From Village Boy to Global Citizen (Volume 2): The Travels of a Journalist

From Village Boy to Global Citizen (Volume 2): The Travels of a Journalist
Author: Shelton A. Gunaratne
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 533
Release: 2012
Genre: Journalists
ISBN: 147714238X

The author describes and dramatizes the most memorable places visited, often with accompanied family members, since leaving the country of his birth in 1966. Author notes: After my retirement in 2007, I found the time to compile this travelogue using the notes in my diaries and updating the material through online research, with particular help from the constantly revised Wikipedia entries. In this process, I learned to make each travel essay an evergreen that would not perish soon after its publication as in the case of newspaper travel pieces. Travel has shaped my personality. Global travel to get to know culturally diverse people was one of my childhood ambitions. Moreover, travel is an essential aspect of a journalists life. Therefore, my travels constitute a very important part of my autobiography. I included detail in the hope that the reader would keep this volume for long-term reference. My explorations of U.S. national parks and my camping expeditions should be of particular interest to family oriented travelers.

From Village Boy to Global Citizen (Volume 1): The Life Journey of a Journalist

From Village Boy to Global Citizen (Volume 1): The Life Journey of a Journalist
Author: SHELTON A. GUNARATNE
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2012-09-10
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1477142428

From Village Boy to Global Citizen (Volume 1): The Journey of a Journalist is the first of an autobiographical trilogy that tells the story of a rustic lad born and raised in the southern tip of the British colony of Ceylon (now independent Sri Lanka) but left his country at the age of 26 on a geographical “conquest” of the world that turned him metaphorically into a global citizen. Starting his professional career as a journalist for the Daily News, Ceylon’s premier English-language daily, he became a journalism teacher at the age of 32, when he received a doctorate in mass communication. However, he continued practicing journalism as a free-lancer throughout his teaching career in Malaysia, Australia and the United States. Volume 1 unfolds the transition of the author’s life from a village kid to a global journalist and educator. It dramatizes the obstacles he had to overcome, as well as the support he received from his benefactors, in the transition.

Village Life in the Forties

Village Life in the Forties
Author: Arcadius
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2012-07-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781475939576

When author Shelton A. Gunaratne was born in January of 1940 in Pathegama, Sri Lanka, life was simple for the poor people in this sparsely populated village. But it was this village that raised him. Through twenty-six biographical sketches of some of the villages most colorful characters, Gunaratne paints a portrait of what life was like in this rural setting. This collection of sketches, first published in the Ceylon Daily NewsMyna, the new village head-man; Vel Vidane, an unctuous official and the irrigation headman; cowards Wala Semba and Naamba; Singappuru Basunnehe, the goldsmith; Kankanama, the cinnamon peeler; Kalu Appu, the fierce burglar; Redi Nenda, the humble washerwoman; Menike Nenda, a village beauty; and Kunu Nachchile, the witchlike animal lover. Demonstrating the Buddhist/Daoist principle that unity and diversity are inextricably interconnected, Village Life in the Forties provides not only a social history, but also a greater global under-standing of the life and times of rural Ceylonese during and around World War II.

From Village Boy to Global Citizen (Volume 2): the Travels of a Journalist

From Village Boy to Global Citizen (Volume 2): the Travels of a Journalist
Author: Shelton A. Gunaratne
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 533
Release: 2012-10-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1477142398

From Village Boy to Global Citizen (Volume 2): The Travels of a Journalist is the last of my autobiographical trilogy. The 74 chapters in this volume attempt to describe and dramatize the most memorable places I visited, often accompanied by my family, since I left the country of my birth in 1966. After my retirement in 2007, I found the time to compile this travelogue using the notes in my diaries and updating the material through online research, with particular help from the constantly revised Wikipedia entries. In this process, I learned to make each travel essay an evergreen that would not perish soon after its publication as in the case of newspaper travel pieces. Travel has shaped my personality. Global travel to get to know culturally diverse people was one of my childhood ambitions. Moreover, travel is an essential aspect of a journalists life. Therefore, my travels constitute a very important part of my autobiography. I included detail in the hope that the reader would keep this volume for long-term reference. My explorations of U.S. national parks and my camping expeditions should be of particular interest to family- oriented travelers. Each of the essays in this volume appeared in the Lankaweb starting December 6, 2009. It carried the latest (but not the last) story (chapter 109) on December 4, 2011. Reacting to the essay (chapter 106) on our mule ride in Mexican territory during the Big Bend adventure, a reader commented, As always it was very well written and visually engaging, which made us feel we were there too. [We] particularly liked the reference to Yankee Doodles [that] made us smile! Thank you for posting it and await the next in the series (May 15, 2011). Another reader reacted to the essay (chapter 92) on our visit to the botanic gardens in Portland, Ore., Please do continue with your articles, Shelton. They are getting better all the time, as you reveal to your readers more of your own thoughts, emotions, and reactions (February 9, 2011). From Village Boy to Global Citizen (Volume 1): The Journey of a Journalist is the second of my autobiographical trilogy. It traces my life as a journalist and a journalism educator in three countries. Village Life in the Forties: Memories of a Lankan Expatriate (published by iUniverse) is the first of the trilogy. This is a collection of 28 sketches of folks in the village of my birth. Each sketch depicts the drama of life relating to the famous and infamous characters who defined the ethos of Pathegama in the 1940s. They range from the amusing and comical to the grave and somber. The trilogy is inextricably interconnected, interdependent and interactive. You are unlikely to grasp what systems theorists call the emergence of the whole if you read only parts of this trilogy.

Enemy Child

Enemy Child
Author: Andrea Warren
Publisher: Holiday House
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0823441512

It's 1941 and ten-year-old Norman Mineta is a carefree fourth grader in San Jose, California, who loves baseball, hot dogs, and Cub Scouts. But when Japanese forces attack Pearl Harbor, Norm's world is turned upside down. Corecipient of The Flora Stieglitz Straus Award A Horn Book Best Book of the Year One by one, things that he and his Japanese American family took for granted are taken away. In a matter of months they, along with everyone else of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, are forced by the government to move to internment camps, leaving everything they have known behind. At the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming, Norm and his family live in one room in a tar paper barracks with no running water. There are lines for the communal bathroom, lines for the mess hall, and they live behind barbed wire and under the scrutiny of armed guards in watchtowers. Meticulously researched and informed by extensive interviews with Mineta himself, Enemy Child sheds light on a little-known subject of American history. Andrea Warren covers the history of early Asian immigration to the United States and provides historical context on the U.S. government's decision to imprison Japanese Americans alongside a deeply personal account of the sobering effects of that policy. Warren takes readers from sunny California to an isolated wartime prison camp and finally to the halls of Congress to tell the true story of a boy who rose from "enemy child" to a distinguished American statesman. Mineta was the first Asian mayor of a major city (San Jose) and was elected ten times to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he worked tirelessly to pass legislation, including the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. He also served as Secretary of Commerce and Secretary of Transportation. He has had requests by other authors to write his biography, but this is the first time he has said yes because he wanted young readers to know the story of America's internment camps. Enemy Child includes more than ninety photos, many provided by Norm himself, chronicling his family history and his life. Extensive backmatter includes an Afterword, bibliography, research notes, and multimedia recommendations for further information on this important topic. A California Reading Association Eureka! Nonfiction Gold Award Winner Winner of the Society of Midland Authors Award’s Children’s Reading Round Table Award for Children’s Nonfiction A Capitol Choices Noteworthy Title A Junior Library Guild Selection A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year A Bank Street Best Book of the Year - Outstanding Merit

They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky

They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky
Author: Benjamin Ajak
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2015-08-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1610395999

The inspiring story of three young Sudanese boys who were driven from their homes by civil war and began an epic odyssey of survival, facing life-threatening perils, ultimately finding their way to a new life in America. Between 1987 and 1989, Alepho, Benjamin, and Benson, like tens of thousands of young boys, took flight from the massacres of Sudan's civil war. They became known as the Lost Boys. With little more than the clothes on their backs, sometimes not even that, they streamed out over Sudan in search of refuge. Their journey led them first to Ethiopia and then, driven back into Sudan, toward Kenya. They walked nearly one thousand miles, sustained only by the sheer will to live. They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky is the three boys' account of that unimaginable journey. With the candor and the purity of their child's-eye-vision, Alephonsian, Benjamin, and Benson recall by turns: how they endured the hunger and strength-sapping illnesses-dysentery, malaria, and yellow fever; how they dodged the life-threatening predators-lions, snakes, crocodiles and soldiers alike-that dogged their footsteps; and how they grappled with a war that threatened continually to overwhelm them. Their story is a lyrical, captivating, timeless portrait of a childhood hurled into wartime and how they had the good fortune and belief in themselves to survive.

Travels with Herodotus

Travels with Herodotus
Author: Ryszard Kapuscinski
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2009-11-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307548236

From the renowned journalist comes this intimate account of his years in the field, traveling for the first time beyond the Iron Curtain to India, China, Ethiopia, and other exotic locales. In the 1950s, Ryszard Kapuscinski finished university in Poland and became a foreign correspondent, hoping to go abroad – perhaps to Czechoslovakia. Instead, he was sent to India – the first stop on a decades-long tour of the world that took Kapuscinski from Iran to El Salvador, from Angola to Armenia. Revisiting his memories of traveling the globe with a copy of Herodotus' Histories in tow, Kapuscinski describes his awakening to the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of new environments, and how the words of the Greek historiographer helped shape his own view of an increasingly globalized world. Written with supreme eloquence and a constant eye to the global undercurrents that have shaped the last half-century, Travels with Herodotus is an exceptional chronicle of one man's journey across continents.

Solito

Solito
Author: Javier Zamora
Publisher: Hogarth
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0593498062

New York Times Bestseller • Read With Jenna Book Club Pick as seen on Today • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography • Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award A young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this “gripping memoir” (NPR) of bravery, hope, and finding family. Finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction • One of the New York Public Library’s Ten Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the PEN/Open Book Award “I read Solito with my heart in my throat and did not burst into tears until the last sentence. What a person, what a writer, what a book.”—Emma Straub “A riveting tale of perseverance and the lengths humans will go to help each other in times of struggle.”—Dave Eggers ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Vulture, She Reads, Kirkus Reviews Trip. My parents started using that word about a year ago—“one day, you’ll take a trip to be with us. Like an adventure.” Javier Zamora’s adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote” hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks. At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents’ arms, snuggling in bed between them, and living under the same roof again. He cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside fellow migrants who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family. A memoir as gripping as it is moving, Solito provides an immediate and intimate account not only of a treacherous and near-impossible journey, but also of the miraculous kindness and love delivered at the most unexpected moments. Solito is Javier Zamora’s story, but it’s also the story of millions of others who had no choice but to leave home.