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History and Current Events October 2019
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| A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century by Jason DeParleWhat it's about: the impact of global migration on three generations of a single Filipino family.
Why you might like it: Intimate and immersive, this resonant portrait puts a human face on a polarizing political issue. Author alert: New York Times journalist Jason DeParle is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. |
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The ungrateful refugee : what immigrants never tell you
by Dina Nayeri
What is it like to be a refugee? It is a question many of us do not give much thought to, and yet there are more than 25 million refugees in the world.
Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel–turned–refugee camp. Eventually she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement. In these pages, a couple fall in love over the phone, and women gather to prepare the noodles that remind them of home. A closeted queer man tries to make his case truthfully as he seeks asylum, and a translator attempts to help new arrivals present their stories to officials. With surprising and provocative questions, The Ungrateful Refugee challenges us to rethink how we talk about the refugee crisis.
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Notre-dame : A Short History of the Meaning of Cathedrals
by Ken Follett
In this short, spellbinding book, international bestselling author Ken Follett describes the emotions that gripped him when he learned about the fire that threatened to destroy one of the greatest cathedrals in the world--the Notre-Dame de Paris. Follett then tells the story of the cathedral, from its construction to the role it has played across time and history, and he reveals the influence that the Notre-Dame had upon cathedrals around the world and on the writing of one of Follett's most famous and beloved novels, The Pillars of the Earth.
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Talking to strangers : what we should know about the people we don't know
by Malcolm Gladwell
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 each other 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.
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| Empire of Sin: A Story of Sex, Jazz, Murder, and the Battle for Modern New Orleans by Gary KristWelcome to... notorious Storyville, New Orleans, an early-20th-century red-light district and site of consternation for the city's reform-minded upper echelons.
Why you might like it: Populated by a large cast of characters (including a young Louis Armstrong), this lively history reveals a bygone era of a city bustling with wicked entrepreneurial spirit.
Don't miss: True-crime fans will enjoy reading about the unsolved case of the "Axman," a serial killer with possible ties to the Black Hand mafia. |
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