Edward Said experienced both British and American imperialism as the old Arab order crumbled in the late forties and early fifties. This account of his early life reveals the influences that have formed his books, "Orientalism" and "Culture and Imperialism".
"Wonderful . . . One of the finest memoirs I've read." -- Philip Caputo, Washington PostIn the summer of 2006, racing through Lebanon to report on the Israeli invasion, Anthony Shadid found himself in his family's ancestral hometown of Marjayoun. There, he discovered his great-grandfather's once magnificent estate in near ruins, devastated by war. One year later, Shadid returned to Marjayoun, not to chronicle the violence, but to rebuild in its wake.So begins the story of a battle-scarred home and a journalist's wounded spirit, and of how reconstructing the one came to fortify the other. In this bittersweet and resonant memoir, Shadid creates a mosaic of past and present, tracing the house's renewal alongside the history of his family's flight from Lebanon and resettlement in America around the turn of the twentieth century. In the process, he memorializes a lost world and provides profound insights into a shifting Middle East. This paperback edition includes an afterword by the journalist Nada Bakri, Anthony Shadid's wife, reflecting on his legacy."A poignant dedication to family, to home, and to history . . . Breathtaking." -- San Francisco Chronicle"Entertaining, informative, and deeply moving . . . House of Stone will stand a long time, for those fortunate enough to read it." -- Telegraph (London)
Surprisingly funny, and refreshingly different from any other writings on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Sharon and My Mother- in-Law, describes Suad Amiry's experience of living on the West Bank from the early eighties to the present.
In the early 1970s, the writer left a small town in Ohio to move to a loft in lower Manhattan. This book is his account of the city over the thirty years he's lived there. It also features street scenes from every corner of the metropolis, where every block is an event and where the denizens are larger than life.
Describes the author's experience of living on the West Bank since the early eighties. The author tells about the life and gossip of her neighbourhood in Ramallah, her moving family history, and the struggle to live a normal life in an insane situation, based on her diary, which she kept during the Israeli invasion of Ramallah in March 2002.
Features articles by: Tim Parks, on the joys of commuting from Verona to Milan every day; Christopher de Bellaigue, on tracking down the Armenians in Turkey; Jeremy Treglown, following in the footsteps of V. S. Pritchett in Spain; Jeremy Seabrook, on being separated from his twin; and, Todd McEwen, on Cary Grant's trousers.
Explores our ideas of the wild. This book also tells the story of a friendship, and of a loss. It mixes history, memory and landscape in a strange and beautiful evocation of wildness and its vital importance.
On the day that Homes was born in 1961, she was given up for adoption. Thirty years later, out of the blue, Homes was contacted by a lawyer on behalf of her birth mother, and they began to correspond; her biological father contacted her soon after. These two individuals and their effect on the adult Homes are strange and unexpected.
In 1907, Princess Sophy ('Sofka') Dolgorouky was born in St Petersburg. The Russian Revolution caused the princess to flee across Europe to England. During the WWII she was interned in a Nazi prison camp, where she discovered Communism. This book uses letters, diaries and interviews to provide a portrait of this princess.
Since her death, Marilyn Monroe has been the subject of some 600 books, all of which claim to uncover the 'real Marilyn'. But the biographies can't agree on many of the most sensational details of the life of the twentieth century's most famous woman.
Wayne McLennan tells the story of his extraordinary life through a series of adventures after he leaves his home town in Australia, desperate to avoid following his father and his grandfather into the mines.
Eva Figes and her family fled the horror of Nazi Germany when Eva was only six, forced to leave behind them friends, relatives and their housemaid, Edith. Ten years later, Edith suddenly re-emerged in their lives. Having miraculously survived wartime Berlin, she had reluctantly emigrated to hostile, volatile Palestine.
In his first venture into non-fiction, the celebrated novelist Rupert Thomson has produced one of the most extraordinary and unforgettable memoirs of recent years. On a warm, sunny day in July 1964, Thomson returned home from school to discover that his mother had died suddenly while playing tennis. Twenty years later, Thomson and his brothers get word that their father, who suffered chronic lung damage during the war, has died alone in hospital. In an attempt to come to terms both with their own loss and with their parents' legacies, the three brothers move back into their father's house. The time they spend in this decadent, anarchic commune leads to a rift between Thomson and his youngest brother, a rift that will not be addressed for more than two decades. "This Party's Got to Stop" works Thomson's memories into a powerful mosaic that reveals the fragility of family life in graphic and often heartbreaking detail. It is both a love letter to a lost brother and a chronicle of the murderousness and longing that can characterize blood relationships.
