President Michelle, or Ten Days that Shook the World

President Michelle, or Ten Days that Shook the World PDF Author: Manu Herbstein
Publisher: Moritz HERBSTEIN
ISBN: 9988243154
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 53

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Book Description
The 2012 presidential election campaign is well under way when Barack Obama succumbs to a sudden heart attack. Vice-president Biden is sworn in as President and the Democratic Party recalls its convention. Jesse Jackson makes a powerful speech proposing that the party adopt Michelle Obama as its candidate. What happens next?

President Michelle, or Ten Days that Shook the World

President Michelle, or Ten Days that Shook the World PDF Author: Manu Herbstein
Publisher: Moritz HERBSTEIN
ISBN: 9988243154
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 53

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Book Description
The 2012 presidential election campaign is well under way when Barack Obama succumbs to a sudden heart attack. Vice-president Biden is sworn in as President and the Democratic Party recalls its convention. Jesse Jackson makes a powerful speech proposing that the party adopt Michelle Obama as its candidate. What happens next?

Ramseyer's Ghost

Ramseyer's Ghost PDF Author: Manu Herbstein
Publisher: Moritz HERBSTEIN
ISBN: 9988243170
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Book Description
2050. The global village has disintegrated. The Third World War, ending in a stalemate, has left the planet split between two hostile powers, each with a captive sphere of influence. The Atlantic Ocean has become an American sea. West Africa is a desert of failed states and anarchy, dotted with mines and oil rigs, stockaded and armed by U. S. corporations. From their island outpost of St. Thomas, the Americans dispatch expeditions of geologists and mining engineers into the dangerous interior of the Dark Continent to search for untapped mineral resources. One such expedition has gone missing. Ekem “Crash” Ferguson, born in the U.S. in 2008 of African parents and abandoned to the care of foster parents, is a Captain in the Marine Corps. His career blocked and his marriage failing, he accepts an offer to proceed to Ghana on a one-man mission to find the missing experts. Unknown to his handlers, he has another mission. His arrival in Africa is inauspicious: in a shack amongst the coconut palms he comes across two human skeletons. This is only the first incident in what turns out to be a journey of discovery and self-discovery. “Magnificently crafted political fiction.” Andre Vltchek, author of Aurora and Exposing the Lies of the Empire.

Akosua and Osman

Akosua and Osman PDF Author: Manu Herbstein
Publisher: Moritz HERBSTEIN
ISBN: 9988243189
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Akosua Annan is a confident and fiercely intelligent student at a posh girls' school in Cape Coast, Ghana. There she comes under the influence of a charismatic feminist teacher. Osman Said's background is very different. Upon the death of his parents, a police sergeant and an unschooled market trader, immigrants to the capital, Accra, from the impoverished north of the country, he is adopted by a retired school teacher, Hajia Zainab. After a spell as an apprentice in an auto workshop, he returns to school. There, finding the teaching inadequate, he becomes an avid reader and educates himself. Akosua and Osman are thrown together by chance in the course of a school visit to the slave dungeon at Cape Coast Castle. Their paths cross again as finalists in the national school debating competition where the subject is "The problem of poverty in Ghana is insoluble." They meet for the third time as students at the University of Ghana and as we leave them, it looks as if their relationship might develop into something permanent. This story won a Burt Award for African Literature in 2011. The judges commented: "This fascinating novel tells the story of how these two young people from disparate backgrounds are brought together as if by an unseen hand, in a process that teaches us about our history, our common humanity despite ethnic differences, the need to pursue our ambitions, the strength of human sexuality and the need for self-discipline, and, above all, the power of love."

The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye

The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti's Eye PDF Author: Manu Herbstein
Publisher: Moritz HERBSTEIN
ISBN: 1508040168
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
Sargrenti is the name by which Major General Sir Garnet Wolseley, KCMG (1833 – 1913) is still known in the West African state of Ghana. Kofi Gyan, the 15-year old boy who spits in Sargrenti’s eye, is the nephew of the chief of Elmina, a town on the Atlantic coast of Ghana. On Christmas Day, 1871, Kofi’s godfather gives him a diary as a Christmas present and charges him with the task of keeping a personal record of the momentous events through which they are living. This novel is a transcription of Kofi’s diary. Elmina town has a long-standing relationship with the Castelo de São Jorge da Mina, known today as Elmina Castle, built by the Portuguese in 1482 and captured from them by the Dutch in 1637. In April, 1872, the Dutch hand over the unprofitable castle to the British. The people of Elmina have not been consulted and resist the change. On June 13, 1873 British forces punish them by bombarding the town and destroying it. (It has never been rebuilt. The flat open ground where it once stood serves as a constant reminder of the savage power of Imperial Britain.) After the destruction of Elmina, Kofi moves to his mother’s family home in nearby Cape Coast, seat of the British colonial government, where Sargrenti is preparing to march inland and attack the independent Asante state. There, Melton Prior, war artist of the London weekly news magazine, The Illustrated London News, offers Kofi a job as his assistant. This gives the lad an opportunity to observe at close quarters not only Prior but also the other war correspondents, Henry Morton Stanley and G. A. Henty. Kofi witnesses and experiences the trauma of a brutal war, a run-up to the formal colonialism which would be realized ten years later at the 1885 Berlin conference, where European powers drew lines on the map of Africa, dividing the territory up amongst themselves. On February 6, 1874, Sargrenti’s troops loot the palace of the Asante king, Kofi Karikari, and then blow up the stone building and set the city of Kumase on fire, razing it to the ground. Kofi’s story culminates in his angry response to the British auction of their loot in Cape Coast Castle. The loot includes the solid gold mask shown on the front cover of the novel. That mask continues to reside in the Wallace Collection in London. The invasion of Asante met with the enthusiastic approval of the British public, which elevated Wolseley to the status of a national hero. All the war correspondents and several military officers hastened to cash in on public sentiment by publishing books telling the story of their victory. In all of these, without exception, the coastal Fante feature as feckless and cowardly and the Asante as ruthless savages. The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti’s Eye tells the story of these momentous events for the first time from an African point of view. It is told with irony and with occasional flashes of humor. The novel is illustrated with scans of seventy engravings first published in The Illustrated London News. This book won a Burt Award for African Literature which included the donation by the Ghana Book Trust of 3000 copies to school libraries in Ghana. In 2016, at the annual conference of the African Literature Association held in Atlanta, GA, it received the ALA’s Creative Book of the Year Award. Manu Herbstein has done what the best cultural historians of Africa should do: that is, read between the lines of the colonial archives to imagine what it was like to be an African alive at that time, witnessing and interpreting events. Prof. Stephanie Newell, Yale University Manu Herbstein’s The Boy who Spat in Sargrenti’s Eye is a masterwork of historical fiction. Trevor R. Getz, Ph.D. San Francisco State University

My Place in the Sun

My Place in the Sun PDF Author: George Stevens Jr.
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 081319525X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
The son of a celebrated Hollywood director emerges from his father's shadow to claim his own place as a visionary force in American culture. George Stevens, Jr. tells an intimate and moving tale of his relationship with his Oscar-winning father and his own distinguished career in Hollywood and Washington. Fascinating people, priceless stories and a behind-the-scenes view of some of America's major cultural and political events grace this riveting memoir. George Stevens, Jr. grew up in Hollywood and worked on film classics with his father and writes vividly of his experience on the sets of A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), Giant (1956) and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). He explores how the magnitude of his father's talent and achievements left him questioning his own creative path. The younger Stevens began to forge his unique career when legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow recruited him to elevate the Motion Picture Service at the United States Information Agency in John F. Kennedy's Washington. Stevens' trailblazing efforts initiated what has been called the "golden era" of USIA filmmaking and a call to respect motion pictures as art. His appointment as founding director of the American Film Institute in 1967 placed him at the forefront of culture and politics, safeguarding thousands of endangered films and training a new generation of filmmakers. Stevens' commitment to America's cultural heritage led to envisioning the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors and propelled a creative life of award-winning films and television programs that heightened attention to social justice, artistic achievement, and the American experience. Stevens provides a rare look at a pioneering American family spanning five generations in entertainment: from the San Francisco stage in the 19th century to silent screen comedies, Academy Award-winning films, Emmy Award-winning television programs and a Broadway play in the 21st century. He reveals the private side of the dazzling array of American presidents, first ladies, media moguls, and luminaries who cross his path, including Elizabeth Taylor, Sidney Poitier, the Kennedys, Yo-Yo Ma, Cary Grant, James Dean, Bruce Springsteen, Barack and Michelle Obama, and many more. In My Place in the Sun, George Stevens, Jr. shares his lifelong passion for advancing the art of American film, enlightening audiences, and shining a spotlight on notable figures who inspire us. He provides an insightful look at Hollywood's Golden Age and an insider's account of Washington spanning six decades, bringing to life a sparkling era of American history and culture.

From Quills to Tweets

From Quills to Tweets PDF Author: Andrea J. Dew
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 1626167125
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
While today's presidential tweets may seem a light-year apart from the scratch of quill pens during the era of the American Revolution, the importance of political communication is eternal. This book explores the roles that political narratives, media coverage, and evolving communication technologies have played in precipitating, shaping, and concluding or prolonging wars and revolutions over the course of US history. The case studies begin with the Sons of Liberty in the era of the American Revolution, cover American wars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and conclude with a look at the conflict against ISIS in the Trump era. Special chapters also examine how propagandists shaped American perceptions of two revolutions of international significance: the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution. Each chapter analyzes its subject through the lens of the messengers, messages, and communications-technology-media to reveal the effects on public opinion and the trajectory and conduct of the conflict. The chapters collectively provide an overview of the history of American strategic communications on wars and revolutions that will interest scholars, students, and communications strategists.

Journalists in Film

Journalists in Film PDF Author: Brian McNair
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748634487
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
A study of the representation of journalists on film and what this tells us about society's relationship with journalism and news media.

Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade

Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade PDF Author: Manu Herbstein
Publisher: Moritz HERBSTEIN
ISBN: 150804080X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
"I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, here and here, I am still a free woman." During a period of four hundred years, European slave traders ferried some 12 million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the Americas, teaching a slave to read and write was a criminal offense. When the last slaves gained their freedom in Brazil, barely a thousand of them were literate. Hardly any stories of the enslaved and transported Africans have survived. This novel is an attempt to recreate just one of those stories, one story of a possible 12 million or more.Lawrence Hill created another in The Book of Negroes (Someone Knows my Name in the U.S.) and, more recently, Yaa Gyasi has done the same in Homegoing. Ama occupies center stage throughout this novel. As the story opens, she is sixteen. Distant drums announce the death of her grandfather. Her family departs to attend the funeral, leaving her alone to tend her ailing baby brother. It is 1775. Asante has conquered its northern neighbor and exacted an annual tribute of 500 slaves. The ruler of Dagbon dispatches a raiding party into the lands of the neighboring Bekpokpam. They capture Ama. That night, her lover, Itsho, leads an attack on the raiders’ camp. The rescue bid fails. Sent to collect water from a stream, Ama comes across Itsho’s mangled corpse. For the rest of her life she will call upon his spirit in time of need. In Kumase, the Asante capital, Ama is given as a gift to the Queen-mother. When the adolescent monarch, Osei Kwame, conceives a passion for her, the regents dispatch her to the coast for sale to the Dutch at Elmina Castle. There the governor, Pieter de Bruyn, selects her as his concubine, dressing her in the elegant clothes of his late Dutch wife and instructing the obese chaplain to teach her to read and write English. De Bruyn plans to marry Ama and take her with him to Europe. He makes a last trip to the Dutch coastal outstations and returns infected with yellow fever. On his death, his successor rapes Ama and sends her back to the female dungeon. Traumatized, her mind goes blank. She comes to her senses in the canoe which takes her and other women out to the slave ship, The Love of Liberty. Before the ship leaves the coast of Africa, Ama instigates a slave rebellion. It fails and a brutal whipping leaves her blind in one eye. The ship is becalmed in mid-Atlantic. Then a fierce storm cripples it and drives it into the port of Salvador, capital of Brazil. Ama finds herself working in the fields and the mill on a sugar estate. She is absorbed into slave society and begins to adapt, learning Portuguese. Years pass. Ama is now totally blind. Clutching the cloth which is her only material link with Africa, she reminisces, dozes, falls asleep. A short epilogue brings the story up to date. The consequences of the slave trade and slavery are still with us. Brazilians of African descent remain entrenched in the lower reaches of society, enmeshed in poverty. “This is story telling on a grand scale,” writes Tony Simões da Silva. “In Ama, Herbstein creates a work of literature that celebrates the resilience of human beings while denouncing the inscrutable nature of their cruelty. By focusing on the brutalization of Ama's body, and on the psychological scars of her experiences, Herbstein dramatizes the collective trauma of slavery through the story of a single African woman. Ama echoes the views of writers, historians and philosophers of the African diaspora who have argued that the phenomenon of slavery is inextricable from the deepest foundations of contemporary western civilization.” Ama, a Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, won the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize for the Best First Book.

No Is Not Enough

No Is Not Enough PDF Author: Naomi Klein
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608468917
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
The New York Times–bestselling roadmap to resistance in the Trump era from the internationally acclaimed activist and author of On Fire and The Battle for Paradise. The election of Donald Trump is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. Trump’s vision—a radical deregulation of the US economy in the interest of corporations, an all-out war on “radical Islamic terrorism,” and a sweeping aside of climate science to unleash a domestic fossil fuel frenzy—will generate wave after wave of crises and shocks, to the economy, to national security, to the environment. In No Is Not Enough, Naomi Klein explains that Trump, extreme as he is, is not an aberration but a logical extension of the worst and most dangerous trends of the past half-century. In exposing the malignant forces behind Trump’s rise, she puts forward a bold vision for a mass movement to counter rising militarism, nationalism, and corporatism in the United States and around the world. Longlisted for the National Book Award “I hope that Klein’s book is read by more than just her (mostly) leftwing fan base. For whatever you think about her economic arguments, she makes a powerful and an important point: that you cannot understand Trump without looking at how he reflects bigger cultural and social dynamics. And what is perhaps refreshing about No Is Not Enough is that Klein tries to move beyond mere outrage and hand-wringing to offer a practical manifesto for opposition.” —Financial Times “Brims with ideas rarely heard in the mainstream media. And her fiery, punchy writing style, which is occasionally laced with humor, makes it hard to put down.” —The Georgia Straight

Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me PDF Author: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0679645985
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.