‘I think attention is going to be drawn no matter what,’ Billy pointed out. ‘We’re three – well, two and a half – Indians walking through a town that hasn’t seen a foreigner since they hanged a monkey 150 years ago thinking it was Napoleon.’ In 1943, as war rages across Europe, Britain’s Great Western Railway (GWR) Works’ labour force is comprised of a few men too valuable, old or infirm for active service and thousands of recently recruited women. With critical skills in short supply, the British government looks to the empire to provide vital expertise in the run up to the D-Day invasion. And that is how railway engineer Imtiaz ‘Billy’ Khan, logistics supremo Vincent Rosario and maths prodigy Akaash Ray find themselves in Swindon, lodging with the well-intentioned Mrs A, hilariously navigating bland food, faulty toilet cisterns, secret assignments and a mutual distrust of each other. Sparkling with wit, Mrs A’s Indian Gentlemen is a rollicking tale of misadventure that delightfully portrays what happens when cultures collide.
Recent scholarly trends and controversies in Gertrude Stein scholarship have focused on her politics and her friendships as well as on Stein the collector, the celebrity, the visual icon. Clearly, these recent examinations not only deepen our understanding of Stein but also attest to her staying power. Yet Stein’s writing itself too often remains secondary. The central premise of Primary Stein is that an extraordinary amount of textual scholarship remains to be done on Stein’s work, whether the well-known, the little-known, or yet unpublished. The essays in Primary Stein draw on recent interdisciplinary examinations, using cultural and historical contexts to enrich and complicate how we might read, understand, and teach Stein’s writing. Following Stein’s own efforts throughout her lifetime to shift the focus from her personality to her writing, these innovative essays turn the lens back to a wide range of her texts, including novels, plays, lectures and poetry. Each essay takes Stein’s primary works as its core interpretive focus, returning scholarly conversations to the challenges and pleasures of working with Stein’s texts.
“Children have the right to be happy. So God sent me to help them.” —Sister Maria Rosa Leggol In Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, in 1966, a short, plump, middle-aged Catholic nun was hot on the heels of the richest man in the country. Sister María Rosa Leggol, a hospital nurse with a fifth-grade education, had no money, no social standing, no clout. What she did have was the audacity to ask big favors of powerful men and the unwavering conviction that her dream—to rescue, house, and educate street children—was sanctioned by God. She also had the gall to think she could stop the man’s airplane from taking off. The help she received that day triggered a dramatic chain of events resulting in the rescue and education of tens of thousands of destitute children in the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Through her network of children’s villages, schools, farms, clinics, vocational training centers, and microbusinesses, this indomitable nun empowered poor Hondurans to live, grow, and work with dignity. Madre is a celebration of a fearless woman’s great goodness, charisma, and chutzpah in challenging corruption and machismo to break generational cycles of poverty. Writer and mission trip leader Kathy Martin O’Neil sets the unlikely triumphs of this “Angel of the Poor” against the backdrop of Honduras’s deprivation, broken families, and gang violence that send desperate young migrants fleeing for their lives. Drawing from more than a decade of mission travel to SAN, she captures Sister Maria Rosa’s magnetic allure and Franciscan wisdom on how best to change hearts and stand with the marginalized people of the world. Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodriguez of Honduras, who is advancing her cause for sainthood, introduces his friend, Sister María Rosa Leggol, in a beautiful Foreword.
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