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.
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.
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.
Hoping to improve her Chinese, Rachel DeWoskin went to work in China. But, before she knew it, she was not just exploring, but making Chinese culture, as the sexy and aggressive, fearless Jiexi, star of a wildly successful soap opera.
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.
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.
Did you know that one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year? That rats' teeth are harder than steel? Focusing on such questions, this book reveals the many ways rats' lives mirror those of humans. It is an account of a year spent in a garbage-strewn alley in lower Manhattan.
