Faced with constant attack from all the peoples who followed them, the last of the Bushmen have retreated to the scorching depths of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa. After a gruelling trek, van der Post finds the Bushmen, thriving in one of the world’s most inhospitable landscapes, with their physical peculiarities, their cave art and their joyful music-making intact.

    Now, in this new and highly revealing biography, Tom Lodge draws on a wide range of original sources to uncover a host of fresh insights about the shaping of Mandela's personality and public persona, from his childhood days and early activism, through his twenty-seven years of imprisonment, to his presidency of the new South Africa. The book follows Mandela from his education at two elite Methodist boarding schools to his role as a moderating but powerful force in the African National Congress. Throughout, Lodge emphasizes the crucial interplay between Mandela's public career and his private world, revealing how Mandela drew moral and political strength from encounters in which everyday courtesy and even generosity softened conflict. Indeed, the lessons Mandela learned as a child about the importance of defeating ones opponents without dishonoring them were deeply engrained. They shaped a politics of grace and honor that was probably the only approach that could have enabled South Africa's relatively peaceful transition to democracy. Here then is a penetrating look at one of the most celebrated political figures of our time, illuminating a pivotal moment in recent world history.Authoritative and fair-minded...deserves to be read widely.--Adam Roberts, The EconomistA fascinating, indeed riveting, and plausible as well as persuasive examination of why Nelson Mandela should have acquired a world following and can remain as he does an iconic figure even in the 21st century. It is certain to provoke much heated debate.--Desmond Tutu

    Rankine's questions disrupt the false comfort of our culture's liminal and private spaces--the airport, the theater, the dinner party, the voting booth--where neutrality and politeness live on the surface of differing commitments, beliefs, and prejudices as our public and private lives intersect.This brilliant arrangement of essays, poems, and images includes the voices and rebuttals of others: white men in first class responding to, and with, their white male privilege; a friend's explanation of her infuriating behavior at a play; and women confronting the political currency of dying their hair blond, all running alongside fact-checked notes and commentary that complements Rankine's own text, complicating notions of authority and who gets the last word.Sometimes wry, often vulnerable, and always prescient, Just Us is Rankine's most intimate work, less interested in being right than in being true, being together.

    "Called" tells the gripping account of 9/11 from her vantage point. She recalls the moment she took the call from Todd Beamer on United Airlines Flight 93, and when she heard the immortal words, "Let's Roll. She remembers the way that her life was transformed vividly when she responded to the call. Jefferson sends a stirring challenge to all of us--whether it comes during quiet obscurity or international adversity, we must be prepared to answer God's call."

    If the world lost the sub-species, it would be the largest land mammal since the woolly mammoth to go extinct. In "The Last Rhinos," Anthony recounts his attempts to save these animals.The demand for rhino horns in the Far East has turned poaching into a dangerous black market that threatens the lives of not just these rare beasts, but also the rangers who protect them.The northern white rhino's last refuge was in an area controlled by the infamous Lord's Resistance Army, one of the most vicious rebel groups in the world. In the face of unmoving government bureaucracy, Anthony made a perilous journey deep into the jungle to try to find and convince them to help save the rhino.

    She was a bride of six weeks, married to a blue-eyed boy from the Netherlands. Amidst international crises and famine, she gave birth to two children, bridged a cultural divide with her Dutch husband, and was devastated by a car accident that took the life of a twelve-year-old Zambian child. She stayed six years. After returning home, Kandel struggled to find her voice and herself. This is the story of how she found her way home. For more information, or to buy a signed copy directly from the author visit her website: jillkandel (dot) com.

    Bruce Bryden's tales of 27 years in the service of our most famous park make a gripping and entertaining read, abounding with encounters with elephant, lion, buffalo, leopard and rhino, whether darting for research, managing culling operations by helicopter or stalking on foot. In the best tradition of bushveld stories, there is a great deal of shooting, and a fair amount of running away; there are meetings with extraordinary characters among the rangers; memorable gatherings; hilarious mishaps and narrow escapes; and throughout, a great love and respect for both the wilderness and the creatures that inhabit it.

    A memoir of Breytenbach’s seven years in South Africa’s prisons - two of them in solitary confinement - this book captures the full horror of life in one of the worst penal systems in the world.

    . . Charles Ramsey gives a roller coaster account of his life before, during, and after the dramatic rescue of three kidnapped women in Cleveland . . .Global news media declared him a hero. Well-wishers mobbed him. The Internet made him a viral sensation. It couldn't have happened to a less likely guy. Now, read how it all went down.Ramsey was in the wrong place at the right time when he answered a young woman's cry for help, kicked in his neighbor's locked front door, and got her the hell out of there--leading to the astonishing rescue of three young women--Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight--who had been missing for a decade.Reporters and TV cameras flocked to a neighborhood--and a man--they otherwise would have ignored. Ramsey was ready, with plenty to say."Bro, I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man's arms . . . Dead giveaway." It was a quote that launched a thousand Internet memes . . .In this book Ramsey walks us step-by-step through the day of the rescue and talks about living right next door to Ariel Castro--outwardly charming, secretly a monster.He tells about life before the rescue--growing up a privileged black kid in a white suburb, seeking out trouble over and over, getting kicked out of school, selling drugs, going to prison, and ultimately finding work as a dishwasher and landing by chance on gritty Seymour Avenue.And he shares what it's like to become an instant celebrity, when suddenly everybody wants a piece of you. (For example, he learned the hard way that when a big TV network flies you to New York City for an interview, that doesn't mean they also bought you a ticket back home to Cleveland!)This is a wild, eye-opening tale told with a sharp sense of humor.

    When Haregwoin Teferra’s husband and daughter died within a few years of each other, her life is shattered and she becomes a recluse. But then a priest delivers an orphan to her door. The another, and another... and together they thrive.The distinguished author of Praying for Sheetrock and two-time National Book award finalist puts a human face on the AIDS crisis in Africa. When Haregwoin Teferra’s husband and 23-year-old daughter died within a few years of each other, her middle-class life in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was shattered. Bereft and with little to live for, Haregwoin became a recluse. Her self-imposed exile to a hut near her daughter’s grave was interrupted when a priest delivered first one, then another, orphaned teenager into her care. To everyone’s surprise, the children thrived, and so did Haregwoin. As word spread, children of all ages began to appear at her modest home: an infant brought by a dying mother, an orphaned brother and sister whose grandfather was too poor to feed them, a baby left on her doorstep. Haregwoin’s small compound became known as the rare place where ailing parents and impoverished families could safely leave their children. Soon Haregwoin was caring for sixty children, running an unofficial orphanage and day school, and learning first-hand about her country’s and her continent’s greatest challenge: the AIDS pandemic that is leaving millions of children without parents to care for them. With the flair and grace of a novelist and the reportorial instincts of a seasoned journalist, Melissa Fay Greene gets to the heart of the AIDS crisis, in a story that is nevertheless one of hope. There Is No Me Without You is the story of Haregwoin and her children: a story of struggle and despair, but also of the triumph of saved lives, and the renewed happiness of children welcomed by adoptive parents in Ethiopia, America, and around the world. Haregewoin’s remarkable story convinces us that the crisis in Africa touches every one of us in some fundamental way. At heart, this book is about children and the parents they need to care for them.

    

    During the last four years of Wiesel’s life, he met frequently with Reich in New York, Chicago and Florida—and spoke with him often on the phone—to discuss the subject that linked them: Reich’s father, Robert Reich, and Wiesel were both liberated from the Buchenwald death camp on April 11, 1945. What had started as an interview assignment from the Chicago Tribune quickly evolved into a friendship and a partnership. Reich and Wiesel believed their colloquy represented a unique exchange between two generations deeply affected by a cataclysmic event. Wiesel said to Reich, “I’ve never done anything like this before,” and after reading the final book, asked him not to change a word. Here Wiesel—at the end of his life—looks back on his ideas and writings on the Holocaust, synthesizing them in his conversations with Reich. The insights on life, ethics, and memory that Wiesel offers and Reich illuminates will not only help the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors understand their painful inheritance, but will benefit everyone, young or old.

    He did not return to Morocco for another 29 years, traveling instead through more than 40 countries on the modern map, covering 75,000 miles and getting as far north as the Volga, as far east as China, and as far south as Tanzania. He wrote of his travels, and comes across as a superb ethnographer, biographer, anecdotal historian, and occasional botanist and gastronome. With this edition by Mackintosh-Smith, Battuta's Travels takes its place alongside other indestructible masterpieces of the travel-writing genre.

    A simple, apolitical man, he believes in the essential fairness of the South African government and its policies—until the sudden arrest and subsequent "suicide" of a black janitor from Du Toit's school. Haunted by new questions and desperate to believe that the man's death was a tragic accident, Du Toit undertakes an investigation into the terrible affair—a quest for the truth that will have devastating consequences for the teacher and his family, as it draws him into a lethal morass of lies, corruption, and murder.

    676). He converted an abandoned storefront on Main Street into a makeshift studio and posted fliers inviting people to stop by. At first they trickled in slowly, but in the end, nearly all of Oxford stood before Feldstein's lens. Twenty years later, Feldstein decided to do it again. Only this time he invited writer Stephen G. Bloom to join him, and together they went in search of the same Oxford residents Feldstein had originally shot two decades earlier. Some had moved. Most had stayed. Others had passed away. All were marked by the passage of time.In a place like Oxford, not only does everyone know everyone else, but also everyone else's brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, lovers, secrets, failures, dreams, and favorite pot luck recipes. This intricate web of human connections between neighbors friends, and family, is the mainstay of small town American life, a disappearing culture that is unforgettably captured in Feldstein's candid black-and-white portraiture and Bloom's astonishing rural storytelling.Meet the town auctioneer who fell in love with his wife in high school while ice-skating together on local ponds; his wife who recalls the dress she wore as his prom date over fifty years ago; a retired buck skinner who started a gospel church and awaits the rapture in 2028; the donut baker at the Depot who went from having to be weighed on a livestock scale to losing over 150 pounds with the support of all of Oxford; a twenty-one-year-old man photographed in 1984 as an infant in his father's arms, who has now survived both of his parents due to tragedy and illness.Considered side-by-side, the portraits reveal the inevitable transformations of aging: wider waistlines, wrinkled skin, eyeglasses, and bowed backs. Babies and children have instantly sprouted into young nurses, truck drivers, teachers, and rodeo riders, become Buddhists, racists, democrats, and drug addicts. The courses of lives have been irrevocably altered by deaths, births, marriages, and divorces. Some have lost God—others have found Him. But there are also those for whom it appears time has almost stood still. Kevin Somerville looks eerily identical in his 1984 and 2004 portraits, right down to his worn overalls, shaggy mane, and pale sunglasses. Only the graying of his lumberjack beard gives away the years that have passed. Face after face, story after story, what quietly emerges is a living composite of a quintessential Midwestern community, told through the words and images of its residents—then and now. In a town where newcomers are recognized by the sound of an unfamiliar engine idle, The Oxford Project invites you to discover the unexpected details, the heartbreak, and the reality of lives lived on the fringe of our urban culture.