Samuel's Return

Samuel's Return
Author: Susan Lantz Simpson
Publisher: Zebra Books
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2021-04-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1420149857

The first scent of blooming flowers, fresh green fields, and invigorating days of sunshine. A Southern Maryland Amish spring bursts with hope, bright promise—and a practical young widow’s chance to try love anew . . . With two lively daughters, an active newborn, and a huge farm to tend, Lena Troyer has no time for impossible what-ifs. She just can’t let herself be distracted by Samuel Mast’s unexpected return. Even though her childhood sweetheart became the man she longed to marry, Samuel never saw or wrote Lena again after his family abruptly moved away. Now a widow, Lena is determined to keep Samuel's helpful ways and irresistible good humor at arm’s length—no matter how often he’s there when she needs him most . . . A restless father with a shameful secret was the reason Samuel’s many letters never got to Lena. And it’s why Samuel can’t bring himself to tell Lena the truth—though he’s doing everything he can to regain her trust and prove he’s worthy of the resourceful woman she’s become. But as a rival for his affections complicates matters, Samuel and Lena must somehow put the past to rest—and believe that faith, honesty, and rekindled love will be more than enough to finally build a family together . . .

Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return
Author: Martin Riker
Publisher:
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781566895286

After he dies, Samuel Johnson inhabits one body after the next, waiting for a chance to return to his son.

Return to Nevèrÿon

Return to Nevèrÿon
Author: Samuel R. Delany
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1994-04-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780819562784

A novel of myth and literacy about a long-ago land on the brink of civilization. Vol 4 In his four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon, Hugo and Nebula award-winner Samuel R. Delany appropriated the conceits of sword-and-sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. Wesleyan University Press has reissued the long-unavailable Nevèrÿonvolumes in trade paperback. The eleven stories, novellas, and novels in Return to Nevèrÿon's four volumes chronicle a long-ago land on civilization's brink, perhaps in Asia or Africa, or even on the Mediterranean. Taken slave in childhood, Gorgik gains his freedom, leads a slave revolt, and becomes a minister of state, finally abolishing slavery. Ironically, however, he is sexually aroused by the iron slave collars of servitude. Does this contaminate his mission — or intensify it? Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators' and commentators' introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.

Machiavelli's Children

Machiavelli's Children
Author: Richard J. Samuels
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 475
Release: 2019-06-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501720295

Two late-developing nations, Japan and Italy, similarly obsessed with achieving modernity and with joining the ranks of the great powers, have traveled parallel courses with very different national identities. In this audacious book about leadership and historical choices, Richard J. Samuels emphasizes the role of human ingenuity in political change. He draws on interviews and archival research in a fascinating series of paired biographies of political and business leaders from Italy and Japan. Beginning with the founding of modern nation-states after the Meiji Restoration and the Risorgimento, Samuels traces the developmental dynamic in both countries through the failure of early liberalism, the coming of fascism, imperial adventures, defeat in wartime, and reconstruction as American allies. Highlights of Machiavelli's Children include new accounts of the making of postwar Japanese politics—using American money and Manchukuo connections—and of the collapse of Italian political parties in the Clean Hands (Mani Pulite) scandal.The author also tells the more recent stories of Umberto Bossi's regional experiment, the Lega Nord, the different choices made by Italian and Japanese communist party leaders after the collapse of the USSR, and the leadership of Silvio Berlusconi and Ishihara Shintar on the contemporary right in each country.

Reaching Back

Reaching Back
Author: Nea Anna Simone
Publisher: Gravel Road Publishing
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2013-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9780985883300

National Bestseller - REACHING BACK succeeds in creating lives that are memorable - they will draw you in and not let you go! This is a work that is both great literature & entertainment. An aging leather bound journal provides a glimpse into the captivating family history of Mignon Samuels, shedding light on the struggles of several generations of African-American women - reaching back in time to her maternal great grandmother to her own mother, and the circumstances endured by each woman in their lives. Fueled by their legacy, Mignon decides to make daring changes of her own, and forge ahead - out of her marriage - to a new future with her three daughters. Mignon feels betrayed by the dream of a fairytale tale life that everyone thought her wealthy husband had given to her - in truth, he had only given her pain. Author Nea Anna Simone crafts a multi-generational tale that takes the reader along a difficult journey with a woman who finds the courage and inspiration to break the bonds and strict codes of the African-American elite. Simone forces the reader to face questions of family secrets, difficult relationships and struggles of skin color. Does it still matter? Fast-paced and gripping, Reaching Back is for all people seeking the courage to face the future and unknown. Nea Anna Simone is a powerful literary voice!

His Name Is George Floyd (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

His Name Is George Floyd (Pulitzer Prize Winner)
Author: Robert Samuels
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0593490622

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE; SHORT-LISTED FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS PRIZE; A BCALA 2023 HONOR NONFICTION AWARD WINNER. A landmark biography by two prizewinning Washington Post reporters that reveals how systemic racism shaped George Floyd's life and legacy—from his family’s roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina, to ongoing inequality in housing, education, health care, criminal justice, and policing—telling the story of how one man’s tragic experience brought about a global movement for change. “It is a testament to the power of His Name Is George Floyd that the book’s most vital moments come not after Floyd’s death, but in its intimate, unvarnished and scrupulous account of his life . . . Impressive.” —New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) “Since we know George Floyd’s death with tragic clarity, we must know Floyd’s America—and life—with tragic clarity. Essential for our times.” —Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist “A much-needed portrait of the life, times, and martyrdom of George Floyd, a chronicle of the racial awakening sparked by his brutal and untimely death, and an essential work of history I hope everyone will read.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song The events of that day are now tragically familiar: on May 25, 2020, George Floyd became the latest Black person to die at the hands of the police, murdered outside of a Minneapolis convenience store by white officer Derek Chauvin. The video recording of his death set off a series of protests in the United States and around the world, awakening millions to the dire need for reimagining this country’s broken systems of policing. But behind a face that would be graffitied onto countless murals, and a name that has become synonymous with civil rights, there is the reality of one man’s stolen life: a life beset by suffocating systemic pressures that ultimately proved inescapable. This biography of George Floyd shows the athletic young boy raised in the projects of Houston’s Third Ward who would become a father, a partner, a friend, and a man constantly in search of a better life. In retracing Floyd’s story, Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa bring to light the determination Floyd carried as he faced the relentless struggle to survive as a Black man in America. Placing his narrative within the larger context of America’s deeply troubled history of institutional racism, His Name Is George Floyd examines the Floyd family’s roots in slavery and sharecropping, the segregation of his Houston schools, the overpolicing of his communities, the devastating snares of the prison system, and his attempts to break free from drug dependence—putting today's inequality into uniquely human terms. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews and extensive original reporting, Samuels and Olorunnipa offer a poignant and moving exploration of George Floyd’s America, revealing how a man who simply wanted to breathe ended up touching the world.

Special Duty

Special Duty
Author: Richard J. Samuels
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2019-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1501741608

The prewar history of the Japanese intelligence community demonstrates how having power over much, but insight into little can have devastating consequences. Its postwar history—one of limited Japanese power despite growing insight—has also been problematic for national security. In Special Duty Richard J. Samuels dissects the fascinating history of the intelligence community in Japan. Looking at the impact of shifts in the strategic environment, technological change, and past failures, he probes the reasons why Japan has endured such a roller-coaster ride when it comes to intelligence gathering and analysis, and concludes that the ups and downs of the past century—combined with growing uncertainties in the regional security environment—have convinced Japanese leaders of the critical importance of striking balance between power and insight. Using examples of excessive hubris and debilitating bureaucratic competition before the Asia-Pacific War, the unavoidable dependence on US assets and popular sensitivity to security issues after World War II, and the tardy adoption of image-processing and cyber technologies, Samuels' bold book highlights the century-long history of Japan's struggles to develop a fully functioning and effective intelligence capability, and makes clear that Japanese leaders have begun to reinvent their nation's intelligence community.

The Spectacular Past

The Spectacular Past
Author: Maurice Samuels
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2018-08-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501729837

Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.

Tales of Nevèrÿon

Tales of Nevèrÿon
Author: Samuel R. Delany
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 1993-11-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780819562708

This 1979 American Book Award nominee contains five interlocked stories that tell of the slave Gorgik in a long-ago land, and a masked swordswoman narrates an astonishing feminist creation myth.

The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel

The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel
Author: Robert Alter
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2009-10-21
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0393070255

"A masterpiece of contemporary Bible translation and commentary."—Los Angeles Times Book Review, Best Books of 1999 Acclaimed for its masterful new translation and insightful commentary, The David Story is a fresh, vivid rendition of one of the great works in Western literature. Robert Alter's brilliant translation gives us David, the beautiful, musical hero who slays Goliath and, through his struggles with Saul, advances to the kingship of Israel. But this David is also fully human: an ambitious, calculating man who navigates his life's course with a flawed moral vision. The consequences for him, his family, and his nation are tragic and bloody. Historical personage and full-blooded imagining, David is the creation of a literary artist comparable to the Shakespeare of the history plays.