Read Books Online and Download eBooks, EPub, PDF, Mobi, Kindle, Text Full Free.
The Cruel Country
Download The Cruel Country full books in PDF, epub, and Kindle. Read online The Cruel Country ebook anywhere anytime directly on your device. Fast Download speed and no annoying ads. We cannot guarantee that every ebooks is available!
Book Synopsis The Cruel Country by : Judith Ortiz Cofer
Download or read book The Cruel Country written by Judith Ortiz Cofer and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I am learning the alchemy of grief—how it must be carefully measured and doled out, inflicted—but I have not yet mastered this art,” writes Judith Ortiz Cofer in The Cruel Country. This richly textured, deeply moving, and lyrical memoir centers on Cofer's return to her native Puerto Rico after her mother has been diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer. Cofer's work has always drawn strength from her life's contradictions and dualities, such as the necessities and demands of both English and Spanish, her travels between and within various mainland and island subcultures, and the challenges of being a Latina living in the U.S. South. Interlaced with these far-from-common tensions are dualities we all share: our lives as both sacred and profane, our negotiation of both child and adult roles, our desires to be the person who belongs and also the person who is different. What we discover in The Cruel Country is how much Cofer has heretofore held back in her vivid and compelling writing. This journey to her mother's deathbed has released her to tell the truth within the truth. She arrives at her mother's bedside as a daughter overcome by grief, but she navigates this cruel country as a writer—an acute observer of detail, a relentless and insistent questioner.
Book Synopsis A Beautiful, Cruel Country by : Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce
Download or read book A Beautiful, Cruel Country written by Eva Antonia Wilbur-Cruce and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016-05-26 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arizona's Arivaca Valley lies only a short distance from the Mexican border and is a rugged land in which to put down stakes. When Arizona Territory was America's last frontier, this area was homesteaded by Anglo and Mexican settlers alike, who often displaced the Indian population that had lived there for centuries. This frontier way of life, which prevailed as recently as the beginning of the twentieth century, is now recollected in vivid detail by an octogenarian who spent her girlhood in this beautiful, cruel country. Eva Antonia Wilbur inherited a unique affinity for the land. Granddaughter of a Harvard-educated physician who came to the Territory in the 1860s, she was the firstborn child of a Mexican mother and Anglo father who instilled in her an appreciation for both cultures. Little Toña learned firsthand the responsibilities of ranching—an education usually reserved for boys—and also experienced the racial hostility that occurred during those final years before the Tohono O'odham were confined to a reservation. Begun as a reminiscence to tell younger family members about their "rawhide tough and lonely" life at the turn of the century, Mrs. Wilbur-Cruce's book is rich with imagery and dialogue that brings the Arivaca area to life. Her story is built around the annual cycle of ranch life—its spring and fall round-ups, planting and harvesting—and features a cavalcade of border characters, anecdotes about folk medicine, and recollections of events that were most meaningful in a young girl's life. Her account constitutes a valuable primary source from a region about which nothing similar has been previously published, while the richness of her story creates a work of literature that will appeal to readers of all ages.
Book Synopsis Country of the Bad Wolfes by : James Carlos Blake
Download or read book Country of the Bad Wolfes written by James Carlos Blake and published by Cinco Puntos Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A page-turning epic about the making of a borderland crime family, Country of the Bad Wolfes will appeal both to aficionados of family sagas and to fans of hard-knuckled crime novels by the likes of Donald Pollack, Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke and James Ellroy. Basing the novel partly on his own ancestors, Blake presents the story of the Wolfe family — spanning three generations, centering on two sets of identical twins and the women they love, and ranging from New England to the heart of Mexico before arriving at its powerful climax at the Rio Grande. Begat by an Irish-English pirate in New Hampshire in 1828, the Wolfe family follows its manifest destiny into war-torn Mexico. There, through the connection of a mysterious American named Edward Little, their fortunes intertwine with those of Porfirio Díaz, who will rule the country for more than thirty years before his overthrow by the Revolution of 1910. In the course of those tumultuous chapters in American and Mexican history, as Díaz grows in power, the Wolfes grow rich and forge a violent history of their own, spawning a fearsome legacy that will pursue them to a climactic reckoning at the Río Grande. A master of the historical novel, James Carlos Blake has been hailed as “a poet of the damned who writes like an angel” (Donald Newlove, Kirkus Reviews). Library Journal says of Blake's latest novel that it is "brawling, high-spirited, and superbly realized ... this novel offers many pleasures, including endearing characters, unlikely love stories, and all manner of mayhem." James Carlos Blake was born in Mexico and grew up in Texas and Florida. He is the author of nine other novels and a collection of short works. Among his literary honors are the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southwest Book Award, and the Falcon Award.
Book Synopsis A Little Piece of Ground by : Elizabeth Laird
Download or read book A Little Piece of Ground written by Elizabeth Laird and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2016-02-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Little Piece Of Ground will help young readers understand more about one of the worst conflicts afflicting our world today. Written by Elizabeth Laird, one of Great Britain’s best-known young adult authors, A Little Piece Of Ground explores the human cost of the occupation of Palestinian lands through the eyes of a young boy. Twelve-year-old Karim Aboudi and his family are trapped in their Ramallah home by a strict curfew. In response to a Palestinian suicide bombing, the Israeli military subjects the West Bank town to a virtual siege. Meanwhile, Karim, trapped at home with his teenage brother and fearful parents, longs to play football with his friends. When the curfew ends, he and his friend discover an unused patch of ground that’s the perfect site for a football pitch. Nearby, an old car hidden intact under bulldozed building makes a brilliant den. But in this city there’s constant danger, even for schoolboys. And when Israeli soldiers find Karim outside during the next curfew, it seems impossible that he will survive. This powerful book fills a substantial gap in existing young adult literature on the Middle East. With 23,000 copies already sold in the United Kingdom and Canada, this book is sure to find a wide audience among young adult readers in the United States.
Book Synopsis The Cruelty Is the Point by : Adam Serwer
Download or read book The Cruelty Is the Point written by Adam Serwer and published by One World. This book was released on 2021-06-29 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From an award-winning journalist at The Atlantic, these searing essays make a powerful case that “real hope lies not in a sunny nostalgia for American greatness but in seeing this history plain—in all of its brutality, unadorned by euphemism” (The New York Times). NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • “No writer better demonstrates how American dreams are so often sabotaged by American history. Adam Serwer is essential.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates To many, our most shocking political crises appear unprecedented—un-American, even. But they are not, writes The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer in this prescient essay collection, which dissects the most devastating moments in recent memory to reveal deeply entrenched dynamics, patterns as old as the country itself. The January 6 insurrection, anti-immigrant sentiment, and American authoritarianism all have historic roots that explain their continued power with or without President Donald Trump—a fact borne out by what has happened since his departure from the White House. Serwer argues that Trump is not the cause, he is a symptom. Serwer’s phrase “the cruelty is the point” became among the most-used descriptions of Trump’s era, but as this book demonstrates, it resonates across centuries. The essays here combine revelatory reporting, searing analysis, and a clarity that’s bracing. In this new, expanded version of his bestselling debut, Serwer elegantly dissects white supremacy’s profound influence on our political system, looking at the persistence of the Lost Cause, the past and present of police unions, the mythology of migration, and the many faces of anti-Semitism. In so doing, he offers abundant proof that our past is present and demonstrates the devastating costs of continuing to pretend it’s not. The Cruelty Is the Point dares us, the reader, to not look away.
Download or read book The Cruel Way written by Ella K. Maillart and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-10 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1939 Swiss travel writer and journalist Ella K. Maillart set off on an epic journey from Geneva to Kabul with fellow writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach in a brand new Ford. As the first European women to travel alone on Afghanistan’s Northern Road, Maillart and Schwarzenbach had a rare glimpse of life in Iran and Afghanistan at a time when their borders were rarely crossed by Westerners. As the two flash across Europe and the Near East in a streak of élan and daring, Maillart writes of comical mishaps, breathtaking landscapes, vitriolic religious clashes, and the ingenuity with which the women navigated what was often a dangerous journey. In beautiful, clear-eyed prose, The Cruel Way shows Maillart’s great ability to explore and experience other cultures in writing both lyrical and deeply empathetic. While the core of the book is the journey itself and their interactions with people oppressed by political conflict and poverty, towards the end of the trip the women’s increasingly troubled relationship takes center stage. By then the glamorous, androgynous Schwarzenbach, whose own account of the trip can be found in All the Roads Are Open, is fighting a losing battle with her own drug addiction, and Maillart’s frustrated attempts to cure her show the profound depth of their relationship. Complete with thirteen of Maillart’s own photographs from the journey, The Cruel Way is a classic of travel writing, and its protagonists are as gripping and fearless as any in literature.
Book Synopsis The Story of Cruel and Unusual by : Colin Dayan
Download or read book The Story of Cruel and Unusual written by Colin Dayan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-03-16 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searing indictment of the American penal system that finds the roots of the recent prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo in the steady dismantling of the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual" punishment. The revelations of prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib and more recently at Guantánamo were shocking to most Americans. And those who condemned the treatment of prisoners abroad have focused on U.S. military procedures and abuses of executive powers in the war on terror, or, more specifically, on the now-famous White House legal counsel memos on the acceptable limits of torture. But in The Story of Cruel and Unusual, Colin Dayan argues that anyone who has followed U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding the Eighth Amendment prohibition of "cruel and unusual" punishment would recognize the prisoners' treatment at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo as a natural extension of the language of our courts and practices in U.S. prisons. In fact, it was no coincidence that White House legal counsel referred to a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1980s and 1990s in making its case for torture.Dayan traces the roots of "acceptable" torture to slave codes of the nineteenth century that deeply embedded the dehumanization of the incarcerated in our legal system. Although the Eighth Amendment was interpreted generously during the prisoners' rights movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, this period of judicial concern was an anomaly. Over the last thirty years, Supreme Court decisions have once again dismantled Eighth Amendment protections and rendered such words as "cruel" and "inhuman" meaningless when applied to conditions of confinement and treatment during detention. Prisoners' actual pain and suffering have been explained away in a rhetorical haze—with rationalizations, for example, that measure cruelty not by the pain or suffering inflicted, but by the intent of the person who inflicted it. The Story of Cruel and Unusual is a stunningly original work of legal scholarship, and a searing indictment of the U.S. penal system.
Book Synopsis That Old Country Music by : Kevin Barry
Download or read book That Old Country Music written by Kevin Barry and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of short stories of rural Ireland in the classic Irish mode: full of love (and sex), melancholy and magic, bedecked in some of the most gorgeous prose being written today—from the author of the wildly acclaimed Night Boat to Tangier. With three novels and two short story collections published, Kevin Barry has steadily established his stature as one of the finest writers not just in Ireland but in the English language. All of his prodigious gifts of language, character, and setting in these eleven exquisite stories transport the reader to an Ireland both timeless and recognizably modern. Shot through with dark humor and the uncanny power of the primal and unchanging Irish landscape, the stories in That Old Country Music represent some of the finest fiction being written today.
Book Synopsis Against the Country by : Ben Metcalf
Download or read book Against the Country written by Ben Metcalf and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2018-08-21 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Against the Country is a gift for fans of Southern Gothic and metafiction alike. Set in the Virginia pines, and overrun with failed parents, racist sex offenders, cast-off priests, and suicidal chickens, this novel challenges literary convention even as it attacks our national myth—that the rural naturally engenders good, while the urban breeds an inevitable sin. In a voice both perfectly American and utterly new, Ben Metcalf introduces the reader to Goochland County, Virginia—a land of stubborn soil, voracious insects, lackluster farms, and horrifying trees—and details one family’s pitiful struggle to survive there. Eventually it becomes clear that Goochland is not merely the author’s setting; it is a growing, throbbing menace that warps and scars every one of his characters’ lives. Equal parts fiery criticism and icy farce, Against the Country is the most hilarious sermon one is likely to hear on the subject of our native soil, and the starkest celebration of the language our land produced. The result is a literary tour de force that raises the question: Was there ever a narrator, in all our literature, so precise, so far-reaching, so eloquently misanthropic, as the one encountered here? Praise for Against the Country “Iconoclastic . . . Against the Country has obvious affinities to Southern Gothic, both in its voice and in the delight it takes in rural ignorance and grotesqueries. . . . [A] country cousin of David Foster Wallace.”—The New York Times Book Review “Exceptional in its verbal brilliance and conscientiousness, Against the Country involves us in a family’s anguished and hilarious struggle against the strange dooms that seem peculiar to white rural America. This is a savage and gladdening novel.”—Joseph O’Neill, author of Netherland and The Dog “Metcalf’s unnamed narrator dazzles with his Puritan deadpan and capacious intellect, not to mention his double-barreled blasts of dark humor and wicked satire. . . . There are so many brilliant turns of phrase in Against the Country that it’s hard to choose favorites, but Metcalf is at his sharpest and most seductive when his antihero does more than blast and blame, when he steps outside his sermons to say something real. . . . Every note in every solo is sounded with exquisite perfection.”—Slate “Faulknerian . . . eccentric, magnificent Southern Gothic metafiction.”—Vanity Fair “Ben Metcalf is a brilliant writer, and Against the Country is an ingenious and hilarious novel, a glittering, bitter celebration of how the lousiness of life can be redeemed in the hands (and mouth) of a top-shelf teller of life’s stories.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and The Fun Parts “A daring conglomeration of every trick, swindle and gimmick possible using only ink and paper, a pulpwood imagination machine so finely and expertly wrought that it can take on Jefferson, Thoreau, the church, patriotism, race relations, sexual identity, J. D. Salinger, the myth of America and a thousand other targets . . . [Against the Country] is absolutely and completely worth all investment of time and effort, because it is an undeniably beautiful object, sharp as a new razor.”—NPR “One of the more necessary—and most eloquent—expressions of a distinctly American, provincial rage in some years.”—Flavorwire
Download or read book Low Country written by J. Nicole Jones and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From horse thieves to hurricanes, from shattered Southern myths to fractured family ties, from Nashville to Myrtle Beach to Miami, Low Country is a lyrical, devastating, fiercely original memoir" of one family's changing fortunes in the Low Country of South Carolina (Justin Taylor, author of Riding with the Ghost). J. Nicole Jones is the only daughter of a prominent South Carolina family, a family that grew rich building the hotels and seafood restaurants that draw tourists to Myrtle Beach. But at home, she is surrounded by violence and capriciousness: a grandfather who beats his wife, a barman father who dreams of being a country music star. At one time, Jones's parents can barely afford groceries; at another, her volatile grandfather presents her with a fur coat. After a girlhood of extreme wealth and deep debt, of ghosts and folklore, of cruel men and unwanted spectacle, Jones finds herself face to face with an explosive possibility concerning her long-abused grandmother that she can neither speak nor shake. And through the lens of her own family's catastrophes and triumphs, Jones pays homage to the landscapes and legends of her childhood home, a region haunted by its history: Eliza Pinckney cultivates indigo, Blackbeard ransacks the coast, and the Gray Man paces the beach, warning of Hurricane Hazel.
Download or read book Chosen Country written by James Pogue and published by Henry Holt. This book was released on 2018-05-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given unprecedented access to those participating in the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a journalist reveals how politics and uncompromising religious belief divided communities.
Download or read book Savage Country written by Robert Olmstead and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The year was 1873 and all about was the evidence of boom and bust, shattered dreams, foolish ambition, depredation, shame, greed, and cruelty . . .” Onto this broken Western stage rides Michael Coughlin, a Civil War veteran with an enigmatic past, come to town to settle his dead brother’s debt. Together with his widowed sister-in-law, Elizabeth, bankrupted by her husband’s folly and death, they embark on a massive, and hugely dangerous, buffalo hunt. Elizabeth hopes to salvage something of her former life and the lives of the hired men and their families who now depend on her; the buffalo hunt that her husband had planned, she now realizes, was his last hope for saving the land. Elizabeth and Michael plunge south across the aptly named “dead line” demarcating Indian Territory from their home state of Kansas. Nothing could have prepared them for the dangers: rattlesnakes, rabies, wildfire, lightning strikes, blue northers, flash floods—and human treachery. With the Comanche in winter quarters, Elizabeth and Michael are on borrowed time, and the cruel work of harvesting the buffalo is unraveling their souls. Bracing, direct, and quintessentially American, Olmstead’s gripping narrative follows that infamous hunt, which drove the buffalo to near extinction. Savage Country is the story of a moment in our history in which mass destruction of an animal population was seen as a road to economic salvation. But it’s also the intimate story of how that hunt changed Michael and Elizabeth forever.
Book Synopsis Home in Florida by : Anjanette Delgado
Download or read book Home in Florida written by Anjanette Delgado and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Independent Publisher Book Awards, Silver Medal for Anthology National Indie Excellence Awards, Finalist in the Anthology Category International Latino Book Awards, Gold Medal for Best Fiction (Multi-Author) International Latino Book Awards, Honorable Mention, Best Nonfiction (Multi-Author) A powerful collection of contemporary voices Showcasing a variety of voices shaped in and by a place that has been for them a crossroads and a land of contradictions, Home in Florida presents a selection of the best literature of displacement and uprootedness by some of the most talented contemporary Latinx writers who have called Florida home. Featuring fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Richard Blanco, Jaquira Díaz, Patricia Engel, Jennine Capó Crucet, Reinaldo Arenas, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and many others, this collection of renowned and award-winning contributors includes several who are celebrated in their countries of origin but have not yet been discovered by readers in the United States. The writers in this volume—first- , second- , and third-generation immigrants to Florida from Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, Perú, Argentina, Chile, and other countries—reflect the diversity of Latinx experiences across the state. Editor Anjanette Delgado characterizes the work in this collection as literature of uprootedness, literatura del desarraigo, a Spanish literary tradition and a term used by Reinaldo Arenas. With the heart-changing, here-and-there perspective of attempting life in environments not their own, these writers portray many different responses to displacement, each occupying their own unique place on what Delgado calls a spectrum of belonging. Together, these writers explore what exactly makes Florida home for those struggling between memory and presence. In these works, as it is for many people seeking to make a new life in the United States, Florida is the place where the uprooted stop to catch their breath long enough to wonder, “What if I stayed? What if here could one day be my home?” Contributors: Daniel Reschinga | Ana Menéndez | Frances Negrón Muntaner | Hernán Vera Álvarez | Liz Balmaseda | Ariel Francisco | Andreina Fernandez | Amina Lolita Gautier PhD | Jennine Capó-Crucet | Dainerys Machado Vento | Carlos Harrison | Legna Rodríguez Iglesias | Judith Ortiz Cofer | Chantel Acevedo | Guillermo Rosales | Achy Obejas | Alex Segura | Patricia Engel | Anjanette Delgado | Mia Leonin | Carlos Pintado | Nilsa Ada Rivera | Natalie Scenters-Zapico | Pedro Medina León | Caridad Moro-Gronlier | Aracelis González Asendorf | Michael García-Juelle | Jaquira Díaz | José Ignacio Chascas-Valenzuela | Raúl Dopico | Javier Lentino | Yaddyra Peralta
Book Synopsis The Line of the Sun by : Judith Ortiz Cofer
Download or read book The Line of the Sun written by Judith Ortiz Cofer and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2011-03-15 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A colorful, revealing portrait of Puerto Rican culture and domestic relationship” from the award-winning poet and author of An Island Like You (Publishers Weekly). Set in the 1950s and 1960s, The Line of the Sun moves from a rural Puerto Rican village to a tough immigrant housing project in New Jersey, telling the story of a Hispanic family’s struggle to become part of a new culture without relinquishing the old. At the story’s center is Guzmán, an almost mythic figure whose adventures and exile, salvation and return leave him a broken man but preserve his place in the heart and imagination of his niece, who is his secret biographer. “Cofer . . . reveals herself to be a prose writer of evocatively lyrical authority, a novelist of historical compass and sensitivity . . . One recognizes in the rich weave and vigorous elegance of the language of The Line of the Sun a writer of authentic gifts, with a genuine and important story to tell.”—The New York Times Book Review “There is great strength in the way Cofer evokes the fierce, loving, and brave Latin spirit that is the novel’s real theme.”—Joyce Johnson, National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author “The Line of the Sun reads like a dream, from the beautifully realized description of the deceptive Paradise Lost, to the utterly different but equally vivid world of the urban North . . . This is a splendid first novel.”—The State (Columbia, South Carolina) “The writing in this superb novel stuns and surprises at every turn. Its sensuality and imagery . . . are riveting.”—The San Juan Star
Download or read book Cruel Modernity written by Jean Franco and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-29 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco examines the conditions under which extreme cruelty became the instrument of armies, governments, rebels, and rogue groups in Latin America. She seeks to understand how extreme cruelty came to be practiced in many parts of the continent over the last eighty years and how its causes differ from the conditions that brought about the Holocaust, which is generally the atrocity against which the horror of others is measured. In Latin America, torturers and the perpetrators of atrocity were not only trained in cruelty but often provided their own rationales for engaging in it. When "draining the sea" to eliminate the support for rebel groups gave license to eliminate entire families, the rape, torture, and slaughter of women dramatized festering misogyny and long-standing racial discrimination accounted for high death tolls in Peru and Guatemala. In the drug wars, cruelty has become routine as tortured bodies serve as messages directed to rival gangs. Franco draws on human-rights documents, memoirs, testimonials, novels, and films, as well as photographs and art works, to explore not only cruel acts but the discriminatory thinking that made them possible, their long-term effects, the precariousness of memory, and the pathos of survival.
Book Synopsis The Man Without a Country and Other Tales by : Edward Everett Hale
Download or read book The Man Without a Country and Other Tales written by Edward Everett Hale and published by Wildside Press LLC. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of short stories by Civil War-era author Hale, including a short fantasy entitled "My Double and How He Undid Me."
Book Synopsis Crisis by : William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
Download or read book Crisis written by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois and published by . This book was released on 1921 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
