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The other mother : a novel / by Harper, Rachel M.,1972-author.;
"Raised by a single mother in Miami, Florida, Jenry Castillo, newly arrived at Brown University on a music scholarship, finds himself searching for information about his late father Jasper Patterson, an internationally recognized principal ballet dancer who died tragically when Jenry was two. Jenry thinks his estranged grandfather, Winston Patterson, a professor of African American history at Brown and a titan in his field, might have the answers he seeks. Already more than a little intimidating, Winston explodes Jenry's world with one question: Why is the young man so interested in his son Jasper? It was Winston's daughter, Juliet, who was his mother's lover. Juliet is the parent he should be looking for--his other mother. Seamlessly moving between the past and the present to piece together the complicated web that has both bound this family together and kept them apart, The Other Mother is a profoundly moving and masterful exploration of the power of love and family; of the intersections of race, class, providence, and sexuality; the role of patriarchy in defining who belongs to whom; and of the relevance of biology in determining familial bonds and what it means to be related. Unfurling in the most surprising and satisfying of ways, revelation follows revelation as each member of Jenry's family peels back layers of a story that is at once deeply familiar-of first love, betrayal, and the selfishness of youth, of the beautiful, complicated love between parents and children-and also compelling in its centering of queer lives and people of color"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Novels.; Birthfathers; Lesbian mothers; Motherhood; Music students; African Americans;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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We don't know ourselves : a personal history of modern Ireland / by O'Toole, Fintan,1958-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."A celebrated Irish writer's magisterial, brilliantly insightful chronicle of the wrenching transformations that dragged his homeland into the modern world. Fintan O'Toole was born in the year the revolution began. It was 1958, and the Irish government?in despair, because all the young people were leaving?opened the country to foreign investment and popular culture. So began a decades-long, ongoing experiment with Irish national identity. In We Don't Know Ourselves, O'Toole, one of the Anglophone world's most consummate stylists, weaves his own experiences into Irish social, cultural, and economic change, showing how Ireland, in just one lifetime, has gone from a reactionary "backwater" to an almost totally open society-perhaps the most astonishing national transformation in modern history. Born to a working-class family in the Dublin suburbs, O'Toole served as an altar boy and attended a Christian Brothers school, much as his forebears did. He was enthralled by American Westerns suddenly appearing on Irish television, which were not that far from his own experience, given that Ireland's main export was beef and it was still not unknown for herds of cattle to clatter down Dublin's streets. Yet the Westerns were a sign of what was to come. O'Toole narrates the once unthinkable collapse of the all-powerful Catholic Church, brought down by scandal and by the activism of ordinary Irish, women in particular. He relates the horrific violence of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which led most Irish to reject violent nationalism. In O'Toole's telling, America became a lodestar, from John F. Kennedy's 1963 visit, when the soon-to-be martyred American president was welcomed as a native son, to the emergence of the Irish technology sector in the late 1990s, driven by American corporations, which set Ireland on the path toward particular disaster during the 2008 financial crisis. A remarkably compassionate yet exacting observer, O'Toole in coruscating prose captures the peculiar Irish habit of "deliberate unknowing," which allowed myths of national greatness to persist even as the foundations were crumbling. Forty years in the making, We Don't Know Ourselves is a landmark work, a memoir and a national history that ultimately reveals how the two modes are entwined for all of us"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Personal narratives.; O'Toole, Fintan, 1958-;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
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