history of our species--and argues that we are on a rapid, one-way trip to extinction. The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire narrates the dramatic rise of humanity, how a scattered range of small groups across several continents eventually inbred, interacted, fought, established stable communities and food supplies, and began the process of dominating the planet. The human story is relatively brief-the oldest fossils of H. Sapiens date to approximately 300,000 years ago-yet the spread of our species has been unstoppable ... until recently. As Gee demonstrates, our population has peaked, and is declining; our environment is becoming inimical to human life in many locations; our core resources of water, arable land, and air are diminishing; and new diseases, simmering conflicts, and ambiguous technologies threaten our collective health. Can we still change our course? Or is our own extinction inevitable? There could be a way out, but the launch window is narrow. Unless Homo sapiens establishes successful colonies in space within the next two centuries, our species is likely to stay earthbound and will have vanished entirely within another ten thousand years, bringing the seven-million-year story of the human lineage to an end. With assured narration, dramatic stories, and his signature sprightly humor, Henry Gee envisions new opportunities for the future of humanity--a future that will reward facing challenges with ingenuity, foresight, and cooperation"--
Subjects: Human beings; Human evolution.; Philosophical anthropology.;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. a true and exact accounting of the history of Turtle Island / by Monkman, Kent,author,artist.; Gordon, Gisèle,author,artist.;
Includes bibliographical references."From global art superstar Kent Monkman and his longtime collaborator Gisèle Gordon, a transformational work of true stories and imagined history that will remake readers' understanding of the land called North America. For decades, the singular and provocative paintings by Cree artist Kent Monkman have featured a recurring character--an alter ego of sorts, a shape-shifting, time-travelling elemental being named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. Though we have glimpsed her across the years, and on countless canvases, it is finally time to hear her story, in her own words. And, in doing so, to hear the whole history of Turtle Island anew. The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island is a genre-demolishing work of genius, the imagined history of a legendary figure through which a profound truths emerge--a deeply Cree and gloriously queer understanding of our shared world, its past, its present, and its possibilities. Volume Two, which takes us from the moment of confederation to the present day, is a heartbreaking and intimate examination of the tragedies of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Zeroing in on the story of one family told across generations, Miss Chief bears witness to the genocidal forces and structures that dispossessed and attempted to erase Indigenous peoples. Featuring many figures pulled from history as well as new individuals created for this story, Volume Two explores the legacy of colonial violence in the children's work camps (called residential schools by some), the Sixties Scoop, and the urban disconnection of contemporary life. Ultimately, it is a story of resilience and reconnection, and charts the beginnings of an Indigenous future that is deeply rooted in an experience of Indigenous history--a perspective Miss Chief, a millennia-old legendary being, can offer like none other. Blending history, fiction, and memoir in bold new ways, The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle are unlike anything published before. And in their power to reshape our shared understanding, they promise to change the way we see everything that lies ahead."--
Subjects: Biographies.; Creative nonfiction.; Personal narratives.; Monkman, Kent.; Indigenous peoples in art.; Indigenous peoples; Indigenous peoples; Indigenous peoples; First Nations artists; First Nations in art.; First Nations; First Nations; First Nations;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Results 291 to 300 of 384 | « previous |