Tales of My Ancestors, Dispossession, and the Building of the United States
Examines the roots of white supremacy and mass incarceration from the vantage point of history Why, asks Pem Davidson Buck, is punishment so central to the functioning of the United States, a country proclaiming "liberty and justice for all"? The Punishment Monopoly challenges our everyday understanding of American history, focusing on the ......
A Russian Dissident's Journey From the Gulag to the West
This riveting memoir tells of the fate of a Soviet dissident, Alexander Shatravka, who tried to escape from the Soviet Union in the 1974, only to be caught and returned to twelve years of imprisonment in Soviet psychiatric hospitals and labor camps. Released in 1986, just in time for the momentous changes of glasnost and perestroika, Shatravka ......
As a boy growing up in New York City, Kevin P. Gilheany had two dreams: to join the Coast Guard, and to play the bagpipes. But by the time he finished high school he was overweight, had a drinking problem, and couldn't swim. Undeterred by the doubts of the folks at home, he decided to enlist in the Coast Guard anyway. With great determination, ......
After learning that she inherited a BRCA2 genetic mutation that put her at high risk for breast and ovarian cancer, Kim Horner's doctors urged her to consider having a double mastectomy. But how do you decide whether to have a surgery to remove your breasts to reduce your risk for a disease you don't have and may never get? Horner shares her ......
The musical career of Alexander Tumanov extends from Stalinist and Soviet Russia through contemporary Canada, and as such provides an inspiring portrait of one person's devotion to his art under trying circumstances. Tumanov was a founding member of Moscow's Madrigal Ensemble of early music, which introduced Renaissance and Baroque music to the ......
A tale of research evolves into a story that began over a century ago. In the depths of the Depression, a German Lutheran daughter of Iowa managed to follow her brothers to Carthage College. After two years, she succumbed to the cultural ideal and left college for marriage. But her Lutheran minister husband proved to be abusive and deserted her at ......
A Story of Struggle, Empowerment, and Disability Pride
A memoir by a disability rights activist Such a Pretty Girl is Nadina LaSpina's story-from her early years in her native Sicily, where still a baby she contracts polio, a fact that makes her the object of well-meaning pity and the target of messages of hopelessness; to her adolescence and youth in America, spent almost entirely in ......
While living in the Presidio National Park, Leslie Carol Roberts became enchanted with the park's 125-year old forest, native plant and habitat restoration, serpentine rock formations, and wild beaches just outside the Golden Gate. Roberts unearths stories of scientists, spiritualists, and artists around the globe engaged with specific and ......
Circumstances impelled Victor Grossman, a U.S. Army draftee stationed in Europe, to flee a military prison sentence: especially the icy pressures of the McCarthy Era. Grossman - a.k.a. Steve Wechsler, a committed leftist since his years at Harvard and, briefly, as a factory worker - left his barracks in Bavaria one August day in 1952, and
