Chair of Tears

Chair of Tears
Author: Gerald Vizenor
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2012-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0803240325

The best stories create traditions, and this novel by celebrated Native American writer Gerald Vizenor is a marvelous conjunction of trickster stories and literary ingenuity. Chair of Tears is funny, fierce, ironic, and deadly serious, a sendup of sacred poses, cultural pretensions, and familiar places from reservations to universities. The novel begins with generous stories about Captain Eighty, his young wife, the poker-playing genius named Quiver, and their children and grandchildren who live on a rustic houseboat. Captain Shammer, an extraordinary grandson reared on the houseboat and with no formal education, is appointed the chairman of a troubled Department of Native American Indian Studies at a prominent university. Shammer is a natural enterpriser and ironic showman in the tradition of trickster stories. He arrives at the first faculty meeting dressed in the uniform of Gen. George Armstrong Custer. Native students celebrate his conversion of the department into an academic poker parlor and casino, and a panic radio station. The most sensational enterprise is the training of service mongrels to detect the absence of irony. An irresistible novel of original ideas, Chair of Tears gets to the heart of questions about identity politics, multiculturalism, pedantry, and timely virtues.

Tears for Fears

Tears for Fears
Author: Will Hall
Publisher: Cherry Lane Music
Total Pages: 64
Release: 1985
Genre: Rock musicians
ISBN: 9780946391776

Riding the Trail of Tears

Riding the Trail of Tears
Author: Blake M. Hausman
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2011-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0803268211

Sherman Alexie meets William Gibson. Louise Erdrich meets Franz Kafka. Leslie Marmon Silko meets Philip K. Dick. However you might want to put it, this is Native American fiction in a whole new world. A surrealistic revisiting of the Cherokee Removal, Riding the Trail of Tears takes us to north Georgia in the near future, into a virtual-reality tourist compound where customers ride the Trail of Tears, and into the world of Tallulah Wilson, a Cherokee woman who works there. When several tourists lose consciousness inside the ride, employees and customers at the compound come to believe, naturally, that a terrorist attack is imminent. Little does Tallulah know that Cherokee Little People have taken up residence in the virtual world and fully intend to change the ride’s programming to suit their own point of view. Told by a narrator who knows all but can hardly be trusted, in a story reflecting generations of experience while recalling the events in a single day of Tallulah’s life, this funny and poignant tale revises American history even as it offers a new way of thinking, both virtual and very real, about the past for both Native Americans and their Anglo counterparts.

The Crying Book

The Crying Book
Author: Heather Christle
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1948226456

This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry, how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression (The New York Times Book Review). Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen–tear–shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence. Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

Crying

Crying
Author: Tom Lutz
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2001
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780393321036

This provocative and indispensable book provides a natural and cultural history of our most mysterious and complex human function: our ability to shed tears. All humans, and only humans, weep. Tears are sometimes considered pleasurable, sometimes dangerous, mysterious, deceptive, or profound. Tears of happiness, tears of joy, the proud tears of a parent, tears of mourning, tears of laughter, tears of defeat --what do they have in common? Why is it that at times of victory, success, love, reunion, and celebration the outward signs of our emotions are identical to those of our most profound experiences of loss? Why We Cry looks at the many different ways people have understood weeping, from the earliest known representation of tears in the fourteenth century B.C. through the latest neurophysiological research. Despite our most common romantic assumptions, what this brilliant book tells us is that tears are never pure, they are never simple.

White Tears

White Tears
Author: Hari Kunzru
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101973218

A PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • GQ • Time • The Economist • Slate • HuffPost • Book Riot Ghost story, murder mystery, love letter to American music--White Tears is all of this and more, a thrilling investigation of race and appropriation in society today. Seth is a shy, awkward twentysomething. Carter is more glamorous, the heir to a great American fortune. But they share an obsession with music--especially the blues. One day, Seth discovers that he's accidentally recorded an unknown blues singer in a park. Carter puts the file online, claiming it's a 1920s recording by a made-up musician named Charlie Shaw. But when a music collector tells them that their recording is genuine--that there really was a singer named Charlie Shaw--the two white boys, along with Carter's sister, find themselves in over their heads, delving deeper and deeper into America's dark, vengeful heart. White Tears is a literary thriller and a meditation on art--who owns it, who can consume it, and who profits from it.

The City of Tears

The City of Tears
Author: Kate Mosse
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2021-01-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250202191

Following #1 Sunday Times bestseller The Burning Chambers, New York Times bestseller Kate Mosse returns with The City of Tears, a sweeping historical epic about love in a time of war. "Mosse is a master storyteller."—Madeline Miller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Circe Alliances and Romance August 1572: Minou Joubert and her husband Piet travel to Paris to attend a royal wedding which, after a decade of religious wars, is intended to finally bring peace between the Catholics and the Huguenots. Loyalty and Deception Also in Paris is their oldest enemy, Vidal, in pursuit of an ancient relic that will change the course of history. Revenge and Persecution Within days of the marriage, thousands will lie dead in the street, and Minou’s family will be scattered to the four winds . . .

What Tears Us Apart

What Tears Us Apart
Author: Deborah Cloyed
Publisher: MIRA
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2013-03-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0778313794

Love lives in the most dangerous places of the heart The real world. That's what Leda desperately seeks when she flees her life of privilege to travel to Kenya. She finds it at a boys'orphanage in the slums of Nairobi. What she doesn't expect is to fall for Ita, the charismatic and thoughtful man who gave up his dreams to offer children a haven in the midst of turmoil. Their love should be enough for one another-it embodies the soul-deep connection both have always craved. But it is threatened by Ita's troubled childhood friend, Chege, a gang leader with whom he shares a complex history. As political unrest reaches a boiling point and the slum erupts in violence, Leda is attacked…and forced to put her trust in Chege, the one person who otherwise inspires anything but. In the aftermath of Leda's rescue, disturbing secrets are exposed, and Leda, Ita and Chege are each left grappling with their own regret and confusion. Their worlds upturned, they must now face the reality that sometimes the most treacherous threat is not the world outside, but the demons within.

Tears We Cannot Stop

Tears We Cannot Stop
Author: Michael Eric Dyson
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2017-01-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1250136008

“A hard-hitting sermon on the racial divide, directed specifically to a white congregation.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review A New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe Bestseller As the country grapples with racial division at a level not seen since the 1960s, Michael Eric Dyson’s voice is heard above the rest. In Tears We Cannot Stop, a provocative and deeply personal call or change, Dyson argues that if we are to make real racial progress, we must face difficult truths, including being honest about how Black grievance has been ignored, dismissed, and discounted. In the tradition of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time—short, emotional, literary, powerful—this is the book that all Americans who care about the current and long-burning crisis in race relations need to read. Praise for Tears We Cannot Stop Named a Best/Most Anticipated Book of 2017 by: The Washington Post • Bustle • Men’s Journal • The Chicago Reader • StarTribune • Blavity• The Guardian • NBC New York’s Bill’s Books • Kirkus Reviews • Essence “Elegantly written and powerful in several areas: moving personal recollections; profound cultural analysis; and guidance for moral redemption. A work to relish.” —Toni Morrison “Here’s a sermon that’s as fierce as it is lucid . . . If you’re black, you’ll feel a spark of recognition in every paragraph. If you’re white, Dyson tells you what you need to know—what this white man needed to know, at least. This is a major achievement. I read it and said amen.” —Stephen King “One of the most frank and searing discussions on race . . . a deeply serious, urgent book, which should take its place in the tradition of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and King’s Why We Can’t Wait.” —The New York Times Book Review

The Other Trail of Tears

The Other Trail of Tears
Author: Mary Stockwell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781594162589

The Story of the Longest and Largest Forced Migration of Native Americans in American History The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was the culmination of the United States' policy to force native populations to relocate west of the Mississippi River. The most well-known episode in the eviction of American Indians in the East was the notorious "Trail of Tears" along which Southeastern Indians were driven from their homes in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to reservations in present-day Oklahoma. But the struggle in the South was part of a wider story that reaches back in time to the closing months of the War of 1812, back through many states--most notably Ohio--and into the lives of so many tribes, including the Delaware, Seneca, Shawnee, Ottawa, and Wyandot (Huron). They, too, were forced to depart from their homes in the Ohio Country to Kansas and Oklahoma. The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians by award-winning historian Mary Stockwell tells the story of this region's historic tribes as they struggled following the death of Tecumseh and the unraveling of his tribal confederacy in 1813. At the peace negotiations in Ghent in 1814, Great Britain was unable to secure a permanent homeland for the tribes in Ohio setting the stage for further treaties with the United States and encroachment by settlers. Over the course of three decades the Ohio Indians were forced to move to the West, with the Wyandot people ceding their last remaining lands in Ohio to the U.S. Government in the early 1850s. The book chronicles the history of Ohio's Indians and their interactions with settlers and U.S. agents in the years leading up to their official removal, and sheds light on the complexities of the process, with both individual tribes and the United States taking advantage of opportunities at different times. It is also the story of how the native tribes tried to come to terms with the fast pace of change on America's western frontier and the inevitable loss of their traditional homelands. While the tribes often disagreed with one another, they attempted to move toward the best possible future for all their people against the relentless press of settlers and limited time.