Tale of Tamari

Tale of Tamari PDF Author: Shimmer Chinodya
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 80

Book Description
Tamari is fourteen. Her parents have died and she lives with her brother, Kuda, in their home where the rooms have been let to lodgers. Her Uncle Banda supposedly keeps an eye on them, but is more concerned about how much money he can make from the tenants. The Tale of Tamari is not a sad or didactic story, but one which delights us with its freshness and its empathy, besides giving us a richly varied slice of life in Zimbabwe today as orphans make their way into a future.

Soy Sauce for Beginners

Soy Sauce for Beginners PDF Author: Kirstin Chen
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544114396
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
For fans of Kyung-Sook Shin and Anna Quindlen, a story of family, loyalty and fresh starts in the heart of Singapore.

Harvest of Thorns

Harvest of Thorns PDF Author: Shimmer Chinodya
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 1779223285
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
The 1990 Commonwealth Writers Regional Prize voted Harvest of Thorns the winner in the Best Book category. Harvest of Thorns tells the story of Benjamin Tichafa who grows up in Rhodesia in the 1960s. From a conservative, religious family, but exposed to the heady ideas of the black nationalist movements, the young student is pulled in different directions. Isolated and troubled at boarding school, he is provoked into leaving, making his way to Mozambique, and joining the freedom fighters. There, in the crucible of a bitter civil war of liberation, the young man develops into manhood. Returning, hardened, at independence, he feels that little has changed, not least within his own family circumstances, and asks himself what it means to be free in the new Zimbabwe.

Year of the Locust

Year of the Locust PDF Author: Salim Tamari
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520287509
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
Year of the Locust captures in page-turning detail the end of the Ottoman world and a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. In the diaries of Ihsan Hasan al-Turjman (1893–1917), the first ordinary recruit to describe World War I from the Arab side, we follow the misadventures of an Ottoman soldier stationed in Jerusalem. There he occupied himself by dreaming about his future and using family connections to avoid being sent to the Suez. His diaries draw a unique picture of daily life in the besieged city, bringing into sharp focus its communitarian alleys and obliterated neighborhoods, the ongoing political debates, and, most vividly, the voices from its streets—soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds. Salim Tamari’s indispensable introduction places the diary in its local, regional, and imperial contexts while deftly revising conventional wisdom on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

The Storyteller of Jerusalem

The Storyteller of Jerusalem PDF Author: Wasif Jawhariyyeh
Publisher: Interlink Publishing
ISBN: 1623710391
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
The memoirs of Wasif Jawhariyyeh are a remarkable treasure trove of writings on the life, culture, music, and history of Jerusalem. Spanning over four decades, from 1904 to 1948, they cover a period of enormous and turbulent change in Jerusalem’s history, but change lived and recalled from the daily vantage point of the street storyteller. Oud player, music lover and ethnographer, poet, collector, partygoer, satirist, civil servant, local historian, devoted son, husband, father, and person of faith, Wasif viewed the life of his city through multiple roles and lenses. The result is a vibrant, unpredictable, sprawling collection of anecdotes, observations, and yearnings as varied as the city itself. Reflecting the times of Ottoman rule, the British mandate, and the run-up to the founding of the state of Israel, The Storyteller of Jerusalem offers intimate glimpses of people and events, and of forces promoting confined, divisive ethnic and sectarian identities. Yet, through his passionate immersion in the life of the city, Wasif reveals the communitarian ethos that runs so powerfully through Jerusalem’s past. And that offers perhaps the best hope for its future.

Dew in the Morning

Dew in the Morning PDF Author: Shimmer Chinodya
Publisher: African Books Collective
ISBN: 1779223528
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 218

Book Description
Dew in the Morning was written when the author, Shimmer Chinodya, was eighteen. The intensity of childhood memory is sharp and immediate. Godi, the young boy whose life we experience as he grows up, perceives more than he understands. The ambivalence or instability of the text lies at the juncture between the felt experience of the child, and the rational, interpretative, analysis of the adult. A Bildungsroman, Chinodya captures the centrality of land in the national consciousness: its beauty, its rhythms, its seasons and its fertility. But he does not romanticise the hardships: the droughts, poor harvests, over-crowding particularly as a result of the inflow of resettled people and the tensions over land and between peoples as they struggle to survive. Good humour, strict morality, hard work, and mutual support can be undermined by corrupt practice, or tainted by traditional ceremonies that are as frightening as they are powerful, and raise essential questions of belief and validity. Dew in the Morning, is a tender, evocative novel of growing up, but in it we see the seeds of many issues which Chinodya will dwell on in his later novels: familial tensions, the taut interplay of tradition and modernity, ancestral beliefs and Christianity.

Too Good to Be True

Too Good to Be True PDF Author: Benjamin Anastas
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547913990
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Book Description
Acclaimed writer Benjamin Anastas s searing, utterly moving memoir of fathers and sons, crushing debt and infidelity, and the first, cautious steps taken towards piecing a life back together."

Beirut

Beirut PDF Author: Samir Kassir
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520256689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 656

Book Description
Beirut is a tour de force that takes the reader from the ancient to the modern world, offering a dazzling panorama of the city's Seleucid, Roman, Arab, Ottoman, and French incarnations. Kassir vividly describes Beirut's spectacular growth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, concentrating on its emergence after the Second World War as a cosmopolitan capital until its near destruction during the devastating Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. --from publisher description.

The Barber of Damascus

The Barber of Damascus PDF Author: Dana Sajdi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804788286
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
This book is about a barber, Shihab al-Din Ahmad Ibn Budayr, who shaved and coiffed, and probably circumcised and healed, in Damascus in the 18th century. The barber may have been a "nobody," but he wrote a history book, a record of the events that took place in his city during his lifetime. Dana Sajdi investigates the significance of this book, and in examining the life and work of Ibn Budayr, uncovers the emergence of a larger trend of history writing by unusual authors—people outside the learned establishment—and a new phenomenon: nouveau literacy. The Barber of Damascus offers the first full-length microhistory of an individual commoner in Ottoman and Islamic history. Contributing to Ottoman popular history, Arabic historiography, and the little-studied cultural history of the 18th century Levant, the volume also examines the reception of the barber's book a century later to explore connections between the 18th and the late 19th centuries and illuminates new paths leading to the Nahda, the Arab Renaissance.

The Hunter

The Hunter PDF Author: Julia Leigh
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571380093
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
The hunter arrives in an isolated community in the Tasmanian wilderness with a single purpose in mind: to find the last thylacine, the tiger of fable, fear and legend. The man is in the employ of the mysterious 'Company', but his sinister purpose is never revealed and as his relationship with a grieving mother and her two children becomes more ambiguous, the hunt becomes his own. Leigh's Tasmania is a place where the wilderness can still claim lives; where the connection between people and the land is at best uneasy and cannot be trusted. In prose of exceptional clarity and elegance, Julia Leigh creates an unforgettable picture of a man obsessed by an almost mythical animal in a damp dangerous landscape. The Hunter is the work of a compelling storyteller and a truly remarkable literary stylist.