Grasping at Straws

Grasping at Straws
Author: Yvonne Maphosa
Publisher:
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2020
Genre: Man-woman relationships
ISBN: 9780620824859

Born in the village of Matombo, Lwezi finds herself questioning the traditions and culture which seem to favour men at the detriment of women, Girls are excluded from school and are groomed for marriage from a very young age. Women are seen as sub humans who are born to serve men. At initiation school, as she prepares for her transition from childhood to womanhood, Lwezi makes a thoughtless sacrifice in an attempt to save her friend. She’s taken to Chief Nxumalo's homestead to answer for her crime in front of the Dale (Gathering of Elders). Circumstances take an unexpected twist and she finds herself tangled deeper into the Nxumalo web of secrets. She's offered a deal she cannot refuse. Will she choose the city and the liberation it offers or will she stay in the patriarchal society she knows and save those that need her help? -- Publisher's description.

Negotiating Languages

Negotiating Languages
Author: Walter N. Hakala
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2016-08-30
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0231542127

Prior to the nineteenth century, South Asian dictionaries, glossaries, and vocabularies reflected a hierarchical vision of nature and human society. By the turn of the twentieth century, the modern dictionary had democratized and politicized language. Compiled "scientifically" through "historical principles," the modern dictionary became a concrete symbol of a nation's arrival on the world stage. Following this phenomenon from the late seventeenth century to the present, Negotiating Languages casts lexicographers as key figures in the political realignment of South Asia under British rule and in the years after independence. Their dictionaries document how a single, mutually intelligible language evolved into two competing registers—Urdu and Hindi—and became associated with contrasting religious and nationalist goals. Each chapter in this volume focuses on a key lexicographical work and its fateful political consequences. Recovering texts by overlooked and even denigrated authors, Negotiating Languages provides insight into the forces that turned intimate speech into a potent nationalist politics, intensifying the passions that partitioned the Indian subcontinent.

Rethinking Hell

Rethinking Hell
Author: Christopher M. Date
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2014-04-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1630871605

Most evangelical Christians believe that those people who are not saved before they die will be punished in hell forever. But is this what the Bible truly teaches? Do Christians need to rethink their understanding of hell? In the late twentieth century, a growing number of evangelical theologians, biblical scholars, and philosophers began to reject the traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment in hell in favor of a minority theological perspective called conditional immortality. This view contends that the unsaved are resurrected to face divine judgment, just as Christians have always believed, but due to the fact that immortality is only given to those who are in Christ, the unsaved do not exist forever in hell. Instead, they face the punishment of the "second death"--an end to their conscious existence. This volume brings together excerpts from a variety of well-respected evangelical thinkers, including John Stott, John Wenham, and E. Earl Ellis, as they articulate the biblical, theological, and philosophical arguments for conditionalism. These readings will give thoughtful Christians strong evidence that there are indeed compelling reasons for rethinking hell.

Bowie

Bowie
Author: Christopher Sandford
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2009-08-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0786750960

Based on interviews with family members, colleagues, lovers, and the previously silent William Burroughs, this unsparing yet evenhanded biography guides the reader through the many personas, crises, and musical metamorphoses of David Bowie—also known as Davy Jones, the Laughing Gnome, Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke, a drug-addled grandfather of punk, actor, art aficionado, political activist, one of rock's most resonant icons, and a totem of modern pop culture. Nowhere else is the man and musician so convincingly deconstructed and so compellingly humanized.

Hunting Hour

Hunting Hour
Author: Margaret Mizushima
Publisher: Crooked Lane Books
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1683312783

Finalist for “Best Mystery,” RT Reviewer’s Choice Award An RT Book Reviews “Top Pick” Finalist for “Best Mystery,” Colorado Book Award When the daughter of Mattie’s on-again, off-again love interest disappears, she and her K-9 partner race to find the missing girl—before it’s too late. Deputy Mattie Cobb is in a dark place and has withdrawn from Cole Walker and his family to work on issues from her past. When she and her K-9 partner, Robo, get called to track a missing junior high student, they find the girl dead on Smoker’s Hill behind the high school, and Mattie must head to the Walker home to break the bad news. But that’s only the start of trouble in Timber Creek, because soon another girl goes missing—and this time it’s one of Cole’s daughters. Knowing that each hour a child remains missing lessens the probability of finding her alive, Mattie and Robo lead the hunt while Cole and community volunteers join in to search everything—to no avail. It seems that someone has snatched all trace of the Walker girl from their midst, including her scent. Grasping at straws, Mattie and Robo follow a phoned-in tip into the dense forest, where they hope to find a trace of the girl and rescue her alive. But when Robo does catch her scent, it leads them to information that challenges everything they thought they knew about the case. Mattie and Robo must rush to hunt down the kidnapper before they’re too late in Hunting Hour, the heart-pounding third installment in Margaret Mizushima’s exhilarating Timber Creek K-9 mysteries.

The Ant Generator

The Ant Generator
Author: Elizabeth Harris
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 182
Release: 1991
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781587291029

For this immense work, Lewis employs a diversity of approaches--bibliographical, historical, socio-cultural and musical--in her study of the role that Gardano and his publications played in the first half of the sixteenth century. Indispensable for research and performance. A collection of 11 short stories, which won the U. of Iowa's John Simmons Short Fiction Award for 1991. Harris's characters respond to ordinary situations in unexpected ways. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod

Self-Portrait with Cephalopod
Author: Kathryn Smith
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Total Pages: 77
Release: 2021-02-09
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1571317481

Environmental collapse. The betrayals and alliances of the animal world. A father who works in a timber mill. The celebrities in our feeds, the stories we tell ourselves. Loss, never-ending loss. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod—selected by francine j. harris as winner of the Jake Adam York Prize—is an account of being a girl, and then a woman, in the world; of being a living creature on a doomed planet; of being someone who aspires to do better but is torn between attention and distraction. Here, Kathryn Smith offers observations and anxieties, prophecies and prayers, darkness and light—but never false hope. Instead, she incises our vanities and our hypocrisies, “the bloody hand holding back / the skin,” revealing “the world’s inner workings, / rubbery and caught between the teeth.” These are the poems of someone who feels her and our failings in the viscera, in the bones, and who bears witness to that pain on the page. Self-Portrait with Cephalopod is an urgent and necessary collection about living in this precarious moment, meditative and resolutely unsentimental.

Peking Story

Peking Story
Author: David Kidd
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2003-07-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781590170403

For two years before and after the 1948 Communist Revolution, David Kidd lived in Peking, where he married the daughter of an aristocratic Chinese family. "I used to hope," he writes, "that some bright young scholar on a research grant would write about us and our Chinese friends before it was too late and we were all dead and gone, folding into the darkness the wonder that had been our lives." Here Kidd himself brings that wonder to life.