In 1976, at age twenty-five, Stephen Kinzer arrived in Nicaragua as a freelance journalist—and became a witness to history. He returned many times during the years that followed, becoming Latin America correspondent for the Boston Globe in 1981 and joining the foreign staff of the New York Times in 1983. That year he opened the New York Times Managua bureau, making that newspaper the first daily in America to maintain a full-time office in Nicaragua.
Widely considered the best-connected journalist in Central America, Kinzer personally met and interviewed people at every level of the Somoza, Sandinistas and contra hierarchies, as well as dissidents, heads of state, and countless ordinary citizens throughout the region.
Blood of Brothers is Kinzer’s dramatic story of the centuries-old power struggle that burst into the headlines in 1979 with the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. It is a vibrant portrait of the Nicaraguan people and their volcanic land, a cultural history rich in poetry and bloodshed, baseball and insurrection.
Brothers is Nico Slate’s poignant memoir about Peter Slate, aka XL, a Black rapper and screenwriter whose life was tragically cut short. Nico and Peter shared the same White American mother but had different fathers. Nico’s was White; Peter’s was Black. Growing up in California in the 1980s and 1990s, Nico often forgot about their racial differences until one night in March 1994 when Peter was attacked by a White man in a nightclub in Los Angeles.
Nico began writing Brothers with the hope that investigating the attack would bring him closer to Peter. He could not understand that night, however, without grappling with the many ways race had long separated him from his brother.
This is a memoir of loss—the loss of a life and the loss at the heart of our racial divide—but it is also a memoir of love. The love between Nico and Peter permeates every page of Brothers. This achingly beautiful memoir presents one family’s resilience on the fault lines of race in contemporary America.
In an account based on extensive archival research, including work in the Liberian National Archives, Sundiata explains how Garvey’s plan collapsed when faced with opposition from the Liberian elite, opposition that belied his vision of a unified Black World. In 1930 the League of Nations investigated labor conditions and, damningly, the United States, land of lynching and Jim Crow, accused Liberia of promoting “conditions analogous to slavery.” Subsequently various plans were put forward for a League Mandate or an American administration to put down slavery and “modernize” the country. Threatened with a loss of its independence, the Liberian government turned to its “brothers beyond the sea” for support. A varied group of white and black anti-imperialists, among them W. E. B. Du Bois, took up the country’s cause. In revealing the struggle of conscience that bedeviled many in the black world in the past, Sundiata casts light on a human rights predicament which, he points out, continues in twenty-first-century African nations as disparate as Sudan, Mauritania, and the Ivory Coast.
Brothers and Strangers traces the history of German Jewish attitudes, policies, and stereotypical images toward Eastern European Jews, demonstrating the ways in which the historic rupture between Eastern and Western Jewry developed as a function of modernism and its imperatives. By the 1880s, most German Jews had inherited and used such negative images to symbolize rejection of their own ghetto past and to emphasize the contrast between modern “enlightened” Jewry and its “half-Asian” counterpart. Moreover, stereotypes of the ghetto and the Eastern Jew figured prominently in the growth and disposition of German anti-Semitism. Not everyone shared these negative preconceptions, however, and over the years a competing post-liberal image emerged of the Ostjude as cultural hero. Brothers and Strangers examines the genesis, development, and consequences of these changing forces in their often complex cultural, political, and intellectual contexts.
Reviews of the Knopf edition:
"A wonderful book—fresh and intelligent. Broyles's eye for Vietnam, then and now, is unerring." —Peter Jennings
"[A] superbly written, often moving story of Broyles' journey back to the killing ground in Vietnam where he once served as a Marine lieutenant. A cool, clear meditation that stings the heart." —Kirkus Reviews
"A first-rate piece of work, infused with an ideal American common decency and common sense." —Kurt Vonnegut
"Exceptional and memorable." —Gay Talese
Oliver Goldsmith arrived in England in 1756 a penniless Irishman. He toiled for years in the anonymity of Grub Street—already a synonym for impoverished hack writers—before he became one of literary London’s most celebrated authors. Norma Clarke tells the extraordinary story of this destitute scribbler turned gentleman of letters as it unfolds in the early days of commercial publishing, when writers’ livelihoods came to depend on the reading public, not aristocratic patrons. Clarke examines a network of writers radiating outward from Goldsmith: the famous and celebrated authors of Dr. Johnson’s “Club” and those far less fortunate “brothers of the quill” trapped in Grub Street.
Clarke emphasizes Goldsmith’s sense of himself as an Irishman, showing that many of his early literary acquaintances were Irish émigrés: Samuel Derrick, John Pilkington, Paul Hiffernan, and Edward Purdon. These writers tutored Goldsmith in the ways of Grub Street, and their influence on his development has not previously been explored. Also Irish was the patron he acquired after 1764, Robert Nugent, Lord Clare. Clarke places Goldsmith in the tradition of Anglo-Irish satirists beginning with Jonathan Swift. He transmuted troubling truths about the British Empire into forms of fable and nostalgia whose undertow of Irish indignation remains perceptible, if just barely, beneath an equanimous English surface.
To read Brothers of the Quill is to be taken by the hand into the darker corners of eighteenth-century Grub Street, and to laugh and cry at the absurdities of the writing life.
My Brother's Madness is part thriller, part exploration that not only describes the causes, character, and journey of mental illness, but also makes sense of it. It is ultimately a story of our own humanity, and answers the question, Am I my brother's keeper?
The Civil War was barely over before Southerners and other students of the war began to examine the Confederate high command in search of an explanation for the South's failure. Although years of research failed to show that the South's defeat was due to a single, overriding cause, the actions of the Southern leaders during the war were certainly among the reasons the South lost the war.
In No Band of Brothers, Steven Woodworth explores, through a series of essays, various facets of the way the Confederacy waged its unsuccessful war for secession. He examines Jefferson Davis and some of his more important generals, including Pierre G. T. Beauregard, Leonidas Polk, Joseph E. Johnston, Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson; the Confederacy's strategic plans; and the South's success in making competent officers out of men with very little military preparation.
Woodworth particularly looks at the personalities and personal relationships that affected the course and outcome of the war. What made a good general? What could make an otherwise able man a failure as a general? What role did personal friendships or animosities play in the Confederacy's top command assignments and decisions? How successful was the Confederacy in making competent generals out of its civilian leaders? In what ways did Jefferson Davis succeed or fail in maximizing the chances for the success of his cause?
In analyzing the Confederate leadership, Woodworth reveals some weaknesses, many strengths, and much new information. No Band of Brothers will be an important addition to Civil War scholarship and will be welcomed by professional historians, amateur historians, students, and the general reader alike.
PNBA Novel of the Year
New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Haunted by the deaths of his parents and uncle, Frank Cassidy journeys north to dispute a cousin's claim to the family farm, where he meets a stranger who might resolve mysteries about Frank's past.The sibling relationship, as any parent with two or more children knows, is an extraordinarily intense one: young brothers and sisters love and hate, play and fight, tease and mock each other with a devastating lack of inhibition.
Why do some siblings get along harmoniously and affectionately, while others constantly squabble? To what extent are parents responsible for differences in siblings' personalities, and how can they ease the tensions?
In this timely and unusual glimpse into the world of the child, Judy Dunn argues that in fighting, bullying, or comforting, very young sisters and brothers possess a far deeper understanding of others than psychologists have supposed. She challenges the usual assumptions that birth order, age gap, and gender are the most crucial factors in explaining dramatic differences between siblings within a family, and suggests that siblings themselves have an important influence on each other's development. She shows that by studying children with their brothers and sisters, rather than in unfamiliar situations, we gain a new and illuminating picture of how growing up with siblings affects children's personalities, their intelligence, their ways of thinking and talking, and their perceptions of themselves, their families, and their friends.
Full of practical advice for coping with the daily trials of parenting two or more children, this warm and accessible book, based on new research, gives a fresh perception of a relationship which for many people lasts longer than any other in life.
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