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Books > Health, Home & Family > Family & health > Family & other relationships > Intergenerational relationships
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Always
(Paperback)
Ellen Kahan Zager
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R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother-daughter
relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually,
debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives
unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her
daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their
weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with
Alzheimer's disease twenty years later. In 1986, Kathleen accepted
a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating
civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter's most faithful
correspondent. The two women exchanged more than two hundred
letters that reflected their lively interest in literature,
theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity,
belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges.
Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer's
disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered
the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched
precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image - of
simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience - sustained
her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a
larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive.
Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations,
journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex
and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration;
friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural
communication, the ethics of international development, and
letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects
on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving
others while they're ours to hold.
Austerity Baby might best be described as an 'oblique memoir'.
Janet Wolff's fascinating volume is a family history - but one that
is digressive and consistently surprising. The central underlying
and repeated themes of the book are exile and displacement; lives
(and deaths) during the Third Reich; mother-daughter and sibling
relationships; the generational transmission of trauma and
experience; transatlantic reflections; and the struggle for
creative expression. Stories mobilised, and people encountered, in
the course of the narrative include: the internment of aliens in
Britain during the Second World War; cultural life in Rochester,
New York, in the 1920s; the social and personal meanings of
colour(s); the industrialist and philanthropist, Henry Simon of
Manchester, including his relationship with the Norwegian explorer,
Fridtjof Nansen; the liberal British campaigner and MP of the
1940s, Eleanor Rathbone; reflections on the lives and images of
spinsters. The text is supplemented and interrupted throughout by
images (photographs, paintings, facsimile documents), some of which
serve to illustrate the story, others engaging indirectly with the
written word. -- .
With half of the UK's grandparents aged under 65, being a granny is
no longer all blue rinses, hip replacements and bingo. Happy,
healthy and energetic, the modern gran is worlds away from the
little old biddy stereotype. If you're a new gran, or about to
become one, The New Granny's Survival Guide is your essential
handbook for grandparenting. Packed full of sanity-saving advice
from Gransnet - the number one online platform for grannies - this
book covers everything you need to know to be a brilliant gran.
With practical guidance, hilarious insights and fresh ideas, you'll
discover: * Top tips for entertaining your grandchildren * Advice
on building great relationships with in-laws * Guidance on how to
cope with broken families, competitive grannies and difficult
situations * Suggestions for how to juggle your own social life
with being a hands-on gran With a foreword by Janet Ellis and full
of wit and wisdom, The New Granny's Survival Guide is the perfect
companion for today's dynamic grannies.
*** 'An honest and thoughtful memoir. Moving but, ultimately, full
of hope. Beautiful.' KATE MOSSE 'Superb. Love & Care is a book
about the unbreakable bonds of family, the cruelty of passing time
and a love that never dies.' TONY PARSONS 'A beautiful, intimate
story of love and understanding - candid and funny. This is a
lyrical memoir of hope and forgiveness.' RAYNOR WINN, author of The
Salt Path * Shaun is finally free of responsibilities to anyone but
himself; single, with two grown up daughters, he is just embarking
on a new life in a new country when he gets a call to say his
father is dying. His mother has Parkinson's Dementia and is in a
care home. Shaun faces a stark choice: should he give up his
new-found freedom, or turn his back on the woman he'd fought so
hard to protect, not least from his own father? Shaun's mother had
loved and cared for her son all her life. Could he now do the same
for her? 'A heart-warming, heart-wrenching, and beautifully humane
account of loving and caring.' NICCI GERRARD, novelist and author
of What Dementia Teaches Us About Love 'An insightful tale of care
. . . this book needed to be written.' JO GOOD, BBC Radio London 'A
vital subject, a really strong voice and, hurrah, humour makes this
absorbing reading.' CAROLINE RAPHAEL, Radio 4's Book at Bedtime 'An
eye-opening - and at times jaw dropping - account that will make
you weep with its tenderness and compassion . . . A highly readable
tale of redemption and a celebration of love's many hues.' PAUL
BLEZARD, Love Reading 'Moving' DAILY MAIL
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