The Last Train: Memoir of a Girl During the Indonesian National Revolution

The Last Train: Memoir of a Girl During the Indonesian National Revolution
Author: Oetari
Publisher: Gramedia Pustaka Utama
Total Pages: 164
Release: 2019-01-04
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 6020622436

It was already dusk. The last train towards East Java was ready to depart. The station master was holding a sign of departure and the departure warning was sounding. A young soldier in his uniform was ready to depart. He had a backpack and rifle on his back and a pistol at his waist. He was standing on the platform with a girl. They gazed at each other; neither of them could break away. Putting both his arms on her shoulders, he looked deep into her eyes. His gaze penetrated her heart deeply. At that moment, the girl felt and knew that she would not see him again. This was a farewell. He would never come back.

Student Soldiers

Student Soldiers
Author: Suhario Padmodiwiryo
Publisher: Yayasan Pustaka Obor Indonesia
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 9794619612

Hario Kecik’s diary is without peer in Indonesian literature as a portrait of talented and brave young revolutionaries during the first days of the Republic which followed a brutal Japanese occupation and finally led to the November 1945 Battle for Surabaya, the longest, bloodiest and most decisive warfare in the Republic’s history. More than one hundred thousand young men and women - the majority under twenty years of age - took up weapons against the modern British-Indian Army and arriving Dutch forces intending to re-establish Dutch colonial rule in the Indies. For Indonesian readers, no period of Indonesian history will better repay study than the events in Surabaya in the last months of 1945, when the August 17 Proclamation of Independence seemed had become almost a dead letter as the British and Japanese forces to combined to put down Merdeka! movements in Bandung, Bogor, Cirebon and Semarang. Young readers, especially, will take courage and marvel at the bravery of school-aged boys taking up arms, while Indonesian readers in general will finally understand that while August 17 was the date of the Proclamation, independence was by no means guaranteed as city after city fell post-war to the British. Surabaya and Hario’s Kecik’s generation changed all that

Migration in the Time of Revolution

Migration in the Time of Revolution
Author: Taomo Zhou
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501739948

Migration in the Time of Revolution explores the complex relationship between China and Indonesia from 1945 to 1967, during a period when citizenship, identity, and political loyalty were in flux. Taomo Zhou examines the experiences of migrants, including youths seeking an ancestral homeland they had never seen and economic refugees whose skills were unwelcome in a socialist state. Zhou argues that these migrants played an active role in shaping the diplomatic relations between Beijing and Jakarta, rather than being passive subjects of historical forces. By using newly declassified documents and oral history interviews, Migration in the Time of Revolution demonstrates how the actions and decisions of ethnic Chinese migrants were crucial in the development of post-war relations between China and Indonesia. By integrating diplomatic history with migration studies, Taomo Zhou provides a nuanced understanding of how ordinary people's lives intersected with broader political processes in Asia, offering a fresh perspective on the Cold War's social dynamics.

The Last Train to London

The Last Train to London
Author: Meg Waite Clayton
Publisher: Center Point
Total Pages: 500
Release: 2020-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781643585512

In 1936, the Nazis are little more than loud, brutish bores to fifteen-year old Stephan Neuman, the son of a wealthy and influential Jewish family and a budding playwright whose playground extends from Vienna's streets to its intricate underground tunnels. Stephan's best friend and companion is the brilliant Žofie-Helene, a Christian girl whose mother edits a progressive, anti-Nazi newspaper. But the two adolescents' carefree innocence is shattered when the Nazis take control.

Marathon Woman

Marathon Woman
Author: Kathrine Switzer
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 2017-04-04
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 030682566X

A new edition of a sports icon's memoir, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Kathrine Switzer's historic running of the Boston Marathon as the first woman to run. In 1967, Kathrine Switzer was the first woman to officially run what was then the all-male Boston Marathon, infuriating one of the event's directors who attempted to violently eject her. In one of the most iconic sports moments, Switzer escaped and finished the race. She made history-and is poised to do it again on the fiftieth anniversary of that initial race, when she will run the 2017 Boston Marathon at age 70. Now a spokesperson for Reebok, Switzer is also the founder of 261 Fearless, a foundation dedicated to creating opportunities for women on all fronts, as this groundbreaking sports hero has done throughout her life. "Kathrine Switzer is the Susan B. Anthony of women's marathoning."-Joan Benoit Samuelson, first Olympic gold medalist in the women's marathon

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran
Author: Azar Nafisi
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 386
Release: 2003-12-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1588360792

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense. Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice. Praise for Reading Lolita in Tehran “Anyone who has ever belonged to a book group must read this book. Azar Nafisi takes us into the vivid lives of eight women who must meet in secret to explore the forbidden fiction of the West. It is at once a celebration of the power of the novel and a cry of outrage at the reality in which these women are trapped. The ayatollahs don’ t know it, but Nafisi is one of the heroes of the Islamic Republic.”—Geraldine Brooks, author of Nine Parts of Desire

Lost Childhood

Lost Childhood
Author: Annelex Hofstra Layson
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2008
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781426303210

The author recounts her childhood experiences as a Japanese prisoner during World War II.

All Ships Follow Me

All Ships Follow Me
Author: Mieke Eerkens
Publisher: Picador
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2019-04-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1250117798

An engrossing, epic saga of one family’s experiences on both sides of WWII, All Ships Follow Me questions our common narrative of the conflict and our stark notions of victim and perpetrator, while tracing the lasting effects of war through several generations. In March 1942, Mieke Eerkens’ father was a ten-year-old boy living in the Dutch East Indies. When the Japanese invaded the island he, his family, and one hundred thousand other Dutch civilians were interned in a concentration camp and forced into hard labor for three years. After the Japanese surrendered, Mieke’s father and his family were set free in a country that plunged immediately into civil war. Across the globe in the Netherlands, police carried a crying five-year-old girl out of her home at war’s end, abandoned and ostracized as a daughter of Nazi sympathizers. This was Mieke's mother. She would be left on the street in front of her sealed home as her parents were taken away and imprisoned in the same camps where the country’s Jews had recently been held. Many years later, Mieke’s parents met, got married, and moved to California, where she and her siblings were born. While her parents lived far from the events of their past, the effects of the war would continue to be felt in their daily lives and in the lives of their children. All Ships Follow Me moves from Indonesia to the Netherlands to the United States, and spans generations, as Mieke recounts her parents' lives during and just after the war, and travels with them in the present day to the sites of their childhood in an attempt to understand their experiences and how it formed them. All Ships Follow Me is a deeply personal, sweeping saga of the wounds of war, and the way trauma can be passed down through generations.

A Certain Age

A Certain Age
Author: Rudolf Mrázek
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2010-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822392682

A Certain Age is an unconventional, evocative work of history and a moving reflection on memory, modernity, space, time, and the limitations of traditional historical narratives. Rudolf Mrázek visited Indonesia throughout the 1990s, recording lengthy interviews with elderly intellectuals in and around Jakarta. With few exceptions, they were part of an urban elite born under colonial rule and educated at Dutch schools. From the early twentieth century, through the late colonial era, the national revolution, and well into independence after 1945, these intellectuals injected their ideas of modernity, progress, and freedom into local and national discussion. When Mrázek began his interviews, he expected to discuss phenomena such as the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism. His interviewees, however, wanted to share more personal recollections. Mrázek illuminates their stories of the past with evocative depictions of their late-twentieth-century surroundings. He brings to bear insights from thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, Le Corbusier, and Marcel Proust, and from his youth in Prague, another metropolis with its own experience of passages and revolution. Architectural and spatial tropes organize the book. Thresholds, windowsills, and sidewalks come to seem more apt as descriptors of historical transitions than colonial and postcolonial, or modern and postmodern. Asphalt roads, homes, classrooms, fences, and windows organize movement, perceptions, and selves in relation to others. A Certain Age is a portal into questions about how the past informs the present and how historical accounts are inevitably partial and incomplete.

The Medallion

The Medallion
Author: Cathy Gohlke
Publisher: NavPress
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1496429699

Christy Award Winner! For fans of bestselling World War II fiction like Sarah’s Key and The Nightingale comes an illuminating tale of courage, sacrifice, and survival, about two couples whose lives are ravaged by Hitler’s mad war yet eventually redeemed through the fate of one little girl. Seemingly overnight, the German blitzkrieg of Warsaw in 1939 turns its streets to a war zone and shatters the life of each citizen—Polish, Jewish, or otherwise. Sophie Kumiega, a British bride working in the city’s library, awaits news of her husband, Janek, recently deployed with the Polish Air Force. Though Sophie is determined that she and the baby in her womb will stay safe, the days ahead will draw her into the plight of those around her, compelling her to help, whatever the danger. Rosa and Itzhak Dunovich never imagined they would welcome their longed-for first child in the Jewish ghetto, or that they would let anything tear their family apart. But as daily atrocities intensify, Rosa soon faces a terrifying reality: to save their daughter’s life, she must send her into hiding. Her only hope of finding her after the war—if any of them survive—is a medallion she cuts in half and places around her neck. Inspired by true events of Poland’s darkest days and brightest heroes, The Medallion paints a stunning portrait of war and its aftermath, daring us to believe that when all seems lost, God can make a way forward.