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A “remarkable and insightful” look inside a New York City school for the deaf, blending memoir and history (The New York Times Book Review). Leah Hager Cohen is part of the hearing world, but grew up among the deaf community. Her Russian-born grandfather had been deaf—a fact hidden by his parents as they took him through Ellis Island—and her father served as superintendent at the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens. Young Leah was in the minority, surrounded by deaf culture, and sometimes felt like she was missing the boat—or in the American Sign Language term, “train go sorry.” Here, the award-winning writer looks back on this experience and also explores a pivotal moment ...
A young boy goes missing. The accused is a loner and outsider. When Ava Manseau learns that the suspect is her brother, Fred, she is compelled to piece together what actually happened, convinced that she alone will be able to explain him and his innocence. Fred has always been different: certainly impaired, never evaluated. The siblings grew up under seemingly idyllic circumstances, free of formal education and constraint in a family that rejected labels and diagnoses. Now brother and sister have grown apart, their parents are gone - the boy is dead and Fred is in jail. Ava is forced to wonder: who is truly responsible for this turn of events? And is it her job to save him? Hager Cohen brings her trademark wisdom and grace, depth of feeling and insight to an enthralling and morally ambiguous story. Perhaps, she suggests, in our ongoing struggle to comprehend one another, our imaginations can be more useful than facts.
ONE OF THE WASHINGTON POST'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR One of Christian Science Monitor's BEST FICTION OF 2019 "Funny and tender but also provocative and wise. . . One of the most hopeful and insightful novels I've read in years." - Ron Charles, The Washington Post "Serious yet joyous comedy, reminiscent of the Pultizer-winning Less" - Out Magazine A novel about what happens when an already sprawling family hosts an even larger and more chaotic wedding: an entertaining story about family, culture, memory, and community. In the seemingly idyllic town of Rundle Junction, Bennie and Walter are preparing to host the wedding of their eldest daughter Clem. A marriage ceremony at their beloved, ra...
A short, concise book in favor of honoring doubt and admitting when the answer is: I don’t know. From the acclaimed author of No Book but the World and 2019's searing new novel Strangers and Cousins. In a tight, enlightening narrative, Leah Hager Cohen explores why, so often, we attempt to hide our ignorance, and why, in so many different areas, we would be better off coming clean. Weaving entertaining, anecdotal reporting with eye-opening research, she considers both the ramifications of and alternatives to this ubiquitous habit in arenas as varied as education, finance, medicine, politics, warfare, trial courts, and climate change. But it’s more than just encouraging readers to confess their ignorance—Cohen proposes that we have much to gain by embracing uncertainty. Three little words can in fact liberate and empower, and increase the possibilities for true communication. So much becomes possible when we honor doubt.
A high school girl, her father, and her math teacher: through this unlikely trio, Leah Hager Cohen charts the complexities of the human heart as only she can. Esker (she prefers to go solely by her last name) is a thirty-one-year-old high school teacher at the Prospect School in Brooklyn who, after various heartbreaks and disappointments, has found a quiet resolve in her lonely spinster routine. But when a mysterious fall leaves her star math student injured and housebound until exams, Esker begins tutoring the precocious teenager at home. And soon, much against her will, she begins falling edgily, haltingly in love with the girl's father. Charged with Esker's own irreverence and wit, Heart, You Bully, You Punk sweeps us irresistibly into her profound and wistful struggle to unite the rest of her self with her unruly heart.
Once upon a time we knew the origins of things: what piece of earth the potato on our dinner plate came from, which well our water was dipped from, who cobbled our shoes, and whose cow provided the leather. In many parts of the world, that information is still readily available. But in our society, even as technology makes certain kinds of information more accessible than ever, other connections are irrevocably lost. In Glass, Paper, Beans, Leah Cohen traces three simple commodities on their geographic and semantic journey from her rickety table at the Someday Café to their various points of origin. As Cohen draws the reader Oz-like across time and continents, she brings to life three unforgettable characters whose labor provides the glass for her mug, the pulp for her newspaper and the beans for her cup of coffee. In prose as sophisticated as it is simple, she braids the myths, lore, and history of these three simple staples and conjures an unseen world where economics, fetishization, and manufacture meet. An elegant and inspired inquiry into the true nature of things, Glass, Paper, Beans is a classic work on the economy of everyday life.
'Any girl who boxes,' writes Leah Hager Cohen, 'challenges, wittingly or not, the idea of what it means to be a girl in our culture. Through the prism of what she does with her fists, she brings a fiercely contrarian light to our most fundamental notions about femininity and power and appetite and shame and desire.'Originally intending simply to research the subject, Leah met four adolescent girls from a Boston housing project who were training under a female coach at the Somerville Boxing Club. In the course of a year, she grew close to them, learning about their families, where they grew up, their explosive friendships and experience of each other as 'intimate adversaries', and especially the damage that had turned each of them into a fighter. Drawn into the ring herself, Leah sparred with the girls and was astounded by the strength and authority of her body. 'I was beginning to get a feel for my own reach.'Spirited and provocative, Without Apology is Leah Cohen's account of what she discovered in that gym about herself, about girls who box, and ultimately about the buried connections between femininity and aggression.
How much would you pay to know the mind of God? In 31 BC, the Jewish high priest, Amariah, flees to the ancient Essene fortification at Qumran, on the shore of the Dead Sea, to avoid Roman persecution. Hidden in his saddle bags are the Urim and Thummim, the revelatory devices used to ask and receive answers from God, which haven’t been seen since the Babylonian captivity in 586 BC. When Amariah is murdered, the Urim and Thummim are buried with his body in a cave vault, later sealed by an earthquake that strikes Judea in 32 BC. There they remain until the present day, when they are discovered by Ishmael, a treadue-hunting young Arab Bedouin, then are passed to Rehavam Krasnoff, an unscrupulous chief investigator for the Israeli Antiquities Authority. When two masterminds in Athens, Gregory Kavidas and Mortimer Stein (who’ve developed the global financial network Masterlink—the precursor to a cashless world economy), become alerted of the stones’ discovery, they set out to seize the stones for themselves . . . before their evil agenda is exposed.
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book A Boston Globe Bestseller "Simply—gorgeous." —Los Angeles Times Late in her twentieth year, Beatrice mails a letter on the sly, sparking events that will change her life forever. The addressee is her grandmother, a legendary stage actress long estranged from her daughter, Bea’s mother. Though Bea wants to become an actress herself, it is the desire to understand the old family rift that drives her to work her way into her grandmother’s graces. But just as she establishes a precarious foothold in her grandmother’s world, Bea’s elite Boston home life begins to crumble. Her beloved father is accused of harassment by one of his graduate students; her usually serene, self-certain mother shows signs of fallibility. And Bea is falling in love with someone many would consider inappropriate. Powerfully written and psychologically intricate, House Lights illuminates the corrosive power of family secrets, and the redemptive struggle to find truth, forgiveness, and love.
"[This book]...merges a realistic complex federal prosecution with real high-court decisions in a hypothetical, fact-intensive mock trial case file. Each of these twenty exercises introduces a wrinkle involving a constitutional challenge to procedures of evidence that students then analyze through the lens of the Supreme Court's decisions in landmark criminal procedure cases. This fusion of factually compelling scenarios and intellectually challenging legal doctrines creates a robust learning experience that will hone the students' skills regarding legal analysis and legal advocacy concerning constitutional issues that arise throughout the course of a criminal case"--