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Oil On Water A Novel
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Book Synopsis Oil on Water: A Novel by : Helon Habila
Download or read book Oil on Water: A Novel written by Helon Habila and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-05-16 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The new generation of twenty-first-century African writers have now come of age. Without a doubt Habila is one of the best.”—Emmanuel Dongala In the oil-rich and environmentally devastated Nigerian Delta, the wife of a British oil executive has been kidnapped. Two journalists—a young upstart, Rufus, and a once-great, now disillusioned veteran, Zaq—are sent to find her. In a story rich with atmosphere and taut with suspense, Oil on Water explores the conflict between idealism and cynical disillusionment in a journey full of danger and unintended consequences. As Rufus and Zaq navigate polluted rivers flanked by exploded and dormant oil wells, in search of “the white woman,” they must contend with the brutality of both government soldiers and militants. Assailed by irresolvable versions of the “truth” about the woman’s disappearance, dependent on the kindness of strangers of unknowable loyalties, their journalistic objectivity will prove unsustainable, but other values might yet salvage their human dignity.
Download or read book Oil On Water written by Helon Habila and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A lean, evocative novel - part thriller, part meditation on the deadly cost of the region's oil politics. A classic coming-of-age narrative' Daily Mail From the desks of Nigeria's newsrooms, two journalists are recruited to find the kidnapped wife of a British oil engineer. Zaq, an infamous and ageing hack, knows the score, but Rufus, who is keen, young and eager to get noticed, has no idea what he's let himself in for. Journeying into the oil-rich regions of the Niger Delta, where militants and corporations rule, and life is cheap but death even cheaper, Rufus uncovers a world far darker and more corrupt than he ever imagined. 'Habila's writing has that combination of elegance and rattling-good-yarn that we associate with Conrad and Graham Greene. Terrific' The Times 'Masterly. Draws on the tradition of the classic detective novel but also operates on a deeper, metaphorical and philosophical level. Habila has a filmic ability to etch scenes on the imagination' Independent 'A strange, almost hallucinatory plunge into the dangerous world of the Niger Delta' Metro 'Lays bare the real-life tragedy of the Niger delta, in which petrodollars warp human relationships as surely as leaking crude poisons birds and fish . . . powerful, accomplished' Observer 'Reads like a post-colonial riff on Conrad's Heart of Darkness' Financial Times
Download or read book Oil on Water written by Helon Habila and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2010-08-05 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the desks of Nigeria's newsrooms, two journalists are recruited to find the kidnapped wife of a British oil engineer. Zaq, an infamous media hack, knows what's in store, but Rufus, a keen young journalist eager to get himself noticed, has no idea what he's let himself in for. Journeying into the oil-rich regions of South Africa, where militants rule and the currency dealt in is the lives of hostages, Rufus soon finds himself acting as intermediary between editor, husband, captive and soldier. As he follows the trail of the missing woman, the love for the 'story' becomes about much more than just uncovering her whereabouts, and instead becomes a mission to seek out and expose the truth. In a cruel twist of fate, Rufus finds himself taking on Zaq's role much more literally than he ever anticipated, and in the midst of a seemingly endless, harrowing war, he learns that truth can often be a bitter pill to swallow . . .
Book Synopsis Oil and Marble by : Stephanie Storey
Download or read book Oil and Marble written by Stephanie Storey and published by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From 1501 to 1505, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti both lived and worked in Florence. Leonardo was a charming, handsome fifty year-old at the peak of his career. Michelangelo was a temperamental sculptor in his mid-twenties, desperate to make a name for himself. The two despise each other."--Front jacket flap.
Download or read book Oil and Water written by Tom Cliff and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-06-10 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xinjiang is, like Tibet, one of China s autonomous regions. Despite the overwhelming attention scholars and activists have given to Tibet, Xinjiang has garnered relatively little attention. Never a quiescent place, however, it has seen one uprising after another, most recently in violent flare-ups over the cultural repression and economic exclusion of the local Muslim Uyghurs. Oil and Water, by anthropologist and photographer Tom Cliff, is the first book to turn the lens onto Han Chinese settlers. Using ethnographic vignettes, life histories, and arresting photographs, Cliff shows how large-scale social and institutional structures, historical narratives, and national political imperatives have shaped the lives of ordinary Han settlers in Xinjiang. The book weaves together the individual threads of life histories to show what it means to be Han in this frontier zone. Along the way, Cliff makes a number of surprising points: for example, that the Communist Party is in fact more concerned with stability among the Han in frontier regions than Uyghur cooperation itself; or that the frontier is simultaneously seen as backward and ahead in that it is the testing ground for policies and practices that may later be put to use in the core. Most important, by shifting the focus away from often-studied state actions and Uyghur reactions and onto the daily experience of diverse Han settlers, Oil and Water provides the first behind the scenes look into the colonial enterprise that China has tried to hide from the world since it took power sixty years ago."
Book Synopsis Desert Kingdom by : Toby Craig Jones
Download or read book Desert Kingdom written by Toby Craig Jones and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oil and water, and the science and technology used to harness them, have long been at the heart of political authority in Saudi Arabia. Oil’s abundance, and the fantastic wealth it generated, has been a keystone in the political primacy of the kingdom’s ruling family. The other bedrock element was water, whose importance was measured by its dearth. Over much of the twentieth century, it was through efforts to control and manage oil and water that the modern state of Saudi Arabia emerged. The central government’s power over water, space, and people expanded steadily over time, enabled by increasing oil revenues. The operations of the Arabian American Oil Company proved critical to expansion and to achieving power over the environment. Political authority in Saudi Arabia took shape through global networks of oil, science, and expertise. And, where oil and water were central to the forging of Saudi authoritarianism, they were also instrumental in shaping politics on the ground. Nowhere was the impact more profound than in the oil-rich Eastern Province, where the politics of oil and water led to a yearning for national belonging and to calls for revolution. Saudi Arabia is traditionally viewed through the lenses of Islam, tribe, and the economics of oil. Desert Kingdom now provides an alternative history of environmental power and the making of the modern Saudi state. It demonstrates how vital the exploitation of nature and the roles of science and global experts were to the consolidation of political authority in the desert.
Book Synopsis We Are Water Protectors by : Carole Lindstrom
Download or read book We Are Water Protectors written by Carole Lindstrom and published by Roaring Brook Press. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 23 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From author Carole Lindstrom and illustrator Michaela Goade comes a New York Times bestselling and Caldecott Medal winning picture book that honors Indigenous-led movements across the world. Powerfully written and gorgeously illustrated, We Are Water Protectors, issues an urgent rallying cry to safeguard the Earth’s water from harm and corruption—inviting young readers everywhere to join the fight. Water is the first medicine. It affects and connects us all . . . When a black snake threatens to destroy the Earth And poison her people’s water, one young water protector Takes a stand to defend Earth’s most sacred resource. The fight continues with Autumn Peltier, Water Warrior, the must-read companion book to We Are Water Protectors. Written by Carole Lindstrom and illustrated by Bridget George, it tells the story of real-life water protectors, Autumn Peltier and her great-aunt Josephine Mandamin, two Indigenous Rights Activists who have inspired a tidal wave of change.
Download or read book The North Water written by Ian McGuire and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year National Bestseller Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize Winner of the RSL Encore Award Finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize A New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestseller Named a Best Book of the Year by Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, New Statesman, Publishers Weekly, and Chicago Public Library Behold the man: stinking, drunk, and brutal. Henry Drax is a harpooner on the Volunteer, a Yorkshire whaler bound for the rich hunting waters of the arctic circle. Also aboard for the first time is Patrick Sumner, an ex-army surgeon with a shattered reputation, no money, and no better option than to sail as the ship's medic on this violent, filthy, and ill-fated voyage. In India, during the Siege of Delhi, Sumner thought he had experienced the depths to which man can stoop. He had hoped to find temporary respite on the Volunteer, but rest proves impossible with Drax on board. The discovery of something evil in the hold rouses Sumner to action. And as the confrontation between the two men plays out amid the freezing darkness of an arctic winter, the fateful question arises: who will survive until spring? With savage, unstoppable momentum and the blackest wit, Ian McGuire's The North Water weaves a superlative story of humanity under the most extreme conditions.
Book Synopsis How Beautiful We Were by : Imbolo Mbue
Download or read book How Beautiful We Were written by Imbolo Mbue and published by Random House. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fearless young woman from a small African village starts a revolution against an American oil company in this sweeping, inspiring novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers. ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, People • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, The Christian Science Monitor, Marie Claire, Ms. magazine, BookPage, Kirkus Reviews “Mbue reaches for the moon and, by the novel’s end, has it firmly held in her hand.”—NPR We should have known the end was near. So begins Imbolo Mbue’s powerful second novel, How Beautiful We Were. Set in the fictional African village of Kosawa, it tells of a people living in fear amid environmental degradation wrought by an American oil company. Pipeline spills have rendered farmlands infertile. Children are dying from drinking toxic water. Promises of cleanup and financial reparations to the villagers are made—and ignored. The country’s government, led by a brazen dictator, exists to serve its own interests. Left with few choices, the people of Kosawa decide to fight back. Their struggle will last for decades and come at a steep price. Told from the perspective of a generation of children and the family of a girl named Thula who grows up to become a revolutionary, How Beautiful We Were is a masterful exploration of what happens when the reckless drive for profit, coupled with the ghost of colonialism, comes up against one community’s determination to hold on to its ancestral land and a young woman’s willingness to sacrifice everything for the sake of her people’s freedom.
Book Synopsis Dead in the Water by : Matthew Campbell
Download or read book Dead in the Water written by Matthew Campbell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2022-05-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Financial Times Book of the Year An Economist Best Book of the Year “A triumph of investigative journalism.” —Tom Wright, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Billion Dollar Whale “A fascinating read. Highly recommended!”-John Carreyrou, bestselling author of Bad Blood "Truly one of the most nail-biting, page-turning, terrifying true-crime books I've ever read." —Nick Bilton, New York Times bestselling author of American Kingpin From award-winning journalists Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel, the gripping, true-crime story of a notorious maritime hijacking at the heart of a massive conspiracy—and the unsolved murder that threatened to unravel it all. In July 2011, the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was drifting through the treacherous Gulf of Aden when a crew of pirates attacked and set her ablaze in a devastating explosion. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for Lloyd’s of London, inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. How had the pirates gotten aboard so easily? And if they wanted to steal the ship and bargain for its return, then why did they destroy it? The questions didn’t add up—and Mockett would never answer them. Soon after his inspection, David Mockett was murdered. Dead in the Water is a shocking expose of the criminal inner workings of international shipping, told through the lens of the Brillante hijacking and its aftermath. Through first-hand accounts of those who lived it—from members of the ship’s crew and witnesses to the attacks, to the ex-London detectives turned private investigators seeking to solve Mockett’s murder and bring justice to his family—award-winning Bloomberg reporters Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel piece together the astounding truth behind one of the most brazen financial frauds in history. The ambitious culmination of more than four years of reporting, Dead in the Water uncovers an intricate web of conspiracy amidst the lawless, old-world industry at the backbone of our new global economy.
Book Synopsis High As the Waters Rise by : Anja Kampmann
Download or read book High As the Waters Rise written by Anja Kampmann and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This "gorgeously written" National Book Award finalist is a dazzling, heart-rending story of an oil rig worker whose closest friend goes missing, plunging him into isolation and forcing him to confront his past (NPR, One of the Best Books of the Year). One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Mátyás, has gone missing. A search of the rig confirms his fear that Mátyás has fallen into the sea. Grief-stricken, he embarks on an epic emotional and physical journey that takes him to Morocco, to Budapest and Mátyás's hometown in Hungary, to Malta, Italy, and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. Waclaw's encounters along the way with other lost and yearning souls—Mátyás's angry, grieving half-sister; lonely rig workers on shore leave; a truck driver who watches the world change from his driver's seat—bring us closer to his origins while also revealing the problems of a globalized economy dependent on waning natural resources. High as the Waters Rise is a stirring exploration of male intimacy, the nature of memory and grief, and the cost of freedom—the story of a man who stands at the margins of a society from which he has profited little, though its functioning depends on his labor.
Download or read book Oil! written by Upton Sinclair and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First edition of Sinclair's savage satire, loosely based on the life and career of Edward L. Doheny, and the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. Although Sinclair's famous novel The Jungle deals with Chicago's meatpacking industry, he moved west to Pasadena in 1916 and began writing novels set in California, the best of which was Oil!, the story of the education of Bunny Ross, son of wildcat oil man Joe Ross after oil is discovered outside Los Angeles. The novel was the basis for Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film There Will Be Blood. In California Classics, Lawrence Clark Powell called Oil! "Sinclair's most sustained and best writing."
Download or read book Water written by Bapsi Sidhwa and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2013-07-21 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eight-year-old is sent to live in a community of widows in India, and finds a new purpose there, in a novel by “a writer of enormous talent” (Newsday). Set in 1938, against the backdrop of Gandhi’s rise to power, Water follows the life of eight-year-old Chuyia, abandoned at a widow’s ashram after the death of her elderly husband. There, she must live in penitence until her death. Unwilling to accept her fate, she becomes a catalyst for change in the widows’ lives. When her friend Kalyani, a beautiful widow-prostitute, falls in love with a young, upper-class Gandhian idealist, the forbidden affair boldly defies Hindu tradition and threatens to undermine the ashram’s delicate balance of power. This riveting look at the lives of widows in colonial India is ultimately a haunting and lyrical story of love, faith, and redemption. “Sidhwa’s humor and compassion glow in Water.” —Houston Chronicle “A deeply moving story, elegantly told, with all the assurance of a master.” —M.G. Vassanji, author of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
Book Synopsis I Know This Much Is True by : Wally Lamb
Download or read book I Know This Much Is True written by Wally Lamb and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-03 with total page 884 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
Book Synopsis Yellow Bird by : Sierra Crane Murdoch
Download or read book Yellow Bird written by Sierra Crane Murdoch and published by Random House. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The gripping true story of a murder on an Indian reservation, and the unforgettable Arikara woman who becomes obsessed with solving it—an urgent work of literary journalism. “I don’t know a more complicated, original protagonist in literature than Lissa Yellow Bird, or a more dogged reporter in American journalism than Sierra Crane Murdoch.”—William Finnegan, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Barbarian Days In development as a Paramount+ original series WINNER OF THE OREGON BOOK AWARD • NOMINATED FOR THE EDGAR® AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Publishers Weekly When Lissa Yellow Bird was released from prison in 2009, she found her home, the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, transformed by the Bakken oil boom. In her absence, the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, her tribal government swayed by corporate interests, and her community burdened by a surge in violence and addiction. Three years later, when Lissa learned that a young white oil worker, Kristopher “KC” Clarke, had disappeared from his reservation worksite, she became particularly concerned. No one knew where Clarke had gone, and few people were actively looking for him. Yellow Bird traces Lissa’s steps as she obsessively hunts for clues to Clarke’s disappearance. She navigates two worlds—that of her own tribe, changed by its newfound wealth, and that of the non-Native oilmen, down on their luck, who have come to find work on the heels of the economic recession. Her pursuit of Clarke is also a pursuit of redemption, as Lissa atones for her own crimes and reckons with generations of trauma. Yellow Bird is an exquisitely written, masterfully reported story about a search for justice and a remarkable portrait of a complex woman who is smart, funny, eloquent, compassionate, and—when it serves her cause—manipulative. Drawing on eight years of immersive investigation, Sierra Crane Murdoch has produced a profound examination of the legacy of systematic violence inflicted on a tribal nation and a tale of extraordinary healing.
Book Synopsis Blood Water Paint by : Joy McCullough
Download or read book Blood Water Paint written by Joy McCullough and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Haunting ... teems with raw emotion, and McCullough deftly captures the experience of learning to behave in a male-driven society and then breaking outside of it."—The New Yorker "I will be haunted and empowered by Artemisia Gentileschi's story for the rest of my life."—Amanda Lovelace, bestselling author of the princess saves herself in this one A William C. Morris Debut Award Finalist 2018 National Book Award Longlist Her mother died when she was twelve, and suddenly Artemisia Gentileschi had a stark choice: a life as a nun in a convent or a life grinding pigment for her father's paint. She chose paint. By the time she was seventeen, Artemisia did more than grind pigment. She was one of Rome's most talented painters, even if no one knew her name. But Rome in 1610 was a city where men took what they wanted from women, and in the aftermath of rape Artemisia faced another terrible choice: a life of silence or a life of truth, no matter the cost. He will not consume my every thought. I am a painter. I will paint. Joy McCullough's bold novel in verse is a portrait of an artist as a young woman, filled with the soaring highs of creative inspiration and the devastating setbacks of a system built to break her. McCullough weaves Artemisia's heartbreaking story with the stories of the ancient heroines, Susanna and Judith, who become not only the subjects of two of Artemisia's most famous paintings but sources of strength as she battles to paint a woman's timeless truth in the face of unspeakable and all-too-familiar violence. I will show you what a woman can do. ★"A captivating and impressive."—Booklist, starred review ★"Belongs on every YA shelf."—SLJ, starred review ★"Haunting."—Publishers Weekly, starred review ★"Luminous."—Shelf Awareness, starred review
Book Synopsis Oil, God, and Gold by : Anthony Cave Brown
Download or read book Oil, God, and Gold written by Anthony Cave Brown and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Played out against a background of war and the turmoil of an ancient culture thrust abruptly into the twentieth century, the struggle to control the flow of Saudi oil was won by the United States, which emerged as the dominant Western power in the Middle East."--BOOK JACKET.