The White Girl

The White Girl
Author: Tony Birch
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0702262056

A searing new novel from leading Indigenous storyteller Tony Birch that explores the lengths we will go to in order to save the people we love.Odette Brown has lived her whole life on the fringes of a small country town. After her daughter disappeared and left her with her granddaughter Sissy to raise on her own, Odette has managed to stay under the radar of the welfare authorities who are removing fair-skinned Aboriginal children from their families. When a new policeman arrives in town, determined to enforce the law, Odette must risk everything to save Sissy and protect everything she loves. In The White Girl, Miles-Franklin-shortlisted author Tony Birch shines a spotlight on the 1960s and the devastating government policy of taking Indigenous children from their families.

The White Birch

The White Birch
Author: Tom Jeffreys
Publisher: Corsair
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2022-06-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781472155665

White Birch, Red Hawthorn

White Birch, Red Hawthorn
Author: Nora Murphy
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 167
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1452954208

“This is conquered land.” The Dakota woman’s words, spoken at a community meeting in St. Paul, struck Nora Murphy forcefully. Her own Irish great-great grandparents, fleeing the potato famine, had laid claim to 160 acres in a virgin maple grove in Minnesota. That her dispossessed ancestors’ homestead, The Maples, was built upon another, far more brutal dispossession is the hard truth underlying White Birch, Red Hawthorn, a memoir of Murphy’s search for the deeper connections between this contested land and the communities who call it home. In twelve essays, each dedicated to a tree significant to Minnesota, Murphy tells the story of the grove that, long before the Irish arrived, was home to three Native tribes: the Dakota, Ojibwe, and Ho-Chunk. She notes devastating strategies employed by the U.S. government to wrest the land from the tribes, but also revisits iconic American tales that subtly continue to promote this displacement—the Thanksgiving story, the Paul Bunyan myth, and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Murphy travels to Ireland to search out another narrative long hidden—that of her great-great-grandmother’s transformative journey from North Tipperary to The Maples. In retrieving these stories, White Birch, Red Hawthorn uncovers lingering wounds of the past—and the possibility that, through connection to this suffering, healing can follow. The next step is simple, Murphy tells us: listen.

The Third Pole

The Third Pole
Author: Mark Synnott
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2021-04-13
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 152474557X

***NPR Books We Love selection*** “If you’re only going to read one Everest book this decade, make it The Third Pole. . . . A riveting adventure.”—Outside Shivering, exhausted, gasping for oxygen, beyond doubt . . . A hundred-year mystery lured veteran climber Mark Synnott into an unlikely expedition up Mount Everest during the spring 2019 season that came to be known as “the Year Everest Broke.” What he found was a gripping human story of impassioned characters from around the globe and a mountain that will consume your soul—and your life—if you let it. The mystery? On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine set out to stand on the roof of the world, where no one had stood before. They were last seen eight hundred feet shy of Everest’s summit still “going strong” for the top. Could they have succeeded decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay? Irvine is believed to have carried a Kodak camera with him to record their attempt, but it, along with his body, had never been found. Did the frozen film in that camera have a photograph of Mallory and Irvine on the summit before they disappeared into the clouds, never to be seen again? Kodak says the film might still be viable. . . . Mark Synnott made his own ascent up the infamous North Face along with his friend Renan Ozturk, a filmmaker using drones higher than any had previously flown. Readers witness first-hand how Synnott’s quest led him from oxygen-deprivation training to archives and museums in England, to Kathmandu, the Tibetan high plateau, and up the North Face into a massive storm. The infamous traffic jams of climbers at the very summit immediately resulted in tragic deaths. Sherpas revolted. Chinese officials turned on Synnott’s team. An Indian woman miraculously crawled her way to frostbitten survival. Synnott himself went off the safety rope—one slip and no one would have been able to save him—committed to solving the mystery. Eleven climbers died on Everest that season, all of them mesmerized by an irresistible magic. The Third Pole is a rapidly accelerating ride to the limitless joy and horror of human obsession.

The Blue Book of The John Birch Society [Fifth Edition]

The Blue Book of The John Birch Society [Fifth Edition]
Author: Robert Welch
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2016-08-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1787200493

Robert Welch was the founder of the John Birch Society, a conservative advocacy group supporting anti-communism and limited government. This book is a transcript of Robert Welch’s two-day presentation of the background, methods and purposes of the John Birch Society, as given at the founding meeting in Indianapolis on December 8-9, 1958. The book became a cornerstone of the Society’s beliefs, with each new member receiving a copy. This Fifth Edition include two previous Forewords and a Postscript from earlier editions (1959 and 1961), as well as a new Postscript dated March 15, 1961.

A Cree Healer and His Medicine Bundle

A Cree Healer and His Medicine Bundle
Author: David Young
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2015-06-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1583949046

With the rise of urban living and the digital age, many North American healers are recognizing that traditional medicinal knowledge must be recorded before being lost with its elders. A Cree Healer and His Medicine Bundle is a historic document, including nearly 200 color photos and maps, in that it is the first in which a native healer has agreed to open his medicine bundle to share in writing his repertoire of herbal medicines and where they are found. Providing information on and photos of medicinal plants and where to harvest them, anthropologist David E. Young and botanist Robert D. Rogers chronicle the life, beliefs, and healing practices of Medicine Man Russell Willier in his native Alberta, Canada. Despite being criticized for sharing his knowledge, Willier later found support in other healers as they began to realize the danger that much of their traditional practices could die out with them. With Young and Rogers, Willier offers his practices here for future generations. At once a study and a guide, A Cree Healer and His Medicine Bundle touches on how indigenous healing practices can be used to complement mainstream medicine, improve the treatment of chronic diseases, and lower the cost of healthcare. The authors discuss how mining, agriculture, and forestry are threatening the continued existence of valuable wild medicinal plants and the role of alternative healers in a modern health care system. Sure to be of interest to ethnobotanists, medicine hunters, naturopaths, complementary and alternative health practitioners, ethnologists, anthropologists, and academics, this book will also find an audience with those interested in indigenous cultures and traditions.

The Birch Bark Books of Simon Pokagon

The Birch Bark Books of Simon Pokagon
Author: Simon Pokagon
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
Total Pages: 53
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1513210777

The Birch Bark Books of Simon Pokagon is a collection of articles and legends written for and about the Potawatomi tribe by Simon Pokagon. Originally printed on the bark of the white birch tree, a gesture made “out of loyalty to [Pokagon’s] own people, and gratitude to the Great Spirit, who [...] provided for [their] use [...] this most remarkable tree,” these works paint a picture of America’s native people. “[On] behalf of my people, the American Indians, I hereby declare to you, the pale-faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now being held in this Chicago city, the wonder of the world. No; sooner would we hold high joy-day over the graves of our departed fathers, than to celebrate our own funeral, the discovery of America.” Before Chicago was one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the nation, it was home to the Anishinaabe peoples, including the Potawatomi to whom Simon Pokagon belonged. Angered with the erasure of his people and the whitewashing of the history of violence against America’s indigenous tribes, Pokagon gave this opening speech, “The Red Man’s Rebuke,” at the World’s Columbia Exposition of 1893. A lifelong activist, Pokagon dissects the false narrative of savagery and civilization which justified the actions of European settlers while vilifying those they displaced in their movement westward. During the Exposition, Pokagon would speak to a crowd of 75,000 on his hope for the future of his people. Including lesser known works, such as, “Algonquin Legends of South Haven,” “Algonquin Legends of Paw Paw” and “The Pottawattomie Book of Genesis,” this beautifully designed edition of Simon Pokagon’s work is a classic of Native American literature reimagined for modern readers.

One Step Too Far

One Step Too Far
Author: Tina Seskis
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 239
Release: 2015-01-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062340107

This “twisted psychological thriller” about a woman who escapes her own life by assuming a new identity “will keeps readers guessing . . . until the end” (US Weekly). No one has ever guessed Emily’s secret. Will you? A happy marriage. A beautiful family. A lovely home. So what makes Emily Coleman get up one morning and walk right out of her life—to start again as someone new? Now, Emily has become Cat, working at a hip advertising agency in London and living on the edge with her inseparable new friend, Angel. Cat’s buried any trace of her old self so well, no one knows how to find her. But she can't bury the past—or her own memories. And soon, she’ll have to face the truth of what she's done—a shocking revelation that may push her one step too far. . . . “One of the world's leading experts at pulling the wool over readers' eyes until the very end.” —Sophie Hannah, New York Times–bestselling author of The Monogram Murders “A skillfully done novel by a writer to watch.” —Booklist “Taut, compelling . . . a storming read.” —Bookseller “Seskis reverses the classic methods of such predecessors as Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy by distancing us from her characters in order to keep us ignorant of the driving force behind their actions until the climactic conclusion.” —Library Journal “Excellent, dramatic pacing, dialogue, and prose, culminating in poignant concluding chapters which examine Emily's decisions without sentimentality. An evocative, skillful novel about the price of escape.” —Kirkus Reviews