Showing titles in Cultural & Regional

In A Daughter of Isis, Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero and one of the Arab world’s greatest writers, tells the story of the formative years which shaped an iconic voice in global feminism. In poignant and moving prose we learn about her relationships with her family, her traumatic experience of female genital mutilation at seven years old and escaping suitors at ten and her journey from the rural Egyptian village of her birth to metropolitan Cairo to study medicine.

In Walking through Fire, Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero and one of the Arab world’s greatest writers, tells the story of the later years of a life which shaped an iconic voice in global feminism. Covering her life in Nasser’s then Sadat’s and Mubarak’s Egypt, we learn about Saadawi’s experience of marriage and motherhood, and we travel with her into exile after her life was threatened by religious extremists. Filled with warmth as well as critical reflection, this book reveals the later years of a remarkable life dedicated to the fight for justice and equality.

A Journey Through a Psychotic Breakdown shatters taboos about coping with mental illness. Written in first-person, this story by Douglas Gonçalves tells the moving account of the executive when he faced a psychotic episode that made him a spectator of his own fate and changed his life forever. The author’s account provokes reflections on the current causes that trigger this disease and demystifies the issue. According to medical statistics, one in four people will have mental health problems throughout their lives, which will greatly affect their personal, professional, and social existence.

We are living in historic times. Not since the Civil Rights Movement of the '60s has our country been as vigorously engaged in the reconciliation conversation. There is a great opportunity right now for culture to change, to be a more perfect union. However, it cannot be done without the church, because the faith of the people is more powerful than any law government can enact.

The story of Garabed Kiremidjian whose parents escaped the Armenian Genocide only to be caught up in further conflict in Cyprus. His story is a glimpse into the life of an Armenian family working their way out of the poverty of 1920’s Cyprus, living through the fight for independence from the British and suffering further during the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

Live life forwards but understand it by looking backwards. In the book, the author’s 21st-century daily experiences are mirrored in his village days. From the comfort of a ZOOM class, jog around the estate and make rare encounters. Walk with him through libraries, hit golf balls, visit the beach and learn a thing or two about hyenas, lions and leopards.

Between 1987 and 1989, Alepho, Benjamin, and Benson, like tens of thousands of young boys, took flight from the massacres of Sudan's civil war. They became known as the Lost Boys. With little more than the clothes on their backs, sometimes not even that, they streamed out over Sudan in search of refuge. Their journey led them first to Ethiopia and then, driven back into Sudan, toward Kenya. They walked nearly one thousand miles, sustained only by the sheer will to live.

When Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the writer Jana Bakunina, who has lived in the UK for 20 years, felt furious, ashamed, but most of all helpless. A year later she travelled to her home city of Yekaterinburg to see how ordinary Russians viewed the conflict—and whether the soul of her nation had truly been crushed.

Diane Guerrero, the television actress from the megahit Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, was just 14 years old on the day her parents were detained and deported while she was at school. Born in the US, Guerrero was able to remain in the country and continue her education, depending on the kindness of family friends who took her in and helped her build a life and a successful acting career for herself, without the support system of her family.

Remember when your friends were everything and a new song was enough to blow your mind? Take a fabulous flashback trip to the late 70s with a group of teens working at a semi-dysfunctional family-owned lodge near Yosemite National Park. Relive an era in which you were in search of yourself as much as the next party. You'll go skinny dipping at midnight, disco dance under the stars, play pranks on your friends, and beer-bong your way down the Merced River. Some are running away from their regular lives, others are victims of their own runaway hormones.

Frank Sayi grew up in the 1970s in Mawabeni, a native reserve in colonial Rhodesia, a country under white minority rule, governed by Ian Smith's illegal regime. Reserves were places of repression and containment. There seemed to Frank to be no difference between government soldiers, police officers, and guerillas fighting for freedom. They were all violent men who terrorised the civilian population. Schools were closed, food supply chains and clothing were contaminated with poison, refugees fled the armies.

The history of the Yan family is inseparable from the history of China over the last century. One of the most influential businesswomen of China today, Lan Yan grew up in the company of the country's powerful elite, including Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and other top leaders. In recounting her family history, Lan Yan brings to life a century of Chinese history from the last emperor to present day, including the Cultural Revolution which tore her childhood apart. The little girl who was crushed by the Cultural Revolution has become one of the most active businesswomen in her country.

How It Feels To Be Colored Me was first published in The World Tomorrow in May 1928. In this autobiographical piece that focuses on race and 1920s America, Hurston reflects on her early childhood in an all-black Florida town and her first experiences in life where she felt "different." Hurston focuses on the similarities we all share and on her own self-identity in the face of difference. "Through it all," she says, "I remain myself."

Fiona Foley Provocateur provides insights into the life of one of Australia’s most influential urban Aboriginal and activist artists. From her beginnings in Hervey Bay, Queensland, it follows her young adult life in Sydney where she co-founded Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-Operative in 1986, to her rise through the art world and, most recently, into an academic life.

"You will be a son, my daughter." With these stunning words Ukmina learned that she was to spend her childhood as a boy. In Afghanistan there is a widespread practice of girls dressing as boys to play the role of a son. These children are called bacha posh: literally "girls dressed as boys." This practice offers families the freedom to allow their child to shop and work - and in some cases, it saves them from the disgrace of not having a male heir. But in adolescence, religion restores the natural law.

Christiana Mara Coelho was born into extreme poverty in Brazil. After spending the first seven years of her life with her loving mother in the forest caves outside São Paulo and then on the city streets, where they begged for food, she and her younger brother were suddenly put up for adoption. When one door closed on the only life Christiana had ever known, a new one opened. As Christina Rickardsson, she’s raised by caring adoptive parents in Sweden, far from the despairing favelas of her childhood. Accomplished and outwardly “normal”, Christina is also filled with rage over what she’s lost....

In a 1970s commuter town, Tracey Thorn's teenage life was forged from what failed to happen. Her diaries were packed with entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, the school coach not arriving. Before she was a best-selling musician and writer, Tracey Thorn was a typical teenager: bored and cynical, despairing of her aspirational parents. Her only comfort came from house parties, Meaningful Conversations and the female pop icons who hinted at a new kind of living.

Since her death in 2003, Nina Simone has been the subject of an astonishing number of rereleased, remastered, and remixed albums and compilations as well as biographies, films, viral memes, samples, and soundtracks. In Fantasies of Nina Simone, Jordan Alexander Stein examines the space between our collective and individual fantasies about Simone the performer, civil rights activist, and icon, and her own fantasies about herself. Stein outlines how Simone gave voice to personal fantasies through releasing dozens of covers of her white male contemporaries.

In 1909, a young Australian actress made headlines around the world when she took to the sky over London in an airship emblazoned with the slogan 'Votes for Women' and dropped leaflets over the city. Muriel Matters was dubbed 'that daring Australian girl', and the American media declared it to be the world's first aerial protest. Just months earlier, Muriel had become the first woman to make a speech in the British House of Commons, after chaining herself to a brass grille to protest against the segregation of women in the Parliament.

Lucienne S. Bloch's beautifully written personal essays explore her world on the Upper West Side of New York City. Growing up in the 1950s as the daughter of refugees from Hitler’s Europe who longed for their former lives and culture, these essays explore her youth, her mother's Viennese upbringing, her father's work in the diamond business and long battle with Alzheimer’s, her typewriter, the landscapes of New York, her ongoing sense of alienation, and her development as a writer.