Aminatta Forna can claim a unique perspective on two countries, two cultures and two families.
The recent violence and political upheaval in Sierra Leone has brought many of the issues dealt with in the book to the forefront of the international political scene once more. In terms of emotional intensity and political insight the book can be compared to Wild Swans and Repossessing Ernestine and Paula.
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(4)"Northerners know nothing at all about Slavery. They think it is perpetual bondage only. They have no conception of the depth of _degradation_ involved in that word, SLAVERY; if they had, they would never cease their efforts until so horrible a system was overthrown."
In the wake of modern genocide, we tend to think of violence against minorities as a sign of intolerance, or, even worse, a prelude to extermination. Violence in the Middle Ages, however, functioned differently, according to David Nirenberg. In this provocative book, he focuses on specific attacks against minorities in fourteenth-century France and the Crown of Aragon (Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia). He argues that these attacks--ranging from massacres to verbal assaults against Jews, Muslims, lepers, and prostitutes--were often perpetrated not by irrational masses laboring under inherited ideologies and prejudices, but by groups that manipulated and reshaped the available discourses on minorities. Nirenberg shows that their use of violence expressed complex beliefs about topics as diverse as divine history, kinship, sex, money, and disease, and that their actions were frequently contested by competing groups within their own society. Nirenberg's readings of archival and literary sources demonstrates how violence set the terms and limits of coexistence for medieval minorities. The particular and contingent nature of this coexistence is underscored by the book's juxtapositions--some systematic (for example, that of the Crown of Aragon with France, Jew with Muslim, medieval with modern), and some suggestive (such as African ritual rebellion with Catalan riots). Throughout, the book questions the applicability of dichotomies like tolerance versus intolerance to the Middle Ages, and suggests the limitations of those analyses that look for the origins of modern European persecutory violence in the medieval past.
In this age of multicultural democracy, the idea of assimilation--that the social distance separating immigrants and their children from the mainstream of American society closes over time--seems outdated and, in some forms, even offensive. But as Richard Alba and Victor Nee show in the first systematic treatment of assimilation since the mid-1960s, it continues to shape the immigrant experience, even though the geography of immigration has shifted from Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Institutional changes, from civil rights legislation to immigration law, have provided a more favorable environment for nonwhite immigrants and their children than in the past.
Assimilation is still driven, in claim, by the decisions of immigrants and the second generation to improve their social and material circumstances in America. But they also show that immigrants, historically and today, have profoundly changed our mainstream society and culture in the process of becoming Americans.
Surveying a variety of domains--language, socioeconomic attachments, residential patterns, and intermarriage--they demonstrate the continuing importance of assimilation in American life. And they predict that it will blur the boundaries among the major, racially defined populations, as nonwhites and Hispanics are increasingly incorporated into the mainstream.
'Documented with wit and keen hibernian insight ... They're all here - chowderheads and goo-goos, Honey Fitz and James Michael Himself - all brought to larger-than-leprechaun life by the gifted pen of Professor O'Connor.' - Martin F. Noaln, BOSTON GLOBE
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Times were hard for English workers in the 1930s when George Orwell dramatized their plight in this documentary expose of the underclasses. THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER is a trek back through time to an experience suffered by many of our parents and is an unrecognized masterpiece by the author of 1984 and ANIMAL FARM. Always courageous and original, Orwell gives us a feeling for what it must have been like to have had to cope with the grinding poverty of half a century ago.
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(9)Written & Narrated by Barack Obama
