Stories of the Stranger

Stories of the Stranger PDF Author: Martin Palmer
Publisher: Bene Factum Publishing
ISBN: 190965745X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Encompassing scriptural, historical, folk, and newly commissioned tales, a collection exploring the centrality of the "stranger" in every major faith tradition—a commonality that could create a more compassionate worldEvery faith has, as a fundamental moment of its formation, the experience of exile, the experience of losing everything, or being thrown out, of being dispossessed, and of relying on the generosity, or not, of strangers. Furthermore, every major faith tradition has popular stories showing how you are more likely to meet the divine in the outcast, the reject, the beggar, than you are in the king, the prince, or indeed minister, priest, or nun. Faiths are therefore often the first to welcome and help refugees. Classic tales on this theme have been retold here from a contemporary perspective, with humor and wit. Sitting alongside powerful illustrations, the tales serve to remind readers of the centrality of the stranger in all traditions, thereby creating the potential for a more compassionate world. This collection is a resource for reflection, ideal for storytelling groups, for drama, art, and poetry, and a unique educational tool as well.

I Won't Go With Strangers

I Won't Go With Strangers PDF Author: Dagmar Geisler
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1510735364
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 43

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Book Description
Lu won’t go with just anyone! Lu is waiting to be picked up after school. She stands on the sidewalk, all alone, and it starts to rain. Ms. Smith walks by, and offers to take her home. Ms. Smith lives in Lu’s neighborhood—but does Lu really know her? Lu asks herself, what’s her first name? Does she dye her hair red? What’s her dog’s name? And she says, “I don’t know you, so I won’t go with you! And besides, Mama said I should wait.” As other adults—all of whom Lu has met in some capacity before—offer to take her home, Lu continues to consider if she really knows them. One by one, she refuses to go with them. Until, finally, the person Mama said she should go home with shows up—though his appearance is a surprise to the reader! This sensitively narrated story illustrates how clear rules and arrangements can help protect and empower children during an especially vulnerable time of day. The ending includes a prompt for readers to create their own similar “safe” list, and a list of resources for parents.

Strangers to Ourselves

Strangers to Ourselves PDF Author: Rachel Aviv
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374600856
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
New York Times bestseller One of the top ten books of the year at The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture/New York magazine A best book of the year at Los Angeles Times, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The New Yorker, Vogue, Kirkus The acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a groundbreaking exploration of mental illness and the mind, and illuminates the startling connections between diagnosis and identity. Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman celebrated as a saint who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s gripping exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does. Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives—and our identities, too. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.

Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers PDF Author: Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316535621
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

The Kindness of Strangers

The Kindness of Strangers PDF Author: Fearghal O Nuallain
Publisher: Summersdale
ISBN: 9781786855312
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer Travel opens our minds to the world; it helps us to embrace risk and uncertainty, overcome challenges and understand the people we meet and the places we visit. But what happens when we arrive home? How do our experiences shape us? The Kindness of Strangers explores what it means to be vulnerable and to be helped by someone we've never met before. Someone who could have walked past, but chose not to. This is a collection of stories by accomplished travellers and adventurous souls like Sarah Outen, Benedict Allen, Ed Stafford and Al Humphreys, who have completed daring journeys through challenging terrain. Each has a story to tell of a time when they were vulnerable, when they were in need and a kind stranger came to their rescue. These are stories that make our hearts grow, stories that will restore our faith in the world and remind us that, despite what the media says, the world isn't a scary place - rather, it is filled with Kind Strangers just like us.

The Blood of Strangers

The Blood of Strangers PDF Author: Frank Huyler
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520262514
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
Reminiscent of Chekhov's stories, The Blood of Strangers is a visceral portrayal of a physician's encounters with the highly charged world of an emergency room. In this collection of spare and elegant stories, Dr. Frank Huyler reveals a side of medicine where small moments—the intricacy of suturing a facial wound, the bath a patient receives from her husband and daughter—interweave with the lives and deaths of the desperately sick and injured. The author presents an array of fascinating characters, both patients and doctors—a neurosurgeon who practices witchcraft, a trauma surgeon who unexpectedly commits suicide, a wounded murderer, a man chased across the New Mexico desert by a heat-seeking missile. At times surreal, at times lyrical, at times brutal and terrifying, The Blood of Strangers is a literary work that emerges from one of the most dramatic specialties of modern medicine. This deeply affecting first book has been described by one early reader as "the best doctor collection I have seen since William Carlos Williams's The Doctor Stories."

Into the Arms of Strangers

Into the Arms of Strangers PDF Author: Mark Jonathan Harris
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408892278
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
___________________ BASED ON THE ACADEMY AWARD WINNING FEATURE DOCUMENTARY ___________________ 'Wonderfully moving ... a noble story, beautifully told' - Daily Mail With a preface by Lord Richard Attenborough, this is a moving collection of accounts from some of the 10,000 children rescued from the Nazi Regime and brought to the UK by the Kindertransport scheme - and an important contribution to our national conversation about how we treat refugees. In November 1938, international public opinion was shocked by the news of Kristallnacht - the anti-Jewish pogrom that led to the burning of synagogues and the first mass arrests of Jewish men. Twelve days later, the British government implemented the Kindertransport plan, which allowed many children to leave the horrors of the Nazi regime and find temporary refuge within British families and hostels. By the time war was declared in September 1939, this brave undertaking had saved 10,000 lives. This book, based on the Academy Award-winning feature documentary of the same name, reveals what it was like to grow up in the shadow of the Nazi threat, to escape danger and fear, but also to leave family and friends, perhaps for ever. It is poignantly told in the words of those directly involved. It is both an astonishing insight into a remarkable moment of history and a timely reminder of how welcoming our country has been in the past to those who need welcome, shelter and hope.

Strangers in the House

Strangers in the House PDF Author: Dorothy Gallagher
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 030743186X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
Dorothy Gallagher’s critically acclaimed memoir, How I Came Into My Inheritance, told of her childhood in 1940s New York as the daughter of left-wing Russian Jewish immigrants. Time magazine called it “a piercingly funny book . . . unsentimental, breezy, blunt.” In Strangers in the House, this brilliant stylist takes us into her adult life and tells us honest, funny, and highly distinctive stories about love, friendship, and responsibilities–stories about ordinary life told in an extraordinarily compelling voice. As she puts it, with typical wryness, “Oh my goodness, the themes you stumble over as you make your way from day to day. Trust, Betrayal, Class, Hypocrisy, Love, Hate, Greed, Sickness, Health. It only needs War and Peace.” Here, among other people and problems, we encounter a man who carries around brass knuckles, hoping to catch the lover Gallagher prefers to him–and whose behavior unexpectedly mirrors Gallagher’s own; the bizarre events that surround the disappearance of a woman with ties to both the Communist Party and Gallagher’s family; and the treachery of a trusted employee who is “bad with money” in more ways than one. The fragility of friendships, the fickleness of love, the marital crisis brought on by chronic illness–Gallagher dramatizes these universal themes with unique feeling, insight, and humor. This is a writer who will turn readers who come to her book as strangers into friends.

This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers

This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers PDF Author: Jeff Sharlet
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 1324003219
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
“A luminous, moving and visual record of fleeting moments of connection.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A visionary work of radical empathy. Known for immersion journalism that is more immersed than most people are willing to go, and for a prose style that is somehow both fierce and soulful, Jeff Sharlet dives deep into the darkness around us and awaiting us. This work began when his father had a heart attack; two years later, Jeff, still in his forties, had a heart attack of his own. In the grip of writerly self-doubt, Jeff turned to images, taking snapshots and posting them on Instagram, writing short, true stories that bloomed into documentary. During those two years, he spent a lot of time on the road: meeting strangers working night shifts as he drove through the mountains to see his father; exploring the life and death of Charley Keunang, a once-aspiring actor shot by the police on LA’s Skid Row; documenting gay pride amidst the violent homophobia of Putin’s Russia; passing time with homeless teen addicts in Dublin; and accompanying a lonely woman, whose only friend was a houseplant, on shopping trips. Early readers have called this book “incantatory,” the voice “prophetic,” in “James Agee’s tradition of looking at the reality of American lives.” Defined by insomnia and late-night driving and the companionship of other darkness-dwellers—night bakers and last-call drinkers, frightened people and frightening people, the homeless, the lost (or merely disoriented), and other people on the margins—This Brilliant Darkness erases the boundaries between author, subject, and reader to ask: how do people live with suffering?

Strangers Drowning

Strangers Drowning PDF Author: Larissa MacFarquhar
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143109782
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas. A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or ten? They adopt twenty. But how do they weigh the needs of unknown children in distress against the needs of the children they already have? Another couple founds a leprosy colony in the wilderness in India, living in huts with no walls, knowing that their two small children may contract leprosy or be eaten by panthers. The children survive. But what if they hadn’t? How would their parents’ risk have been judged? A woman believes that if she spends money on herself, rather than donate it to buy life-saving medicine, then she’s responsible for the deaths that result. She lives on a fraction of her income, but wonders: when is compromise self-indulgence and when is it essential? We honor such generosity and high ideals; but when we call people do-gooders there is skepticism in it, even hostility. Why do moral people make us uneasy? Between her stories, MacFarquhar threads a lively history of the literature, philosophy, social science, and self-help that have contributed to a deep suspicion of do-gooders in Western culture. Through its sympathetic and beautifully vivid storytelling, Strangers Drowning confronts us with fundamental questions about what it means to be human. In a world of strangers drowning in need, how much should we help, and how much can we help? Is it right to care for strangers even at the expense of those we are closest to? Moving and provocative, Strangers Drowning challenges us to think about what we value most, and why.

Angels and Other Strangers

Angels and Other Strangers PDF Author: Katherine Paterson
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060783761
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
A collection of nine Christmas stories.