A Small Crowd of Strangers

A Small Crowd of Strangers PDF

Author: Joanna Rose

Publisher: Forest Avenue Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 194243684X

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Marrying the wrong man is easier than leaving him. How does a librarian from New Jersey end up in a convenience store on Vancouver Island in the middle of the night, playing Bible Scrabble with a Korean physicist and a drunk priest? She gets married to the wrong man for starters—she didn't know he was 'that kind of Catholic'—and ends up in St. Cloud, Minnesota. She gets a job in a New Age bookstore, wanders toward Buddhism without realizing it, and acquires a dog. Things get complicated after that. Pattianne Anthony is less a thinker than a dreamer, and she finds out the hard way that she doesn't want a husband, much less a baby, and that getting out of a marriage is a lot harder than getting into it, especially when the landscape of the west becomes the voice of reason. A Small Crowd of Strangers, Joanna Rose’s second novel, is part love story, part slightly sideways spiritual journey.

The Care of Strangers

The Care of Strangers PDF

Author: Ellen Michaelson

Publisher: Melville House

Published: 2020-11-10

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1612198694

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Winner of the 2019 Miami Book Fair/de Groot Prize, The Care of Strangers is a moving story about friendship set in a gritty Brooklyn hospital, where a young woman learns to take charge of her life by taking care of others. Working as an orderly in a gritty Brooklyn public hospital, Sima is often reminded by her superiors that she's the least important person there. An immigrant who, with her mother, escaped vicious anti-Semitism in Poland, she spends her shifts transporting patients, observing the doctors and residents ... and quietly nurturing her aspirations to become a doctor herself by going to night school. Now just one credit short of graduating, she finds herself faltering in the face of pressure from her mother not to overreach, and to settle for the life she has now. Everything changes when Sima encounters Mindy Kahn, an intern doctor struggling through her residency. Sensing a fellow outsider in need of support, Sima bonds with Mindy over their patients, and learns the power of truly letting yourself care for another person, helping to give her the courage to face her past, and take control of her future. A moving story about vulnerability and friendship, The Care of Strangers is the story of one woman's discovery that sometimes interactions with strangers are the best way to find yourself.

How to Behave in a Crowd

How to Behave in a Crowd PDF

Author: Camille Bordas

Publisher: Crown

Published: 2018-08-21

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0451497554

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A witty, heartfelt novel that brilliantly evokes the confusions of adolescence and marks the arrival of an extraordinary young talent. Isidore Mazal is eleven years old, the youngest of six siblings living in a small French town. He doesn't quite fit in. Berenice, Aurore, and Leonard are on track to have doctorates by age twenty-four. Jeremie performs with a symphony, and Simone, older than Isidore by eighteen months, expects a great career as a novelist—she's already put Isidore to work on her biography. The only time they leave their rooms is to gather on the old, stained couch and dissect prime-time television dramas in light of Aristotle's Poetics. Isidore has never skipped a grade or written a dissertation. But he notices things the others don't, and asks questions they fear to ask. So when tragedy strikes the Mazal family, Isidore is the only one to recognize how everyone is struggling with their grief, and perhaps the only one who can help them—if he doesn't run away from home first. Isidore’s unstinting empathy, combined with his simmering anger, makes for a complex character study, in which the elegiac and comedic build toward a heartbreaking conclusion. With How to Behave in a Crowd, Camille Bordas immerses readers in the interior life of a boy puzzled by adulthood and beginning to realize that the adults around him are just as lost.

Talking to Strangers

Talking to Strangers PDF

Author: Malcolm Gladwell

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0316535621

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Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers

Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers PDF

Author: John Gierach

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1501168606

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Witty, shrewd, and always a joy to read, John Gierach, “America’s best fishing writer” (Houston Chronicle) and favorite streamside philosopher, has earned the following of “legions of readers who may not even fish but are drawn to his musings on community, culture, the natural world, and the seasons of life” (Kirkus Reviews). “After five decades, twenty books, and countless columns, [John Gierach] is still a master” (Forbes). Now, in his latest original collection, Gierach shows us why fly-fishing is the perfect antidote to everything that is wrong with the world. “Gierach’s deceptively laconic prose masks an accomplished storyteller…His alert and slightly off-kilter observations place him in the general neighborhood of Mark Twain and James Thurber” (Publishers Weekly). In Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers, Gierach looks back to the long-ago day when he bought his first resident fishing license in Colorado, where the fishing season never ends, and just knew he was in the right place. And he succinctly sums up part of the appeal of his sport when he writes that it is “an acquired taste that reintroduces the chaos of uncertainty back into our well-regulated lives.” Lifelong fisherman though he is, Gierach can write with self-deprecating humor about his own fishing misadventures, confessing that despite all his experience, he is still capable of blowing a strike by a fish “in the usual amateur way.” “Arguably the best fishing writer working” (The Wall Street Journal), Gierach offers witty, trenchant observations not just about fly-fishing itself but also about how one’s love of fly-fishing shapes the world that we choose to make for ourselves.

Little Miss Strange

Little Miss Strange PDF

Author: Joanna Rose

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Published: 2012-10-05

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 1616202297

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1997 Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Association Prize for First Novel. Sarajean is the child of love children. She lives with Jimmy Henry, a Vietnam vet she accepts as her father. Her mother, whoever she was, disappeared long ago. Sarajean scams her way through childhood, surviving on intuition, seeing her world clearly without judging it. From carelessly discarded clues, she knits together the identity she's always longed for. "An extraordinarily powerful first novel. Sarajean is impossible to forget."--Kirkus Reviews, pointered; "A wondrous, uncanny book . . . Rose has written a story so assured and accomplished that it seems the work of a seasoned novelist at the peak of her talent."--Portland Oregonian; "LITTLE MISS STRANGE is the closest thing to a perfect book that I have read in years."--Bellingham Herald.

The People of Sparks

The People of Sparks PDF

Author: Jeanne DuPrau

Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers

Published: 2004-06-22

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0375890505

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A modern-day classic. This highly acclaimed adventure series about two friends desperate to save their doomed city has captivated kids and teachers alike for almost fifteen years and has sold over 3.5 MILLION copies! Lina and Doon have led the citizens of Ember to an exciting new world. When they discover a village called Sparks, they are welcomed, fed, and given places to sleep. But the town’s resources are limited and it isn’t long before resentment begins to grow between the two groups. When mysterious acts of vandalism cause tempers to erupt, putting everyone’s lives in danger, it’s up to our two heroes to find the courage to stop the conflict and bring peace. Praise for the City of Ember books: Nominated to 28 State Award Lists! An American Library Association Notable Children’s Book A New York Public Library 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing Selection A Kirkus Reviews Editors’ Choice A Child Magazine Best Children’s Book A Mark Twain Award Winner A William Allen White Children’s Book Award Winner “A realistic post-apocalyptic world. DuPrau’s book leaves Doon and Lina on the verge of undiscovered country and readers wanting more.” —USA Today “An electric debut.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred “While Ember is colorless and dark, the book itself is rich with description.” —VOYA, Starred

The Book of Strangers

The Book of Strangers PDF

Author: Ian Neil Dallas

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1988-01-01

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 9780887069901

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Sometime in the future the head librarian at a great center of learning suddenly disappears, leaving behind a journal that describes his weariness with a world "where people teach but know nothing, where the sentences flow on endlessly but lead nowhere." His successor in the post becomes more and more intrigued by the vanished man's fate, until a series of mysterious clues lead him on a journey both inward and outward, to a world that begins where language ends. Within a matter of weeks he finds himself in the company of powerful dervishes, God-intoxicated nomads whose eyes blaze with love, and ragged beggars with the smile of the Pure One. These men, the followers of an enlightened Shaykh, speak little, but simply to be in their company fills him with ecstasy and knowledge.

Intimate Strangers

Intimate Strangers PDF

Author: Vanessa Smith

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-10-28

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 1139788620

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When Louis Antoine de Bougainville reached Tahiti in 1768, he was struck by the way in which 'All these people came crying out tayo, which means friend, and gave a thousand signs of friendship; they all asked nails and ear-rings of us.' Reading the archive of early contact in Oceania against European traditions of thinking about intimacy and exchange, Vanessa Smith illuminates the traditions and desires that led Bougainville and other European voyagers to believe that the first word they heard in the Pacific was the word for friend. Her book encompasses forty years of encounters from the arrival of the Dolphin in Tahiti in June 1767, through Cook's and Bligh's voyages, to early missionary and beachcomber settlement in the Marquesas. It unpacks both the political and emotional significances of ideas of friendship for late eighteenth-century European, and particularly British, explorations of Oceania.

A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People

A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People PDF

Author: David Boarder Giles

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2021-07-21

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1478021713

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In A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People, David Boarder Giles explores the ways in which capitalism simultaneously manufactures waste and scarcity. Illustrating how communities of marginalized people and discarded things gather and cultivate political possibilities, Giles documents the work of Food Not Bombs (FNB), a global movement of grassroots soup kitchens that recover wasted grocery surpluses and redistribute them to those in need. He explores FNB's urban contexts: the global cities in which late-capitalist economies and unsustainable consumption precipitate excess, inequality, food waste, and hunger. Beginning in urban dumpsters, Giles traces the logic by which perfectly edible commodities are nonetheless thrown out—an act that manufactures food scarcity—to the social order of “world-class” cities, the pathways of discarded food as it circulates through the FNB kitchen, and the anticapitalist political movements the kitchen represents. Describing the mutual entanglement of global capitalism and anticapitalist transgression, Giles captures those emergent forms of generosity, solidarity, and resistance that spring from the global city's marginalized residents.