Zenosbooks

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1642

Your Name Shall Be Tanga by Calixthe Beyala. Portsmouth. 1996. Heinemann. 0435909509. Translated from the French by Marjolijn de Jager. African Writers Series. 137 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Jane Human.  

DESCRIPTION - In a West-African prison cell a young woman, Tanga, is dying. Her only companion is Anna-Claude, a foreigner on the brink of madness. Reluctantly, Tanga begins to confide her life story to this stranger. A grim talc of incest, prostitution, bereavement and crime unfolds. Tanga's anguished mind searches for the words to express such suffering. Yet as she does so, the bond between her and the white stranger begins to grow. In passing on her story, she is fusing her identity with the woman who will live after her death. `Your name shall be Tanga', she insists. In this disturbing novel about sexual abuse and violence, Calixthe Beyala voices the solidarity that unites women across racial, religious and class barriers.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Calixthe Beyala was born in Cameroon in 1961. She spent her childhood in Douala with one of her sisters, four years older than herself. Calixthe Beyala left Cameroon aged seventeen and arrived in France where she studied, married, had two children and published numerous novels. In 1996 she was awarded the Grand Prix du Roman de l'AcadEmie Française. She now (2011) lives in France.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1557

Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat. New York. 1994. Soho Press. 1569470057. 234 pages. hardcover. Jacket design - RMB. Jacket art - 'Little Madonna of the Tropics' by Joseph Stella.  

DESCRIPTION - At an astonishingly young age, Edwidge Danticat has become one of our most celebrated new novelists, a writer who evokes the wonder, terror, and heartache of her native Haiti--and the enduring strength of Haiti's women--with a vibrant imagery and narrative grace that bear witness to her people's suffering and courage. At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. What ensues is a passionate journey through a landscape charged with the supernatural and scarred by political violence, in a novel that bears witness to the traditions, suffering, and wisdom of an entire people.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1477

Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood by Maria Tatar. New York. 2009. Norton. 9780393066012. 296 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by The Design Works Group, Jason Gabbert.

  
DESCRIPTION - Highly illuminating for parents, vital for students and book lovers alike, ENCHANTED HUNTERS transforms our understanding of why children should read. Ever wondered why little children love listening to stories, why older ones get lost in certain books? In this enthralling work, Maria Tatar challenges many of our assumptions about childhood reading. Much as our culture pays lip service to the importance of literature, we rarely examine the creative and cognitive benefits of reading from infancy through adolescence. By exploring how beauty and horror operate in C. S. Lewis's THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, Philip Pullman's HIS DARK MATERIALS, J. K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER novels, and many other narratives, Tatar provides a delightful work for parents, teachers, and general readers, not just examining how and what children read but also showing through vivid examples how literature transports and transforms children with its intoxicating, captivating, and occasionally terrifying energy. In the tradition of Bruno Bettelheim's landmark THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT, Tatar's book is not only a compelling journey into the world of childhood but a trip back for adult readers as well.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on folklore and literature. She is the author of THE ANNOTATED BROTHERS GRIMM and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1449

God's Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane. Garden City. 1962. Doubleday. Translated from the French by Francis Price. 333 pages. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - AN ANCIENT SENECALESE TRADITION decrees that if the members of any group must be counted, they may only be numbered as so many of ‘God's Bits of Wood.' To give them names might attract the attention of an evil spirit and fatefully alter their lives. . . Strike! The word itself was foreign to the men and women who lived along the thousand miles of steel that run from the city of Dakar into the ancient heartland of the Sudan. Strike! The word had come to them with the building of the railroad, and with the red-eared men from a country named France. Once before, they had taken it up as a weapon and had been bloodily repulsed; and now, in 1947, they were taking it up again. A few thousands of men and their women were plunging themselves, their people -and, eventually, their continent-headlong into the future. And this time they knew they could not, must not, fail. Written by a man who is himself one of ‘God's Bits of Wood,' and based on actual events, this novel is dramatic evidence of the rebirth of a great people.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sembene Ousmane, who was born into a Senegalese fishing family in 1923, worked at a diversity of jobs before writing his first book, THE BLACK DOCKER, in 1956. Since then he has written several novels and short story collections, through which he tells the saga of his land and its people. He has also gained a reputation for his films, particularly BLACK GIRL and THE MONEY ORDER, which were well received both in the U.S. and abroad.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1410

Enlightenment by Maureen Freely. Woodstock/New York. 2008. Overlook Press. 9781590200742. 398 pages. hardcover. Cover photo by Zeynep Kanra. Cover design by Plainclothes Ltd.

DESCRIPTION - In October 2005, only a few months after her Turkish husband is detained and her five-year-old son distributed to a foster family by US border patrol, Jeannie Wakefield disappears. She leaves behind in Istanbul a 57-page letter to M, an anonymous investigative journalist who Jeannie begs to write about her plight. The letter tells the story of Jeannie's first arrival in Turkey 34 years earlier, when she was a bright-eyed 16-year-old innocent shimmering with open-hearted idealism. The letter reveals a convoluted tale of complex political intrigue, of retired intelligence operatives and Turkish teenage radicals willing to die for their right to speak out against the humanitarian outrages of their government, of a grisly murder and a dismembered body in a trunk. It is a grim and heartbreaking history of first loves shattered and best friends betrayed, and M finds herself, against her will, tangled in Jeannie's narrative. But in the ‘deep state' of post-911 Turkey, nobody is who they say they are, and everyone is a suspect - exactly how much will M inadvertently sacrifice to save the woman who stole her only true love? ‘A dark Conradian drama set in a beautifully illuminated Istanbul, where the past is always with us' - Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prizewinning author of Snow ‘Byzantine in structure, mischievous in intent, it is as concerned with the garbled and provisional nature of truth as with the minutiae of repression' - Times Literary Supplement ‘A gripping novel' - The Independent ‘Playing out against a meticulously realized backdrop of Turkey in the years following the Cold War that feels thoroughly authentic, this sinister, complex political thriller snakes to a remarkably subtle conclusion.' - Independent on Sunday. .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maureen Freely was born in Neptune, New Jersey, in 1952, the oldest of three children. When she was eight, her family moved to Istanbul, Turkey. It was here that she spent the remainder of her childhood, with the exception of one year in London, one year at a boarding school in Beirut, and many summers with her family on the Greek Island of Naxos. After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1974. she returned to Europe to live with her husband, the American writer Paul Spike. Their first child was born in late 1978.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 2161

The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon. New York. 1956. St Martin's Press. 171 pages. hardcover.  

 
DESCRIPTION - There is a new type in the streets of London. His clothes stand out baroque and garish in the subfusc London scene, his voice is calypso-like, his smile is disarming, and his skin is black. He is, in fact, one of the vast and growing army of West Indian immigrants who have invaded the larger cities and whose calypso tunes and infectious gaiety mask the serious problems of a precarious existence. This is a book about these people by one of them, written in the very idiom in which they speak and think. Though the author writes it as a novel, we doubt if any of its characters is really fictitious. Here you may see through the eyes of the narrator, Moses, such flamboyant individuals as Five Past Twelve, Captain, the amorous young Sir Galahad and a host of others, toiling, ‘Liming', gossiping and love-making. We follow them to their Saturday-night socials, their jive sessions and rendezvous on the park benches, see them crouching under blankets for warmth in winter and airing themselves voluptuously in the summer sunshine of mean streets. Samuel Selvon is a young Trinidadian whose first novel A BRIGHTER SUN was given such generous critical appreciation on both sides of the Atlantic. Carl Carmer wrote, ‘Not since I read Porgy have I been so impressed by a work that concerns itself with the nobilities of primitive peoples striving to overcome limitations placed upon them by poverty and discrimination. . .' Under the laughter and the lilting rhythms of Trinidadian speech, THE LONELY LONDONERS has the same compassion which made his earlier work so memorable.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Selvon (1923–16 April 1994) was a Trinidad-born writer. Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners is ground-breaking in its use of creolized English, or ‘nation language', for narrative as well as dialogue. The Lonely Londoners, as with most of his later work, focuses on the immigration of West Indians to Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, and the cultural differences that are often subtle and implicit to the dying Empire's fantasy of a ‘white nation'. Selvon also illustrates the panoply of different ‘cities' that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi.

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1412

Nietzsche's Political Skepticism by Tamsin Shaw. Princeton. 2007. Princeton University Press. 9780691133225. 192 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Political theorists have long been frustrated by Nietzsche's work. Although he develops profound critiques of morality, culture, and religion, it is very difficult to spell out the precise political implications of his insights. He himself never did so in any systematic way. In this book, Tamsin Shaw claims that there is a reason for this: Nietzsche's insights entail a distinctive form of political skepticism. Shaw argues that the modern political predicament, for Nietzsche, is shaped by two important historical phenomena. The first is secularization, or the erosion of religious belief, and the fragmentation of moral life that it entails. The second is the unparalleled ideological power of the modern state. The promotion of Nietzsche's own values, Shaw insists, requires resistance to state ideology. But Nietzsche cannot envisage how these values might themselves provide a stable basis for political authority; this is because secular societies, lacking recognized normative expertise, also lack a reliable mechanism for making moral insight politically effective. In grappling with this predicament, Shaw claims, Nietzsche raises profound questions about political legitimacy and political authority in the modern world. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tamsin Shaw is assistant professor of politics at Princeton University.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 63

Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross. New York. 1980. M Evans. 0871313170. 419 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Widely acclaimed and hotly debated, this provocative and original look at current trends in the United States presents a grim forecast of a possible totalitarian future. The author shows how the chronic problems faced by the U.S. in the late twentieth century require increasing collusion between Big Business and Big Government in order to ‘manage' society in the interests of the rich and powerful. This ‘friendly fascism,' Gross argues, will probably lack the dictatorships, public spectacles, and overt brutality of the classic varieties of Germany, Italy, and Japan, but has at its root the same denial of individual freedoms and democratic rights. No one who cares about the future of democracy, in this country and around the world, can afford to ignore the frightening possibilities for Friendly Fascism. ‘At a time of escalating political uncertainty, when the forces of totalitarianism threaten once more to crawl out of the American woodwork, Friendly Fascism is a powerful tool - better yet, a weapon - that can help us avert a distinctly unfriendly future.' - Alvin Toffler. ‘First-rate...a fascinating, provocative job. Bertram Gross has written an important book, and it deserves the widest possible audience.' - Michael Harrington. ‘This is the best thing I've seen on how America might go fascist democratically. Friendly Fascism offers a very clear exposition of where America is, and how we got there.' - William Shirer.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bertram Myron Gross (1912 in Philadelphia - March 12, 1997 in Walnut Creek, California) was an American social scientist, Federal bureaucrat and Professor of Political Science at Hunter College (CUNY). He is known from his book Friendly Fascism from 1980 and as primary author of the Humphrey–Hawkins Full Employment Act.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1937

The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym. New York. 2001. Basic Books. 405 pages. hardcover. Cover: Evgeny Khaldei-'Sebastopol, 1944'.  

DESCRIPTION - Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his troops, buried a soldier alive as a deterrent to nostalgia. In her new book, Svetlana Boym develops a comprehensive approach to this elusive ailment. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities - St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague - and the imagined homelands of exiles - Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. From JURASSIC PARK to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, from love letters on Kafka's grave to conversations with Hitler's impersonator, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Svetlana Boym (April 29, 1966, Saint Petersburg, Russia - August 5, 2015, Boston, MA) was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, and a media artist, playwright and novelist. She was an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University. Much of her work focused on developing the new theoretical concept of the off-modern.Boym was born in Leningrad, USSR. She studied Spanish at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad. She received an M.A. from Boston University and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Boym's written work explored relationships between utopia and kitsch, memory and modernity, and homesickness and the sickness of home. Her research interests included 20th-century Russian literature, cultural studies, comparative literature and literary studies. In addition to teaching and writing, Boym also sat on the Editorial Collective of the interdisciplinary scholarly journal Public Culture. Boym was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Cabot Award for Research in Humanities, and an award from the American Council of Learned Societies. She won a Gilette Company Fellowship which provided her half a year study at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2006, Boym's media art exhibit opened in Factory Rog Art Space in Ljubljana during the City of Women Festival. She also curated the exhibit "Territories of Terror: Memories and Mythologies of Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art" at Boston's University Art Gallery. Boym died on August 5, 2015, aged 56, in Boston, Massachusetts, following a year-long battle with cancer.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 1880

James Joyce by Richard Ellmann. Oxford. 1959. Oxford University Press. 842 pages. hardcover. Jacket design By Frank Wilimczyk.

DESCRIPTION - Here is the first complete biography of Joyce written since his death. It presents Joyce as son, lover, husband, and father-but always as writer. Although the author's method is ostensibly chronological, it is also thematic: each chapter is a spot of time and a state of mind. By narrative, by reports of conversation, by many unpublished as well as published letters, by anecdote, and by comment, Mr. Ellmann captures the personality of the most elusive of contemporary artists. In the process of creating this masterpiece of literary biography, the author obtained access in many countries to unexpected new Joyce material. His search took him to Dublin, London, Zurich, Trieste, Paris, and other cities in Europe as well as to many parts of this continent. In his travels he talked to such people as Joyce's son George, Joyce's brother Stanislaus, his three sisters, Mrs. Joyce's sister, Dr. Carl Jung, and an old blind man who knew all the turnings in Dublin. Mr. Ellmann's literary detective work discovered, among other things, the actual woman who inspired the character of Molly Bloom, and the old man in a junk shop on the quays who in part was the model for Hugh (‘Blazes') Boy Ian in ULYSSES. He uncovers the raw material in Joyce's waits and shows how Joyce converted it into fiction. The book gives a fascinating account of literary life in Europe in Joyce's lifetime, telling of his relations with Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, Hemingway, Proust, and Pound, among others, and paints an altogether fresh picture of Joyce's acquaintances - writes, artists, and musicians. It reveals new details of Joyce's meeting with his future wife Nora Barnacle, of their life together, and of her quizzical attitude toward his writings. Light is thrown on his break with the Roman Catholic Church, and on his relationship with his emotionally disturbed daughter, Lucia. Altogether, the book presents Joyce dramatically and completely, good and bad combined. It shows that Joyce the man and Joyce the artist were products of the same central energy. The biographer's point of view is unobtrusive, but in the end the reader is persuaded into an understanding of Joyce and his works. Mr. Ellmann's scholarly odyssey also turned up many photographs which have never before been published in a book. A rare picture of Joyce and Nora Barnacle on their wedding day is included in the 16 pages of half-tone illustrations. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard David Ellmann (March 15, 1918 - May 13, 1987) was a prominent American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century; its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A liberal humanist, Ellmann's academic work generally focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________