She hadn't been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she'd never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn't believe in hospitals. The Education of an Idealist: The Education of an Idealist combines powerful storytelling, vividly drawn characters and deep political insight. It traces Power's journey from childhood growing up in a pub in Ireland to war correspondent to presidential Cabinet official. In 2005, her critiques of US foreign policy caught the eye of newly elected Senator Barack Obama, who invited her to work with him on Capitol Hill and then on his presidential campaign.

    The book is set in the early to late 1800s, focusing on the artist and his equally strong-willed mother, Rachel Monsanto Pomié Petit Pizzarro.Rachel longs for Paris although her grandparents long ago fled France for St. Thomas, an island in what is now the US Virgin Islands, where Jews could be citizens. Her grandparents brought only an apple tree to remind them of the orchards they once owned. Her father, Moses Monsanto Pomié, tells Rachel stories of Paris often despite the fact he has never been there. Although no one is persecuting them at the moment, the rapidly growing Jewish community on St. Thomas tries to keep a low profile to ensure that things stay that way. Rachel, however, is determined not to be a mouse. She wants to soar like a hawk…   PLEASE NOTE: This is a summary and analysis of the book and NOT the original book.    Inside this Instaread Summary & Analysis of The Marriage of Opposites • Summary of book • Introduction to the Important People in the book • Analysis of the Themes and Author’s Style  About the Author With Instaread, you can get the summary and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, summarize and analyze it for your convenience.

    It wasn’t long before hardships left them unable to provide.Soon, four-year-old Phyllis is plucked off her front porch, ripped away from the only family she knows, and sent to live with her grandmother Lula on an Alabama farm with no electricity, plumbing, or running water.Heartbroken by her mother’s abandonment, Phyllis struggles to acclimate to her new surroundings. Thanks to the unconditional love of Grandma Lula and the healing powers of an old, tattered quilt, she is finally able to adjust to her new life.In Quilt of Souls, Lawson documents her childhood growing up with the incredible woman who raised her and the powerful family heirloom that served as the cloth that would forever stitch their lives together.With its tales of family, despair, freedom and hope, the true story behind this deeply personal memoir serves as the inspiration for http://www.quiltofsouls.com, where individuals share relics and stories from their own family histories.

    He pulled her from her mother's wrecked car when she was three. He's kept an eye out for her ever since. It's a tough place to live—northern Minnesota along the Red River. Cash navigated through foster homes, and at thirteen was working farms. She's tough as nails—Five feet two inches, blue jeans, blue jean jacket, smokes Marlboros, drinks Bud Longnecks. Makes her living driving truck. Playing pool on the side. Wheaton is big lawman type. Scandinavian stock, but darker skin than most. He wants her to take hold of her life. Get into Junior College. So there they are, staring at the dead Indian lying in the field. Soon Cash was dreaming the dead man's cheap house on the Red Lake Reservation, mother and kids waiting. She has that kind of power. That's the place to start looking. There's a long and dangerous way to go to find the men who killed him. Plus there's Jim, the married white guy. And Longbraids, the Indian guy headed for Minneapolis to join the American Indian Movement.Marcie R. Rendon is an enrolled member of the White Earth Anishinabe Nation. She is a mother, grandmother, writer, and performance artist. A recipient of the Loft's Inroads Writers of Color Award for Native Americans, she studied under Anishinabe author Jim Northrup. Her first children's book is Pow Wow Summer (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2014). Murder on the Red River is her debut novel.

    Her parents have died, her food is dwindling and the rent is due. When a stranger arrives bearing a note from an uncle, inviting Katka to join him and his wife in America, she leaves all that she has held dear to rebuild her life across the ocean. On the voyage to New York, she becomes friends with the stranger and begins to fall in love. But at Ellis Island, they are separated when he is detained by authorities as a suspected anarchist. Alone, Katka continues her journey to her uncle’s house on the rough and tumble Iron Range in northern Minnesota. Soon she is immersed in a lively community of iron miners and begins publishing an underground newspaper about their struggles and the heroism of the women on the Iron Range, as they are swept into a tumultuous strike that will change their lives forever. “Under Ground” is a work of fiction inspired by true events.

    Now that Sparrow, her ward, has reached nine years of age, she reckons he needs a male role model in his life. With typical efficiency she sets about finding a father-figure by drawing up a series of checklists for each candidate, and following a strict protocol for interviewing them.So far, all the contenders have failed miserably to get enough ticks in the right boxes. But Ferne is focused and nothing is going to stop her from fulfilling her responsibilities…...except maybe a saboteur out to wreck her business; drunken neighbours; her unfortunate past from which it is so difficult to escape; her estranged mother; long-lost sister; and her Jack Russell, Merrie, who is not above galloping over and nipping any prospective role models she thinks Will Not Do.Katie Fforde (best-selling rom com author and President of the Romantic Novelists' Association) said of 'All His Own Hair': 'Susan Alison handles difficult issues with quirky humour and uplifting results.'(To give you some idea of length - 'White Lies and Custard Creams' is 83,700 words long and 'All His Own Hair' is 87,300 words long.)Susan Alison is the Katie Fforde Bursary Award winner for 2011. She has won competition awards for short fiction and sold numerous stories to commercial publications. Her fiction concentrates on the relationships humans forge with each other (and quite often with their dogs). She is a freelance artist.Jill Mansell (best-selling rom com author) said of 'White Lies and Custard Creams': "Susan Alison has written a lovely, quirky romp packed with off-the-wall characters - original, intriguing and great fun!"

    Kerry Stokes is a remarkable Australian. Not because he is one of this country's wealthiest and most powerful people but because of what he overcame to get there and because he has endured when others didn't. He is the last mogul. His rise has intrigued the business world for decades but there is so much more to him than takeover targets and balance sheets. Behind the laconic front is a human story as tough and touching as a Dickens tale: Oliver Twist with great self-expectations. It is the story of a poor boy who stared down poverty, ignorance and the stigma of his birth to achieve great wealth and fulfilment. A compelling story that, until now, he has not told. Now he oversees a multi-billion dollar media, machinery and property empire. He is renowned for his art collection and for philanthropy, spending millions of dollars to buy Victoria Crosses from soldiers' families to donate to the Australian War Memorial. But he's a private man. A man apart. He made his name in the West but kept his distance from the buccaneering band of entrepreneurs who forged fabulous fortunes in Perth from the 1960s until the 1987 crash. Bond went to jail, Holmes a Court died; Connell did both. Lesser lights flickered and faded but Stokes grew stronger, becoming a player alongside Murdoch, Packer and Lowy. His story fascinates all the more because he has spent most of his life guarding it. But now he's telling it, to one of Australia's great storytellers. This book will tell his story, scars and all.

    Lined with church thrift stores, boarded windows, and prostitutes leaning against streetlights, the sidewalks were thick with bloody, discarded needles. Today, University Avenue is a bustling commercial center, a hub of Halal butchers, Mexican carnicerias, grocery stores selling delicacies to new arrivals from Ethiopia and Bosnia, Iraq and China. A dying strip of America has been revived by the stateless.As the country's doors are closing and nativism is on the rise, Kao Kalia Yang—herself a refugee from Laos—set out to tell the stories of the refugees to whom University Avenue is now home. Here are people who have summoned the energy and determination to make a new life even as they carry an extraordinary burden of hardship, loss, and emotional damage: Irina, an ex-Soviet, who still hoards magical American fruit—bananas!—under her bed; the Thai brothers of Vinai and their business selling purified water to gullible immigrants; the Kareni boys, who have brought Minnesota to basketball glory.In Yang's exquisite, poetic, and necessary telling, the voices of refugees from all over the world restore humanity to America's strangers and redeem its long history of welcome.

    Maud Hart Lovelace's careful research into the documents of the Minnesota Historical Society, combined with her knowledge of the actual setting, enabled her to write a story that conveys a sense of time and place both accurate and compelling for young adults as well as general readers.

    Essays that challenge, discomfort, disorient, galvanize, and inspire all of us to evolve now, for our shared future.

    The enchantment stayed with her and shimmers throughout this book as we join Leaf and her family in canoeing the waterways of North America, always on the lookout for the good life amid the splendors and surprises of the natural world.The journey begins with a trip to the border lakes of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, then wanders into the many beautiful little rivers of Minnesota and Wisconsin, the provincial parks of Canada, the Louisiana bayou, and the arid West. A biologist and birder, Leaf considers natural history and geology, noticing which plants are growing along the water and which birds are flitting among the branches. Traveling the routes of the Ojibwe, voyageurs, and map-making explorers, she reflects on the region’s history, peopling her pages with Lewis and Clark, Jean Lafitte, Henry Schoolcraft, and Canada’s Group of Seven artists. Part travelogue, part natural and cultural history, Portage is the memoir of one family’s thirty-five-year venture into the watery expanse of the world. Through sunny days and stormy hours and a few hair-raising moments, Sue and her husband, Tom, celebrate anniversaries on the water; haul their four kids along on family adventures; and occasionally make the paddle a social outing with friends. Along the way they contend with their own human nature: they run rapids when it would have been wiser to portage, take portages and learn truths about aging, avoid portages and ponder risk-taking. Through it all, out in the open, in the wild, in the blue, exploring the river means encountering life—good decisions and missed chances, risks and surprises, and the inevitable changes that occur as a family canoes through time and learns what it means to be human in this natural world.

    With nowhere left to turn, they are now homeless. In order to survive they must dig through dumpsters, beg, and steal. While living on the streets, Nichole struggles to understand why people treat them differently.

    Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides chapter-by-chapter analysis; explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols; and a review quiz and essay topics. Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.

    The Furnace Girl is Kraig Moreland's theory of what really happened to Elfrieda Knaak, as told to and beautifully written by Toby Jones, It is a stranger-than-fiction story, told through the eyes of Griff Morgan, a young orphan boy, whose harrowing journey makes him an accidental witness to what still remains one of the most puzzling, unsolved crimes of the early 1900s.   In this fictionalized account of the mystery, Griff and his young sister land at the Lake Bluff Orphanage, where they must learn to navigate their new surroundings and face their fears. The 12-year-old Griff stumbles upon unlawful activity throughout the town, from Elfrieda’s illicit relationship with a married man, (and prime suspect) to characters so dark that he feels his safety slipping away with every day.  The Furnace Girl appeals to crime buffs and those looking for a powerful coming-of-age story that pulls on even the toughest of heartstrings.

    A comprehensive guide to Amor Towles' acclaimed new novel 'A Gentleman in Moscow', this discussion aid includes a wealth of information and resources: useful literary and historical context; an author biography; a plot synopsis; analyses of themes & imagery; character analysis; twenty thought-provoking discussion questions; recommended further reading and even a quick quiz. For those in book clubs, this useful companion guide takes the hard work out of preparing for meetings and guarantees productive discussion. For solo readers, it encourages a deeper examination of a multi-layered text.