To My Father's Village

To My Father's Village PDF Author: William Kurelek
Publisher: Tundra Books (NY)
ISBN: 9780887762208
Category : Borivci (Ukraine) - Descriptions
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Two months before his death from cancer in 1977, William Kurelek returned to his father’s village in the Ukraine. The Soviet authorities had allowed him to spend four hours there in 1970, and the desire to return had become an obsession with him. In his diary of that trip he wrote, “Let the authorities let me come back to spend six weeks painting the real (to me) Ukrainian people…Those peasants that we met in the collective farm’s fields, the vast rolling fields, speak to me as an artist…let me live with these people as an artist…let me live with these people, dress as they dress, eat their food, sleep on the peech.” During his four weeks spent in the little village of Borivtsi, Bukovina, he had managed with incredible energy to complete 100 drawings and six paintings. They are an extraordinary legacy, a record of a search to understand the world out of which his father came and thereby himself, to solve the dilemma of the immigrant’s son, to know whether he belonged more to the Old World or the New. An extraordinary feature of the drawings is how lovingly they record the simple handmade objects of farm life: the dishes, untensils, tools, and farm implements. The drawings and paintings reproduced here are supplemented with letters written to his wife Jean during the 1970 trip and his personal photographs.

To My Father's Village

To My Father's Village PDF Author: William Kurelek
Publisher: Tundra Books (NY)
ISBN: 9780887762208
Category : Borivci (Ukraine) - Descriptions
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Two months before his death from cancer in 1977, William Kurelek returned to his father’s village in the Ukraine. The Soviet authorities had allowed him to spend four hours there in 1970, and the desire to return had become an obsession with him. In his diary of that trip he wrote, “Let the authorities let me come back to spend six weeks painting the real (to me) Ukrainian people…Those peasants that we met in the collective farm’s fields, the vast rolling fields, speak to me as an artist…let me live with these people as an artist…let me live with these people, dress as they dress, eat their food, sleep on the peech.” During his four weeks spent in the little village of Borivtsi, Bukovina, he had managed with incredible energy to complete 100 drawings and six paintings. They are an extraordinary legacy, a record of a search to understand the world out of which his father came and thereby himself, to solve the dilemma of the immigrant’s son, to know whether he belonged more to the Old World or the New. An extraordinary feature of the drawings is how lovingly they record the simple handmade objects of farm life: the dishes, untensils, tools, and farm implements. The drawings and paintings reproduced here are supplemented with letters written to his wife Jean during the 1970 trip and his personal photographs.

Orani

Orani PDF Author: Claire A. Nivola
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374356572
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 45

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Book Description
Children's book author Claire A. Nivola explores the village of Orani, the tiny hamlet in the mountains of central Sardinia where her father lived before moving to New York during World War II.

A Village with My Name

A Village with My Name PDF Author: Scott Tong
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022633905X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
An “immensely readable” journey through modern Chinese history told through the experiences of the author’s extended family (Christian Science Monitor). When journalist Scott Tong moved to Shanghai, his assignment was to start the first full-time China bureau for “Marketplace,” the daily business and economics program on public radio stations across the US. But for Tong the move became much more: an opportunity to reconnect with members of his extended family who’d remained there after his parents fled the communists six decades prior. Uncovering their stories gave him a new way to understand modern China’s defining moments and its long, interrupted quest to go global. A Village with My Name offers a unique perspective on China’s transitions through the eyes of regular people who witnessed such epochal events as the toppling of the Qing monarchy, Japan’s occupation during WWII, exile of political prisoners to forced labor camps, mass death and famine during the Great Leap Forward, market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and the dawn of the One Child Policy. Tong focuses on five members of his family, who each offer a specific window on a changing country: a rare American-educated girl born in the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, a pioneer exchange student, a toddler abandoned in wartime who later rides the wave of China’s global export boom, a young professional climbing the ladder at a multinational company, and an orphan (the author’s daughter) adopted in the middle of a baby-selling scandal fueled by foreign money. Through their stories, Tong shows us China anew, visiting former prison labor camps on the Tibetan plateau and rural outposts along the Yangtze, exploring the Shanghai of the 1930s, and touring factories across the mainland—providing a compelling and deeply personal take on how China became what it is today. “Vivid and readable . . . The book’s focus on ordinary people makes it refreshingly accessible.” —Financial Times “Tong tells his story with humor, a little snark, [and] lots of love . . . Highly recommended, especially for those interested in Chinese history and family journeys.” —Library Journal (starred review)

Good Neighbors, Bad Times

Good Neighbors, Bad Times PDF Author: Mimi Schwartz
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0803217676
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Mimi Schwartz grew up on milkshakes and hamburgers and her father s boyhood stories. She rarely took the stories seriously. What was a modern American teenager supposed to make of these accounts of a village in Germany where, according to her father, before Hitler, everyone got along ? It was only many years later, when she heard a remarkable story of the Torah from that very village being rescued by Christians on Kristallnacht, that Schwartz began to sense how much these stories might mean. Thus began a twelve-year quest that covered three continents as Schwartz sought answers in the historical records and among those who remembered that time. Welcomed into the homes of both the Jews who had fled the village fifty years earlier and the Christians who had remained, Schwartz peered into family albums, ate home-baked linzertorte (almost everyone served it!), and heard countless stories about life in one small village before, during, and after Nazi times. Sometimes stories overlapped, sometimes one memory challenged another, but always they seemed to muddy the waters of easy judgment. Small stories of decency are often overlooked in the wake of a larger historic narrative. Yet we need these stories to provide a moral compass, especially in times of political extremism, when fear and hatred strain the bonds of loyalty and neighborly compassion. How, this book asks, do neighbors maintain a modicum of decency in such times? How do we negotiate evil and remain humane when, as in the Nazi years, hate rules?

In a Village by the Sea

In a Village by the Sea PDF Author: Muon Van
Publisher:
ISBN: 1939547156
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 19

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Book Description
"Moving from the wide world to the snugness of home and back out again, Village by the Sea tells the story of longing for the comforts of home"--

Dreamer from the Village

Dreamer from the Village PDF Author: Michelle Markel
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805063738
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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Book Description
Chronicles the life of Marc Chagall, a celebrated twentieth-century artist who was born in Russia.

Death Comes to the Village

Death Comes to the Village PDF Author: Catherine Lloyd
Publisher: Kensington Books
ISBN: 0758287348
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A wounded soldier and a rector’s daughter discover strange goings-on in their sleepy English village in this Regency-era mystery series opener. Major Robert Kurland has returned to the quiet vistas of Kurland St. Mary to recuperate from the horrors of Waterloo. However injured his body may be, his mind is as active as ever. Too active, perhaps. When he glimpses a shadowy figure from his bedroom window struggling with a heavy load, the tranquil façade of the village begins to loom sinister… Unable to forget the incident, Robert confides in his childhood friend, Miss Lucy Harrington. As the dutiful daughter of the widowed rector, following up on the major's suspicions offers a welcome diversion—but soon presents real danger. Someone is intent on stopping their investigation. And in a place where no one locks their doors, a series of thefts and the disappearance of two young serving girls demands explanation… As Robert grapples with his difficult recovery, he and Lucy try to unearth the dark truth lurking within the village shadows, and stop a killer waiting to strike again… Praise for Death Comes to the Village “[A] delightful debut…Readers will hope death returns soon to Kurland St. Mary.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Lloyd combines a satisfying mystery with plenty of wit and character development.”—Booklist

New York, My Village: A Novel

New York, My Village: A Novel PDF Author: Uwem Akpan
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393881431
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
Exuberant storytelling full of wry comedy, dark history, and devastating satire—by the celebrated and original author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Say You’re One of Them. From a suspiciously cheap Hell’s Kitchen walk-up, Nigerian editor and winner of a Toni Morrison Publishing Fellowship Ekong Udousoro is about to begin the opportunity of a lifetime: to learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry from its incandescent epicenter. While his sophisticated colleagues meet him with kindness and hospitality, he is soon exposed to a colder, ruthlessly commercial underbelly—callous agents, greedy landlords, boorish and hostile neighbors, and, beneath a superficial cosmopolitanism, a bedrock of white cultural superiority and racist assumptions about Africa, its peoples, and worst of all, its food. Reckoning, at the same time, with the recent history of the devastating and brutal Biafran War, in which Ekong’s people were a minority of a minority caught up in the mutual slaughter of majority tribes, Ekong’s life in New York becomes a saga of unanticipated strife. The great apartment deal wrangled by his editor turns out to be an illegal sublet crawling with bedbugs. The lights of Times Square slide off the hardened veneer of New Yorkers plowing past the tourists. A collective antagonism toward the “other” consumes Ekong’s daily life. Yet in overcoming misunderstandings with his neighbors, Chinese and Latino and African American, and in bonding with his true allies at work and advocating for healing back home, Ekong proves that there is still hope in sharing our stories. Akpan’s prose melds humor, tenderness, and pain to explore the myriad ways that tribalisms define life everywhere, from the villages of Nigeria to the villages within New York City. New York, My Village is a triumph of storytelling and a testament to the life-sustaining power of community across borders and across boroughs.

My Father's Kampung: A History Of Aukang And Punggol

My Father's Kampung: A History Of Aukang And Punggol PDF Author: Shawn Li Song Seah
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9811226709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Written by author and speaker Shawn Seah, My Father's Kampung delves into the social history of Aukang and Punggol as it traces a son's journey to better understand and appreciate the kampung life his father lived. The book is rich in personal stories and oral histories of those who lived there from the 1940s to 1970s, brought to life by Seah's passionate narrative as well as illustrations and photos.This book is supported by the National Heritage Board, with Forewords by Robert Yeo and Montfort Alumni.

It Doesn't Take a Village

It Doesn't Take a Village PDF Author: Stephen P. Dixon
Publisher: Ceshore Publishing Company
ISBN: 9781585010141
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Perhaps in other countries the village concept works, but if the village cannot save our children, who can?