Baker presents a literary exploration of the Beats' encounter with India in the 1960s, a journey--led by Allen Ginsberg--that inspired and influenced generations of Americans and Indians alike.
*A 2011 National Book Award Finalist* A spellbinding story of renunciation, conversion, and radicalism from Pulitzer Prize-finalist biographer Deborah Baker What drives a young woman raised in a postwar New York City suburb to convert to Islam, abandon her country and Jewish faith, and embrace a life of exile in Pakistan? The Convert tells the story of how Margaret Marcus of Larchmont became Maryam Jameelah of Lahore, one of the most trenchant and celebrated voices of Islam's argument with the West. A cache of Maryam's letters to her parents in the archives of the New York Public Library sends the acclaimed biographer Deborah Baker on her own odyssey into the labyrinthine heart of twentieth-century Islam. Casting a shadow over these letters is the mysterious figure of Mawlana Abul Ala Mawdudi, both Maryam's adoptive father and the man who laid the intellectual foundations for militant Islam. As she assembles the pieces of a singularly perplexing life, Baker finds herself captive to questions raised by Maryam's journey. Is her story just another bleak chapter in a so-called clash of civilizations? Or does it signify something else entirely? And then there's this: Is the life depicted in Maryam's letters home and in her books an honest reflection of the one she lived? Like many compelling and true tales, The Convert is stranger than fiction. It is a gripping account of a life lived on the radical edge and a profound meditation on the cultural conflicts that frustrate mutual understanding.
Allow Deborah Baker-Receniello to guide you through an awakening experience, defeating limitations, and ultimately having everything you desire. scientific principles to use powerfully and on purpose to shape your life. physics, and love have to do with you and them; our internal self-talk about them, our investment in attention to them, and emotion. The moment you can see this clearly, everything becomes possible. Nothing outside of you can stop you. Deborah Baker-Receniello, Ph.D. has done a remarkable job of researching, integrating, making available and discussing a wide range of complex information across many disciplines and specialties. of our being, but also on our emotional, mental and spiritual levels . She easily connects the scientific field and a well-rounded understanding of philosophy, attitudes, feelings and spirituality in her discussion ... Howard Batie, Director Evergreen Healing Arts Center my life;. I've found a key that opens the lock to manifesting-- S. J. M., Massage Therapist This book challenges you to see your true self... S. L., Stress Management I didn't know where to start. Now, not only have I changed my life for the better, my whole world is changing... BJ, Rainer, WA I now am open to the possibility of there being enough in this world for everyone and I am healing my shattered wings. I've learned to reinforce my beliefs and trust in myself-- T.L., Olympia, WA
A sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, about the waning of the British Empire in India John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers—W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender—achieved literary fame, they vied to be included on an expedition that would deliver Everest’s summit to an Englishman, a quest that had become a metaphor for Britain’s struggle to maintain power over India. To this rivalry was added another: in the summer of 1938 both men fell in love with a painter named Nancy Sharp. Her choice would determine where each man’s wartime loyalties would lie. Set in Calcutta, London, the glacier-locked wilds of the Karakoram, and on Everest itself, The Last Englishmen is also the story of a generation. The cast of this exhilarating drama includes Indian and English writers and artists, explorers and Communist spies, Die Hards and Indian nationalists, political rogues and police informers. Key among them is a highborn Bengali poet named Sudhin Datta, a melancholy soul torn, like many of his generation, between hatred of the British Empire and a deep love of European literature, whose life would be upended by the arrival of war on his Calcutta doorstep. Dense with romance and intrigue, and of startling relevance for the great power games of our own day, Deborah Baker’s The Last Englishmen is an engrossing story that traces the end of empire and the stirring of a new world order.
Philosopher, psychoanalyst, politician, propagandist, prophet...although difficult to categorize, Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century and one of our most powerful writers on race and revolution. The book opens with a biography, following Fanon from his birthplace of Martinique through combat in World War II and education in France, to his heroic involvement in the fights for Algerian independence and African decolonization. After a brief discussion of Fanon’s political and cultural influences, the main section of the book covers the three principal stages of Fanon’s thought: the search for black identity, as presented in Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon's stunning diagnosis of racism the struggle against colonialism, as explained in "A Dying Colonialism" and "Toward the African Revolution," essays centering on Algeria’s war of independence the process of decolonization, as analyzed in The Wretched of the Earth, the book that extended insights gained in Algeria to Africa and the Third World Fanon For Beginners concludes by examining Fanon’s influence on political practice, such as the Black Power movement in the United States, on literary theory, and on political studies showing how his works and words continue to have a profound impact on contemporary cultural debate.e.
When it comes to family, love, tradition and pride are a powerful brew . . . The fourth of the Sweet Tea story collections (SWEET TEA & JESUS SHOES, MORE SWEET TEA, ON GRANDMA'S PORCH) treats readers to a panorama of Southern life, both then and now. Family dramas, comic mishaps, sentimental remembrances and poignant choices illuminate these thirteen stories by new and established authors. There's something for every reader: The gritty realism of a hunt for wild boars, the gentle grieving for a home now filled only with memories, the funny battle between a woman and her recipe for deviled eggs, and much more. Come sit a spell on the front porch. Prop your feet up, sip a cold glass of sweet iced tea, and lose yourself in a way of life that's as irresistible as pecan pie and as unforgettable as a chilled slice of watermelon on a hot summer day. Welcome to a place that exists between the pages of How It Was and How It Might Have Been--just a little bit south of the long path home. Sweet Tea Collections: Sweet Tea & Jesus Shoes, On Grandma's Porch, and More Sweet Tea
Writing as A. Deborah Baker, New York Times bestselling and award-winning author SEANAN McGUIRE introduces readers to a world of talking trees and sarcastic owls, of dangerous mermaids and captivating queens in Over the Woodward Wall, an exceptional tale for readers who are young at heart. If you trust her you’ll never make it home... Avery is an exceptional child. Everything he does is precise, from the way he washes his face in the morning, to the way he completes his homework – without complaint, without fuss, without prompt. Zib is also an exceptional child, because all children are, in their own way. But where everything Avery does and is can be measured, nothing Zib does can possibly be predicted, except for the fact that she can always be relied upon to be unpredictable. They live on the same street. They live in different worlds. On an unplanned detour from home to school one morning, Avery and Zib find themselves climbing over a stone wall into the Up and Under – an impossible land filled with mystery, adventure and the strangest creatures. And they must find themselves and each other if they are to also find their way out and back to their own lives.
The French Renaissance poet Louise Labe is one of the most striking and influential women writers of early modern Europe. In her broad-ranging volume of prose and poetic works (1555), Labe transforms the position of woman in Renaissance discourse from an object to a subject of erotic and artistic desire and privileges the notion of desire itself as a central issue for literary and psychic exploration. Deborah Lesko Baker presents the dramatic creation and evolution of female subjectivity in Labe as a passionate quest for internal selfhood made possible through both authentic self-expression and interaction with others. In so doing she analyzes how the development of the female subject coincides with an ongoing interrogation of the inherited models of the Petrarchan lyric tradition.
In this engrossing new piece of Beat history, Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker takes us back to the moment when America's edgiest writers looked to India for answers as India looked to the West. It was 1961 when Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, where he hoped to meet poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. Baker follows Ginsberg and his companions as they travel from ashram to opium den. Exposing an overlooked chapter of the literary past, A Blue Hand will delight all those who continue to cherish the frenzied creativity of the Beats.
Deborah Ronna Baker's The Porch Down Home chronicles the life of seventeen-year-old Avie and her sister, Cassie, who live in the Midwest with their beloved grandparents, Bigmomma and Bigdaddy. Avie and Cassie have been taught right from wrong by their young-at-heart grandparents, but that doesn't stop Avie from getting into mischief every once in a while, like the time she 'borrows' a stash of Bigdaddy's healing herb to use for her science project. But Bigdaddy will soon be thankful, for a summer storm destroys seemingly all of the precious herb one night-all but Avie's stash in the meadow. The Porch Down Home offers a cast of characters as different as night and day that will become like part of your own family, from nosy Cora Lee and the stuttering Lester brothers to Big Sally the bully and shy but sweet Chase. From the schoolhouse to the nickel and dime, join these Midwest characters in discovering that life is best lived on The Porch Down Home. The author creates a real world peopled with characters-even animals-that are so lively, colorful, and vivid they become your next-door neighbors. No-closer than that; they're like family! -Mary Frances Stubbs, Director of Development for the College of Engineering, Architecture and Computer Sciences, and Advisor of Film and Literary Projects, Howard University
In a round-about-way, demand for a closer inspection of the shoe designs of Patrick Sart necessitates this third volume, French Shoes 2007. He further expounds on this subject: Always au courant, you start with bits and pieces, a squiggle here and there, to assemble, to construct a truly original shoe. A vision of artistic interpretation for the coming season of passion not necessarily fashion. A perception of detail is repeated perhaps in a silhouette of the shoes on pages 32 and 168 sans la material prima one should notice, for example, on page 235. By merely thumbing through marvelously comprehensive book one can discover a particularly sublime sketch that could be transmorphed into always wearable-meaning comfy-shoe. "But not for the lady traipsing to the corner market.", harps the culture maven, Paige Forrest. The old world craftsmanship in their products excels beyond even the most recherché ateliers, ne'cest pas? where hype is unknown or the element of provocateur-oui?non? Sart simply dismisses these diversions and comments, "They are usually meant for the lush enjoyment and collection with no wedges meaning heels to a point
In Jonathan Swift and the Vested Word, Deborah Wyrick argues that modern Continental and American literary theory is "tantalizingly applicable to Swiftian texts." Its applicability, she writes, "stems from Swift's interest in and exploration of what are now though of as phenomenological, structuralist, poststructuralist, and new historicist concerns: how a life in language comes into being, how semiotic systems determine meaning, how texts open up their own systems to other texts and to multiple interpretations." Wyrick investigates Swift's confrontations with three theories of language current in his day, theories that locate meaning in the thing named, in the idea behind the word, or in the response of the audience. She concludes that Swift fashioned a fourth theory of meaning, one that locates meaning in and among words themselves. Because of his fear of the anarchic potential of language, Swift attempted to invest his words with extratextual authority; yet a powerful counterforce was his desire to exploit the possibilities of language divested of stable significance. These divestitures, particularly the word-play and language games, ultimately served serious personal and social purposes. A crucial personal purpose was Swift's ability to create a textual self, which he did, Wyrick maintains, by constructing defensive transvestitures centered on clothes and money. These parallel sign systems produced Swift's greatest achievement in using the resources of language and history to effect political action. By using the entire Swift canon -- poems and prose narratives, letters and essays, sermons and satires -- Wyrick presents Swift's struggle with the inadequacies of language and its inability to answer the tremendous demands he made upon it. Originally published 1988. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Thanks to her acclaimed volume of poetry and prose published in France in 1555, Louise Labé (1522-66) remains one of the most important and influential women writers of the Continental Renaissance. Best known for her exquisite collection of love sonnets, Labé played off the Petrarchan male tradition with wit and irony, and her elegies respond with lyric skill to predecessors such as Sappho and Ovid. The first complete bilingual edition of this singular and broad-ranging female author, Complete Poetry and Prose also features the only translations of Labé's sonnets to follow the exacting rhyme patterns of the originals and the first rhymed translation of Labé's elegies in their entirety.
Two-time National Book Award finalist Deborah Wiles introduces us to the Cakes, a family of traveling bakers, who've just arrived in Wiles's legendary Aurora County, Mississippi. Emma Lane Cake has five brothers, four dogs, and a family that can't stay put. The Cake family travels from place to place, setting up bakeries in communities that need them. Then, just when Emma feels settled in with new friends... they move again. Now the Cakes have come to Aurora County, and Emma has vowed that this time she is NOT going to get attached to ANYONE or ANYTHING. Why bother, if her father's only going to uproot her again? But fate has different plans. As does Ruby Lavender, who is going to show Emma Lane Cake a thing or two about making friendship last.
This multimedia book generates a rich conversation about food sovereignty, initiated by eight collaborators in the Legacies Project, a unique intergenerational and intercultural exchange between food justice activists and artists--Canadian, American, and Mexican, settler and Indigenous, elders and youth. Their stories come alive in video clips and short photo essays around cross-cutting themes. In addition, an instructor's guide offers ways to engage students and activists in critical questions about food and settler-Indigenous relationships, through constantly evolving contexts, linking to other resources, text-based and visual, print and online.
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