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Alice Herz-Sommer was born in 1903 in Prague, the Prague of the Hapsburgs and of Franz Kafka, a family friend. Musically very gifted, by her mid-teens Alice was one of the best-known pianists in Prague. But as the Nazis swept across Europe her comfortable, bourgeois world began to crumble around her, as anti-Jewish feeling not only intensified but was legitimised. In 1942, Alice's mother was deported. Desperately unhappy, she resolved to learn Chopin's 24 Etudes - the most technically demanding piano pieces she knew - and the complex but beautiful music saved her sanity. A year later, she, too - together with her husband and their six-year-old son - was deported to a concentration camp. But even in Theresienstadt, music was her salvation and in the course of more than a hundred concerts she gave her fellow-prisoners hope in a world of pain and death. This is her remarkable story, but it is also the story of a mother's struggle to create a happy childhood for her beloved only son in the midst of atrocity and barbarism. Of 15,000 children sent to the camp, Raphael was one of the 130 who survived. Today, Alice Herz-Sommer lives in London and she still plays the piano every day.
"Gorgeous knitwear--that does good, too! The knitting community has always come together to support a great cause, and Knit Red once again attests to knitters' generous, giving spirit. These 30 beautiful red-themed projects help raise awareness of the number-one killer of women today: heart disease. The patterns are all donated by top designers, including Debbie Stoller, Debbie Bliss, Iris Schreier, and Deborah Newton. In addition, the book offers important medical information, a Heart Healthy Resources and Action Plan, and powerful stories from survivors of this deadly ailment"--
Inspired by a letter found tucked inside her famous husband’s papers, The Birdman’s Wife imagines the fascinating inner life of Elizabeth Gould, who was so much more than just the woman behind the man. Elizabeth was a woman ahead of her time, juggling the demands of her artistic life with her roles as wife, lover and helpmate to a passionate and demanding genius, and as a devoted mother who gave birth to eight children. In a society obsessed with natural history and the discovery of new species, the birdman’s wife was at its glittering epicentre. Her artistry breathed life into hundreds of exotic finds, from her husband’s celebrated collections to Charles Darwin’s famous Galapagos finches. Fired by Darwin’s discoveries, in 1838 Eliza defied convention by joining John on a trailblazing expedition to the untamed wilderness of Van Diemen’s Land and New South Wales to collect and illustrate Australia’s ‘curious’ birdlife. From a naïve and uncertain young girl to a bold adventurer determined to find her own voice and place in the world, The Birdman’s Wife paints an indelible portrait of an extraordinary woman overlooked by history, until now.
"The Torah is called the Tree of Life. Just as a tree is always growing and changing, the Torah's ideas can help us grow and change, too. Yoga can do the same. Both can help us strengthen ourselves, calm our minds, and learn to appreciate the world around us. Written by rabbi and certified yoga instructor Mychal Copeland, I Am the Tree of Life encourages us to explore both the world of yoga and the stories of the Bible and find meaning in both"--Amazon.com.
Lara Jüssen takes the case of Latin American household and construction workers in Madrid to show how ir/regular labour migrants make citizenship available for themselves through emplacements, embodiments and enactments of citizenship. After describing the sociopolitical context of crisis and resistance in Spain, citizenship is anthropologized in order to approach it through the workplace: the private household and the construction site. Based on empirical results from interviews, it is analyzed how citizenship is emplaced through ego-centered networks and assemblages that situate the migrants’ social belonging; how it is embodied through carving out of identities of the migrant workers, intersectionality of gender, ethnicity, and class, affects that imprint workers’ bodies, and experiences of violence at the workplace; then citizenships’ enactment is scrutinized through workers’ empowerment for rights, individually at the workplace and collectively through demonstrations and political theater performance in urban public space.
A sports journalist, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when he disembarks at the railway station. Memories of one of his best, most trusted friends, a tragically young victim of cancer, begin to flood through his mind as he attempts to go about the routine business of reporting a football match. B S Johnson’s famous ‘book in a box’, in which the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses, is one of the key works of a novelist now undergoing an enormous revival of interest. The Unfortunates is a book of passionate honesty and dark, courageous humour: a meditation on death and a celebration of friendship which also offers a remarkably frank self-portrait of its author.
A racy, thoughtful tale of love and abuse, survival and triumph.
Equipped with his cheerful optimism and a pith helmet, this Odysseus in a dinghy takes you with him from the borders of north Wales to the Black Sea - 4,900 kilometers over salt and fresh water, under sail, at oars, or at the end of a tow rope - through twelve countries, 282 locks, and numerous trials and adventures, including an encounter with Balkan pirates.