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Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > General
A coming-of-age travel memoir that probes thorny spiritual
questions while taking the reader on a wild ride from the deep
American South to the Middle East, Europe, and the Far East. Once
the golden girl of her Arkansas town, Natalie finds herself
squeezed under small town shame and rejection after being kicked
out of church for getting a divorce. It's a hard fall off of a
sanctimonious high horse, and religious fundamentalism has left her
feeling broken and stuck. But she can't shake the 'wanderlust woes'
that have plagued her since childhood, so she runs away to the
Middle East. As a mostly-sheltered Southerner, she struggles to
adapt but is determined to be 'at home' in the world. Her journey
is more than a pilgrimage, it's a peregrination: a one-way ticket
to elsewhere in search of the place of her own resurrection. Within
these pages is a suspenseful adventure filled with love, loss,
laughter, tears, and a little bit of scandalous behavior, but at
the heart of it, Natalie walks squarely into the unknown to
confront the secret matters of the soul that we wrestle with at
night.
The story of a fifty-year relationship between a Vietnam veteran
and a remote Aboriginal tribe: a miniature epic of human
adaptation, suffering and resilience. The Passion of Private White
describes the meeting of two worlds: the world of the fiercely
driven biologist and anthropologist Neville White, and the world of
the hunter-gatherer clans of remote northern Australia he studied
and lived with. As White tried to understand the world as it was
understood on the other side of the vast cultural divide, he was
also trying to transcend the mental scars he suffered on the
battlefields of Vietnam. The clans had their own injuries to deal
with, as they tried to adapt to modernity, live down their losses
and yet hold onto their ancient lands, customs, laws and language.
Over five decades, White mapped in astonishing detail the culture
and history of the Yolgnu clans at Donydji in north-east Arnhem
Land. But eventually presence meant involvement, and White became
advocate more than anthropologist in the clan's struggle to survive
when everything - from the ambitions of mining companies and a
zombie bureaucracy, to feuds, sorcery and magic, despair and
dysfunction - conspired to destroy them. And the fifty-year
endeavour served another purpose for White and the members of his
old platoon he took there. Working to help the community at Donydji
became a kind of antidote for the psychic wounds of Vietnam. While
for the clans, from the old warriors to the children, their
fanatical benefactor offered a few rays of meaning and hope. There
was no cure in this meeting of two worlds, both suffering their own
form of PTSD, but they helped each other survive. This is a
miniature epic of human adaptation, suffering and resilience, an
astonishing window into both our recent and our deep history, the
coloniser and colonised - indeed into the human condition itself.
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Fledgling
(Paperback)
Hannah Bourne-Taylor
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R240
R217
Discovery Miles 2 170
Save R23 (10%)
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Read the powerful account of one woman's struggle to reshape her
identity when all normality has fallen away. When lifelong
bird-lover Hannah Bourne-Taylor moved with her husband to Ghana
seven years ago she couldn't have anticipated how her life would be
forever changed by her unexpected encounters with nature and the
subsequent bonds she formed. Plucked from the comfort and
predictability of her life before, Hannah struggled to establish
herself in her new environment, striving to belong in the rural
grasslands far away from home. In this challenging situation, she
was forced to turn inwards and interrogate her own sense of
identity, however in the animal life around her, and in two wild
birds in particular, Hannah found a source of solace and a way to
reconnect with the world in which she was living. Fledgling is a
portrayal of adaptability, resilience and self-discovery in the
face of isolation and change, fuelled by the quiet power of nature
and the unexpected bonds with animals she encounters. Hannah
encourages us to reconsider the conventional boundaries of the
relationships people have with animals through her inspiring and
very beautiful glimpse ofwhat is possible when we allow ourselves
to connect to the natural world. Full of determination and
compassion, Fledgling is apowerful meditation on our instinctive
connection to nature. It shows that even the tiniest of birds can
teach us what is important in life and how to embrace every day.
THE LONG-AWAITED, MOVING MEMOIR OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR HANNAH
PICK-GOSLAR, WHO SHARES AN INTIMATE LOOK INTO HER LIFE AND
FRIENDSHIP WITH ANNE FRANK. 'As a girl I witnessed the world I
loved crumble and vanish, destroyed by senseless hatred, and with
it, my best friend Anne' Two best friends' lives were about to
change for ever, neither would ever be forgotten... When Hannah's
family flee from the Nazi to Amsterdam, she soon strikes up a
friendship with a girl just like her freshly arrived from Germany.
Precocious and outspoken, the girl's name is Anne Frank and for
seven blissful years the inseparable pair navigate school, boys and
coming of age. Then one day in 1942, as the Nazi occupation
intensifies, they are separated without warning. Hannah calls on
Anne and can't find a trace of her, breakfast dishes still in the
sink, beds unmade. Anne and her family have seemingly vanished.
They are told the Franks have fled to Switzerland. As Hannah is
tormented by the fate of her friend, hoping she is alive and well
elsewhere, her own family's fate unfolds. After attempts to flee
themselves, the SS finally come for them and they are taken to the
transit camp Westerbork. Eventually Hannah, her father and younger
sister Gabi are transported to Bergen-Belsen. Amid horrific
conditions with death all around, it is during Hannah's darkest
point at the concentration camp that she hears astonishing of news
of Anne. Desperate to save her friend who is weak and struggling to
survive, Hannah risks her life to help her. In an incredible memoir
of hope, strength and defiance, Hannah shares the intimate, loving
portrait of her friendship with the young diarist who would go on
to capture the hearts of millions around the world.
'John Douglas is the FBI's pioneer and master of investigative
profiling' Patricia Cornwell GET INSIDE THE MINDS OF PSYCHOPATHS
WITH THE GODFATHER OF CRIMINAL PROFILING In The Killer Across the
Table, legendary FBI criminal profiler and number one bestselling
author John Douglas delves deep into the lives and crimes of four
complex predatory killers, offering never-before-revealed details
about his profiling process and divulging the strategies used to
crack some of his most challenging cases. In this riveting work of
true crime, Douglas spotlights four very different criminals he's
confronted over the course of his career, and explains how they
helped him to put together the puzzle of how psychopaths and
predators think. Taking us inside the interrogation room and
demonstrating the unique techniques he uses to understand the
workings of the most terrifying and incomprehensible minds, The
Killer Across the Table is an unputdownable journey into the
darkest reaches of criminal profiling and behavioural science from
a man who knows serial killers better than anyone else. As Douglas
says: 'If you want to understand the artist, look at his art.' If
you want to understand what makes a murderer, start here.
In the 1970s Hennie Keyter was an angry young man, fresh out of
military service for the apartheid government of South Africa,
unsure of his path in life and deeply uneasy about his faith. When
God revealed to him that He had a purpose for him and a calling on
his life, at first Hennie was not ready to hear it. When he finally
accepted and understood his mission, a flame was lit in his heart
that nothing could have extinguished. But nothing could have
prepared him either for the extraordinary spiritual journey he was
about to embark on which would take him wherever God wanted him to
go: from Malawi, ‘the warm heart of Africa’, to Mozambique at the
height of its civil war, where he was sentenced to death and faced
a firing squad, from a less than welcoming beginning in Zanzibar,
to the United Nations base at Lokichokio on the border between
Kenya and Sudan (where on one trip he discovered that he had a
price of US 10 000 on his head). Desiring only to do the will of
God and to spread the Gospel, Hennie took up the challenge of
taking the Gospel to many of the countries on the African continent
and in the Middle East, building up leaders and planting churches
in poverty stricken areas, lands devastated by years of conflict
and deprivation, and war zones where soldiers seemed to have lost
everything, even hope. Through the bushfire of mass evangelism and
his dedicated teams of volunteers, supported by the love and faith
of his wife Rita and his children Anton and Mari, in His Call, My
All: An African Drumbeat – A Missionary’s Heartbeat Hennie Keyter
looks back at his life in the service of the Lord and forward to
continuing His work for as long as God requires it of him.
Hospice nurse and TikTok star Hadley Vlahos shares moving stories, life lessons and wisdom from her patients in this heart-warming memoir about how end-of-life care can teach us just as much about how to live as it does about how we die.
We don't often talk about dying, even in the medical field, but death is a universal part of life. An ardent advocate for compassionate end-of-life care, Hadley Vlahos, shows us that the end of our lives can be rich, beautiful and transformative by sharing moving stories about how her patients' final days have changed her life.
Full of insights from real people, from the woman who never once questioned her faith until she was close to death, to the older man seeing visions of his late daughter, to the young patient who laments that she spent too much of her short life worrying about what others thought of her - each story raises vital questions about living, dying and the afterlife, inspiring us to live our lives to the fullest.
Having joined the BBC as a trainee in 1984, Jeremy Bowen first
became a foreign correspondent four years later. He had witnessed
violence already, both at home and abroad, but it wasn't until he
covered his first war -- in El Salvador -- that he felt he had
arrived. Armed with the fearlessness of youth he lived for the job,
was in love with it, aware of the dangers but assuming the bullets
and bombs were meant for others. In 2000, however, after eleven
years in some of the world's most dangerous places, the bullets
came too close for comfort, and a close friend was killed in
Lebanon. This, and then the birth of his first child, began a
process of reassessment that culminated in the end of the affair.
Now, in his extraordinarily gripping and thought-provoking new
book, he charts his progress from keen young novice whose first
reaction to the sound of gunfire was to run towards it to the more
circumspect veteran he is today. It will also discuss the changes
that have taken place in the ways in which wars are reported over
the course of his career, from the Gulf War to Bosnia, Afghanistan
to Rwanda.
Winner of the 2021 Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award Winner of
the 2021 Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the 2020
National Book Critics John Leonard Prize for Best First Book
Finalist for the 2021 New England Society Book Award Finalist for
the 2021 New England Independent Booksellers Association Award A
New York Times Editors' Choice and Chicago Tribune top book for
2020 "Mill Town is the book of a lifetime; a deep-drilling,
quick-moving, heartbreaking story. Scathing and tender, it lifts
often into poetry, but comes down hard when it must. Through it all
runs the river: sluggish, ancient, dangerous, freighted with
America's sins." --Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland Kerri
Arsenault grew up in the small, rural town of Mexico, Maine, where
for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that
provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three
generations of her family. Kerri had a happy childhood, but years
after she moved away, she realized the price she paid for that
childhood. The price everyone paid. The mill, while providing the
social and economic cohesion for the community, also contributed to
its demise. Mill Town is a book of narrative nonfiction,
investigative memoir, and cultural criticism that illuminates the
rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and
leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease with
the central question; Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for
our own survival?
Louis, a self trained photorapher , grew up on a smallholding
north east of Pretoria in South Africa. Louis qualified in the
field of commerce and followed a corporate career in a large
financial services organisation . At the age of 40, Louis started
to take photography, his hobby for many years, more seriously.
He enrolled for varies courses and did a lot of self studying on
the subject. Louis discovered the value of photography as a
medium to communicate without words and how to paint
stories with light. He became passionate about photographing
remote landscapes, places and ordinary people. Over the last
20 years, Louis has participated in several solo and group
exhibitions. He exhibits permanently in Price Albert, his
hometown, and shares his passion for photography with others
during workshops .
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