Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land PDF

Author: Taylor Brorby

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2022-06-07

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 1324090871

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"Brorby has written not only a truly great memoir, but also a frighteningly relevant one that speaks to the many battles we still have left to fight." —Jung Yun, New York Times Book Review From a young, gay environmentalist, a searing coming-of-age memoir set against the arid landscape of rural North Dakota, where homosexuality “seems akin to a ticking bomb.” “I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power.” So begins Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, “a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking.” In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.

Not Like Other Boys

Not Like Other Boys PDF

Author: Marlene Fanta Shyer

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13:

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A memoir of a mother and son's parallel lives and their movement from concealment and shame to acceptance and love.

In Solidarity with the Earth

In Solidarity with the Earth PDF

Author: Hilda P. Koster

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-09-21

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0567706117

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Based on case studies, the book creates a multidisciplinary conversation on the gendered vulnerabilities resulting from extractive industries and toxic pollution, and also charts the resilience and courage of women as they resist polluting industries, fight for clean water and seek to protect the land. While ecumenical in scope, the book takes its departure from the concept of integral ecology introduced in Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si'. The first three sections of the book focus on the social and ecological challenges facing minoritized women and their communities that are related to mining, pollutants and biodiversity loss, and toxicity. The final section of the book focuses on the possibilities and obstacles to global solidarity. All chapters offer a cross disciplinary response to a particular local situation, tracing the ways ecological destruction, resulting from extraction and toxic contamination, affects the lives of women and their communities. The book pays careful attention to the political, economic, and legal structures facilitating these life-threatening challenges. Each section concludes with a response from a 'practitioner' in the field, representing an ecclesial organization or NGO focused on eco-justice advocacy in the global South, or minority communities in the global North.

Black Diamonds

Black Diamonds PDF

Author: Catherine Young

Publisher: Torrey House Press

Published: 2023-09-26

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1948814846

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A lyrical literary memoir of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Black Diamonds uncovers layers of history about the place that fueled the nation for over a century. As a girl in the 1960s, Catherine Young lived amid mountains of waste coal above ground and mine fires beneath her feet while longing for the green, lovely scene portrayed in The Lackawanna Valley, George Inness’s 1855 painting. She shows readers the valley through a child's eyes, passing through the immigrant kitchens, relief lines, and soot-stained alleys of a collapsing city—and family love amid lives cut short by coal.

Windfall

Windfall PDF

Author: Erika Bolstad

Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Published: 2023-01-17

Total Pages: 199

ISBN-13: 1728246946

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Beneath the windswept North Dakota plains, riches await... At first, Erika Bolstad knew only one thing about her great-grandmother, Anna: she was a homesteader on the North Dakota prairies in the early 1900s before her husband committed her to an asylum under mysterious circumstances. As Erika's mother was dying, she revealed more. Their family still owned the mineral rights to Anna's land—and oil companies were interested in the black gold beneath the prairies. Their family, Erika learned, could get rich thanks to the legacy of a woman nearly lost to history. Anna left no letters or journals, and very few photographs of her had survived. But Erika was drawn to the young woman who never walked free of the asylum that imprisoned her. As a journalist well versed in the effects of fossil fuels on climate change, Erika felt the dissonance of what she knew and the barely-acknowledged whisper that had followed her family across the Great Plains for generations: we could be rich. Desperate to learn more about her great-grandmother and the oil industry that changed the face of the American West forever, Erika set out for North Dakota to unearth what she could of the past. What she discovers is a land of boom-and-bust cycles and families trying their best to eke out a living in an unforgiving landscape, bringing to life the ever-present American question: What does it mean to be rich?

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop PDF

Author: Willa Cather

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2023-11-14

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0593511816

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For the 150th anniversary of Willa Cather's birth, and for the first time in Penguin Classics, her quietly beautiful novel of one man's life as he encounters the harsh landscape of the New Mexico desert and the people who inhabit it, with an introduction by National Book Award finalist Kali Fajardo-Anstine A Penguin Vitae Edition In 1848, following the US's recent acquisition of the American Southwest from Mexico, the young bishop Father Jean Marie Latour receives instruction from the Vatican to oversee a newly created diocese in New Mexico. With his good friend Father Joseph Vaillant in tow, the pair travel through the unforgiving and seemingly-endless desert on mules in attempt to reclaim the region from corrupt priests who have taken mistresses, exhibited greed, and inflicted abuse and genocide on the Mexican and Indigenous residents. But as Father Latour spends more time in New Mexico with the people who have inhabited and influenced it for centuries, he begins to realize that the task he was sent to do is more complicated than anticipated. Rather than leave, though, Father Latour decides to stay and uphold his commitment to the Church and his faith, and gains an eye-opening perspective along the way. Written in 1927 at a time when Cather herself was expanding her own ideas of race, religion, and gender, Death Comes for the Archbishop remains a moving account of one man's physical and spiritual journey of understanding in naturalistic prose as sparse as the desert plains.

Eleven-Inch

Eleven-Inch PDF

Author: Michal Witkowski

Publisher:

Published: 2021-10-15

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780857428912

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What does it take to succeed as a queer teenage Eastern European sex worker in the 1990s? Eleven inches and a ruthless attitude. Western Europe, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall: Two queer teens from Eastern Europe journey to Vienna, then Zurich, in search of a better life as sex workers. They couldn't be more different from each other. Milan, aka Dianka, a dreamy, passive naïf from Slovakia, drifts haplessly from one abusive sugar daddy to the next, whereas Michał, a sanguine pleasure-seeker from Poland, quickly masters the selfishness and ruthlessness that allow him to succeed in the wild, capitalist West--all the while taking advantage of the physical endowment for which he is dubbed "Eleven-Inch." By turns impoverished and flush with their earnings, the two traverse a precarious new world of hustler bars, public toilets, and nights spent sleeping in train stations and parks or in the opulent homes of their wealthy clients. With campy wit and sensuous humor, Michał Witkowski explores in Eleven-Inch the transition from Soviet-style communism to neoliberal capitalism in Europe through the experiences of the most marginalized: destitute queers.

Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel

Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel PDF

Author: Pam Houston

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2012-02-06

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 039308292X

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“An absorbing, generous, ravishing book by a high priestess of you-have-to-read-this prose." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild Pam Houston, an "early master of the art of rendering fiercely independent, brilliant women in love with the wrong men" (Sarah Norris, Barnes & Noble Review), delivers a novel that whisks us from one breathtaking precipice to the next. Along the way, we unravel the story of Pam (a character not unlike the author), a fearless traveler aiming to leave her metaphorical baggage behind as she seeks a comfort zone in the air. With the help of a loyal cast of friends, body workers, and a new partner who helps her to be at home, she finally finds something like ground under her feet.

Fracture

Fracture PDF

Author: Taylor Brorby

Publisher: Ice Cube Press

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781888160901

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Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America brings together a choir of established and emerging writers, giving voice to the complexities of hydraulic fracturing across the United States. During a time in which so much information is known about fracking, art is needed to move the public consciousness and national conversation towards better land practices. In the tradition of Wallace Stegners 'This is Dinosaur,' Terry Tempest Williams and Stephen Trimbles 'Testimony,' and Rick Bass and David James Duncans 'The Heart of the Monster,' Fracture braids together essays, poems, and fiction to help bring new understanding to the plight of fracking. Pam Houston provides an introduction.