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Author: Dori Katz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606333X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181
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Book Description
Dori Katz is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who thought that her lost memories of her childhood years in Belgium were irrecoverable. But after a chance viewing of a documentary about hidden children in German-occupied Belgium, she realized that she might, in fact, be able to unearth those years. Looking for Strangers is the deeply honest record of her attempt to do so, a detective story that unfolds through one of the most horrifying periods in history in an attempt to understand one’s place within it. In alternating chapters, Katz journeys into multiple pasts, setting details from her mother’s stories that have captivated her throughout her life alongside an account of her own return to Belgium forty years later—against her mother’s urgings—in search of greater clarity. She reconnects her sharp but fragmented memories: being sent by her mother in 1943, at the age of three, to live with a Catholic family under a Christian identity; then being given up, inexplicably, to an orphanage in the years immediately following the war. Only after that, amid postwar confusion, was she able to reconnect with her mother. Following this trail through Belgium to her past places of hiding, Katz eventually finds herself in San Francisco, speaking with a man who claimed to have known her father in Auschwitz—and thus known his end. Weighing many other stories from the people she meets along her way—all of whom seem to hold something back—she attempts to stitch thread after thread into a unified truth, to understand the countless motivations and circumstances that determined her remarkable life. A story at once about self-discovery, the transformation of memory, a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and the oppression of millions, Looking for Strangers is a book of both historical insight and imaginative grasp. It is a book in which the past, through its very mystery, becomes alive, immediate—of the most urgent importance.
Author: Joe Keohane
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1984855786
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
A “meticulously researched and buoyantly written” (Esquire) look at what happens when we talk to strangers, and why it affects everything from our own health and well-being to the rise and fall of nations in the tradition of Susan Cain’s Quiet and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens “This lively, searching work makes the case that welcoming ‘others’ isn’t just the bedrock of civilization, it’s the surest path to the best of what life has to offer.”—Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Homeland Elegies In our cities, we stand in silence at the pharmacy and in check-out lines at the grocery store, distracted by our phones, barely acknowledging one another, even as rates of loneliness skyrocket. Online, we retreat into ideological silos reinforced by algorithms designed to serve us only familiar ideas and like-minded users. In our politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we’ve never met. But what if strangers—so often blamed for our most pressing political, social, and personal problems—are actually the solution? In The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane sets out on a journey to discover what happens when we bridge the distance between us and people we don’t know. He learns that while we’re wired to sometimes fear, distrust, and even hate strangers, people and societies that have learned to connect with strangers benefit immensely. Digging into a growing body of cutting-edge research on the surprising social and psychological benefits that come from talking to strangers, Keohane finds that even passing interactions can enhance empathy, happiness, and cognitive development, ease loneliness and isolation, and root us in the world, deepening our sense of belonging. And all the while, Keohane gathers practical tips from experts on how to talk to strangers, and tries them out himself in the wild, to awkward, entertaining, and frequently poignant effect. Warm, witty, erudite, and profound, equal parts sweeping history and self-help journey, this deeply researched book will inspire readers to see everything—from major geopolitical shifts to trips to the corner store—in an entirely new light, showing them that talking to strangers isn’t just a way to live; it’s a way to survive.
Author: Roberto Suro
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0679744568
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370
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Book Description
Strangers Among Us is a lucid, informed, and cliché-shattering examination of Latino immigration to the United States--its history, the vast transformations it is fast producing in American society, and the challenges it will present for decades to come. In making vivid an array of people, places, and events that are little known to most Americans, the author--an American journalist who is himself the son of Latino immigrants--makes an often bewildering phenom-enon vastly more understandable. He tells the stories of a number of large Latino communities, linked in a chronological narrative that starts with the Puerto Rican migration to East Harlem in the 1950s and continues through the California-bound rush of Mexicans and Central Americans in the 1990s. He takes us into the world of Mexican-American gang members; Guatemalan Mayas in suburban Houston; Cuban businessmen in Miami; Dominican bodega owners in New York. We see people who represent a unique transnationalism and a new form of immigrant assimilation--foreigners who come from close by and visit home frequently, so that they virtually live in two lands. Like other groups of immigrants who preceded them onto American shores, Latinos, as they begin to find a place for themselves here, are changing the way this nation thinks of itself. These are people who defy easy categorization: they are neither white nor black; their households often include both legal and illegal immigrants; most struggle toward some kind of economic stability, but so many others fall short that they have become the new face of the urban poor. Some Latinos endure the special poverty of people who work long hours for wages that barely ensure survival. Their children grow up learning more from their televisions than from their teachers, knowing what they want from America but not how to get it. Looking to the future, we see clearly that the sheer number of Latino newcomers will force the United States to develop new means of managing relations among diverse ethnic groups and of creating economic opportunity for all. But we also see a catalog of conflict and struggle: Latinos in confrontation with blacks; Latinos wrestling with the strain of illegal immigration on their communities; Latinos fighting the backlash that is denying legal immigrants access to welfare programs. Critical both of incoherent government policies and of the failures of minority-group advocacy, the author proposes solutions of his own, including a rejection of illegal immigration by Latinos themselves paired with government efforts to deter unlawful journeys into the United States, and a new emphasis on English-language training as an aid to successful assimilation. Roberto Suro has written a timely, controversial, and hugely illuminating book.
Author: Magda Schloss Riederman
Publisher: bioGraph
ISBN: 9781951946005
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
We Were Strangers is the true story of Magda Preiss, a breathtaking masterpiece of Holocaust literature, composed in her own words upon arriving in America in the 1940s. Lived and told by a beautiful young bride with fearless defiance, Magda's harrowing experience reveals a character who is larger than life and death. Hers is a love story more complex than any happy-ever-after tale. It recounts the love of culture, beauty, and life itself that fueled Magda's will to survive; the love for her husband that made her stay to face Nazi horror instead of escaping with her parents and siblings; and her love for strangers, whose humanity amidst the most inhumane circumstances illuminates every page through Magda's heroic voice.From an idyllic childhood in Czechoslovakia through the hells of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Ravensbrück, and Beendorf, Magda shows what it means to be a stranger at home and in foreign lands, to be estranged from loved ones and even from oneself as the world goes insane. In devastating sentences as sharp as barbed wire, Magda uncovers universal truths from her experience as a woman in the Holocaust. Then in words as sweet as an unexpected smile, she redeems our love of life. Dreamlike but all too real; dripping raw passion but unsentimental; righteous without moralizing-they don't make books like this anymore, yet we need books like this now more than ever.
Author: Jennine Capó Crucet
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250059666
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
A young, Cuban-American woman is accepted into an elite college right as her home life unravels.
Author: Ellen Michaelson
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612198694
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
Winner of the 2019 Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize, The Care of Strangers is a moving story about friendship set in a gritty Brooklyn hospital, where a young woman learns to take charge of her life by taking care of others. Working as an orderly in a gritty Brooklyn public hospital, Sima is often reminded by her superiors that she's the least important person there. An immigrant who, with her mother, escaped vicious anti-Semitism in Poland, she spends her shifts transporting patients, observing the doctors and residents ... and quietly nurturing her aspirations to become a doctor herself by going to night school. Now just one credit short of graduating, she finds herself faltering in the face of pressure from her mother not to overreach, and to settle for the life she has now. Everything changes when Sima encounters Mindy Kahn, an intern doctor struggling through her residency. Sensing a fellow outsider in need of support, Sima bonds with Mindy over their patients, and learns the power of truly letting yourself care for another person, helping to give her the courage to face her past, and take control of her future. A moving story about vulnerability and friendship, The Care of Strangers is the story of one woman's discovery that sometimes interactions with strangers are the best way to find yourself.
Author: Dori Katz
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606333X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181
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Book Description
Dori Katz is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who thought that her lost memories of her childhood years in Belgium were irrecoverable. But after a chance viewing of a documentary about hidden children in German-occupied Belgium, she realized that she might, in fact, be able to unearth those years. Looking for Strangers is the deeply honest record of her attempt to do so, a detective story that unfolds through one of the most horrifying periods in history in an attempt to understand one’s place within it. In alternating chapters, Katz journeys into multiple pasts, setting details from her mother’s stories that have captivated her throughout her life alongside an account of her own return to Belgium forty years later—against her mother’s urgings—in search of greater clarity. She reconnects her sharp but fragmented memories: being sent by her mother in 1943, at the age of three, to live with a Catholic family under a Christian identity; then being given up, inexplicably, to an orphanage in the years immediately following the war. Only after that, amid postwar confusion, was she able to reconnect with her mother. Following this trail through Belgium to her past places of hiding, Katz eventually finds herself in San Francisco, speaking with a man who claimed to have known her father in Auschwitz—and thus known his end. Weighing many other stories from the people she meets along her way—all of whom seem to hold something back—she attempts to stitch thread after thread into a unified truth, to understand the countless motivations and circumstances that determined her remarkable life. A story at once about self-discovery, the transformation of memory, a fraught mother-daughter relationship, and the oppression of millions, Looking for Strangers is a book of both historical insight and imaginative grasp. It is a book in which the past, through its very mystery, becomes alive, immediate—of the most urgent importance.
Author: Carol Ryrie Brink
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 338
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Book Description
Strangers in the Forest, originally published in 1959, was included in the Reader's Digest Condensed Books series. Set in the white-pine timberland of the Idaho panhandle in 1908, the story explores the efforts of the early U.S. Forest Service to instill a sense of conservation in the land--a new concept affecting Idaho's seemingly inexhaustible forests. Bundy Jones heads west to investigate the people taking timber homesteads in the north Idaho woods, suspecting that their real intention is to sell out for profit to lumber companies. Jones befriends the homesteaders, wins their confidence, and even admires them. When his connection with the Forest Service is revealed, most of the homesteaders turn against him. But the inferno of a north Idaho forest fire once again unites Jones and the timber settlers.
Author: John B. Simon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761871500
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 489
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Book Description
What did it feel like to be an openly Jewish soldier fighting alongside German troops in WWII? Could a Jewish nurse work safely in a field hospital operating theater under the supervision of German army doctors? Several hundred members of Finland’s tiny Jewish community found themselves in absurd situations like this, yet not a single one was harmed by the Germans or deported to concentration or extermination camps. In fact, Finland was the only European country fighting on either side in WWII that lost not a single Jewish citizen to the Nazi’s “Final Solution.” Strangers in a Stranger Land explores the unique dilemma of Finland’s Jews in the form of a meticulously researched novel. Where did these immigrant Jews—the last in Europe to achieve citizenship status—come from? What was life like from their arrival in Finland in the early nineteenth century to the time when their grandchildren perversely found themselves on “the wrong side” of WWII? And how could young lovers plan for the future when not only their enemies but also their country’s allies threatened their very existence? Seven years researching Finland’s National Archives plus numerous in-depth interviews with surviving Finnish Jewish war veterans provide the background for a narrative exploration of love, friendship, and commitment but also uncertainty and terror under circumstances that were unique in the annals of “The Good War.” The novel’s protagonists—Benjamin, David and Rachel—adopt varying survival strategies as they struggle with involvement in a brutal conflict and questions posed by their dual loyalty as Finnish citizens and Zionists committed to the creation of a Jewish homeland. Tensions mount as the three young adults painfully work through a relationship love triangle and try to fulfill their commitments as both Jews and Finns while their country desperately seeks to extricate itself from an unwinnable war.
Author: Lyn H. Lofland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244
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Book Description
In traditional human societies, the stranger was a threat, to be disarmed at once by an act of force or by a ritual of hospitality. Under no conditions could a stranger be ignored or taken for granted. Yet in all great cities today, human beings seem to live out their entire lives in a world of strangers. How did it become possible for millions of people to do this? How is city life possible? The unique value of A World of Strangers lies in Loflands expert use of rich historical and anthropological sources to answer these questions. She demonstrates that a potentially chaotic and meaningless world of strangers was transformed into a knowable and predictable world of strangers by the same mechanism humans always use to make their world livable: it was ordered. Lofland offers a brilliant analysis of the various devices used at different times in history to create social and psychological order in cities, concluding with an analysis of the contemporary city, in which the location of the encounter between strangers has come to replace personal appearance as a means of evaluating others. Lofland also describes how city people initially learn and then act upon the ordering principles dominant in their society. A World of Strangers is a wonderfully wise and readable account of how we have come to live as we do.
Author: Jane Jacobs
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525432884
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
With intelligence and clarity of observation, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities addresses the moral values that underpin working life. In Systems of Survival, Jane Jacobs identifies two distinct moral syndromes—one governing commerce, the other, politics—and explores what happens when these two syndromes collide. She looks at business fraud and criminal enterprise, government’s overextended subsidies to agriculture, and transit police who abuse the system the are supposed to enforce, and asks us to consider instances in which snobbery is a virtue and industry a vice. In this work of profound insight and elegance, Jacobs gives us a new way of seeing all our public transactions and encourages us towards the best use of our natural inclinations.
