Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood, and Why It's Good for Everyone


Richard A. Settersten Jr. - 2010
    

The Life of the Mind


Hannah Arendt - 1971
    The author’s final work, presented in a one-volume edition, is a rich, challenging analysis of man’s mental activity, considered in terms of thinking, willing, and judging.

To the Edge of the Sky: A Story of Love, Betrayal, Suffering, and the Strength of Human Courage


Anhua Gao - 2000
    Anhua Gao (her name means Tranquil Flower) was born in 1949, the year that Mao Tse Tung declared the foundation of the People's Republic of China. "To The Edge of the Sky" is, like Jung Chang's "Wild Swans," an inspiring and heartrending story of life under communist rule and, at the same time, a compelling and detailed history of China's political upheaval through the twentieth century. Gao's early childhood is idyllic-both of her parents are highly respected workers in the Communist army and the family lives in comfort, with many privileges. By the time Anhua is eleven, however, both are dead-and their reputation proves a fragile shield from the horrors of communist China. With an assured and deliberate voice, and from the perspective of her new and hard-won safety of a new life in Britain (her mother once pointed out the island country to her on a Chinese world map, located on the far left "on the edge of the sky"), Gao interweaves a picture of calamitous Maoist policies with her own story of shocking family betrayal, cruel imprisonment, and bureaucratic absurdity. "To the Edge of the Sky" is a powerful and evocative autobiography-the story of a woman who, against unbelievable odds, survived to find a happiness she had not dared hope for.

Plain Tales from the Hills


Rudyard Kipling - 1888
    Most of the stories it includes had already appeared in the Civil and Military Gazette they were written before he reached the age of 22; and they show a remarkably precocious literary talent. His vignettes of life in Brittish India a hundred years ago give vivid insight into Anglo-India at work and play, into a barrack-room life, and into the character of Indians themselves.

Cambodia's Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land


Joel Brinkley - 2011
    But under this façade lies a country still haunted by its years of terror. Joel Brinkley won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia on the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime that killed one quarter of the nation's population during its years in power. In 1992, the world came together to help pull the small nation out of the mire. Cambodia became a United Nations protectorate--the first and only time the UN tried something so ambitious. What did the new, democratically-elected government do with this unprecedented gift?In 2008 and 2009, Brinkley returned to Cambodia to find out. He discovered a population in the grip of a venal government. He learned that one-third to one-half of Cambodians who lived through the Khmer Rouge era have P.T.S.D.--and its afflictions are being passed to the next generation. His extensive close-up reporting in Cambodia's Curse illuminates the country, its people, and the deep historical roots of its modern-day behavior.

New Selected Poems


Stevie Smith - 1988
    Replacing the slim volume which introduced Stevie Smith to American readers, New Selected Poems is chronologically arranged and contains 165 poems along with many of the author's doodles.

Full of Grace: Miraculous Stories of Healing and Conversion Through Mary's Intercession


Christine Watkins - 2010
    Each story is accompanied by scripture, prayer, and discussion exercises designed to remind readers of Mary of Medjugorje's intercession on their behalf and God's personal love for them. Watkins gives nationwide talks and workshops and works as a spiritual director in the Bay Area, in addition to maintaining an active website and e-mail newsletter.

The Less You Know The Sounder You Sleep


Juliet Butler - 2000
    I squeeze my eyes shut and dig my fingers into Masha’s neck where I’m holding her. She digs hers into mine. The curtains slowly open. I can’t see anything because the spotlight is on us, bright as anything and blinding me, but I can hear the gasp go up. They always gasp.’Dasha cannot imagine life without her sister. Masha is feisty and fearless. Dasha is gentle, quiet and fears everything; from the Soviet scientists who study them, to the other ‘defective’ children who bully them and the ‘healthies’ from whom they must be locked away.For the twins have been born conjoined in a society where flaws must be hidden from sight and where their inseparability is the most terrible flaw of all.Through the seismic shifts of Stalin’s communism to the beginnings of Putin’s democracy, Dasha and her irrepressible sister strive to be more than just ‘the together twins’, finding hope – and love – in the unlikeliest of places.But will their quest for shared happiness always be threatened by the differences that divide them? And can a life lived in a sister’s shadow only ever be half a life?

Anita and Me


Meera Syal - 1997
    With great warmth and humor, Meera Syal brings to life a quirky, spirited 1960s mining town and creates in her protagonist what the Washington Post calls a “female Huck Finn.” The novel follows nine-year-old Meena through a year spiced with pilfered sweets and money, bad words, and compulsive, yet inventive, lies. Anita and Me offers a fresh, sassy look at a childhood caught between two cultures.

China's Hidden Children: Abandonment, Adoption, and the Human Costs of the One-Child Policy


Kay Ann Johnson - 2016
     It’s generally assumed that this diaspora is the result of China’s approach to population control, but there is also the underlying belief that the majority of adoptees are daughters because the One-Child Policy often collides with the traditional preference for a son. While there is some truth to this, it does not tell the full story—a story with deep personal resonance to Kay Ann Johnson, a China scholar and mother to an adopted Chinese daughter.             Johnson spent years talking with the Chinese parents driven to relinquish their daughters during the brutal birth-planning campaigns of the 1990s and early 2000s, and, with China’s Hidden Children, she paints a startlingly different picture. The decision to give up a daughter, she shows, is not a facile one, but one almost always fraught with grief and dictated by fear. Were it not for the constant threat of punishment for breaching the country’s stringent birth-planning policies, most Chinese parents would have raised their daughters despite the cultural preference for sons. With clear understanding and compassion for the families, Johnson describes their desperate efforts to conceal the birth of second or third daughters from the authorities. As the Chinese government cracked down on those caught concealing an out-of-plan child, strategies for surrendering children changed—from arranging adoptions or sending them to live with rural family to secret placement at carefully chosen doorsteps and, finally, abandonment in public places. In the twenty-first century, China’s so-called abandoned children have increasingly become “stolen” children, as declining fertility rates have left the dwindling number of children available for adoption more vulnerable to child trafficking. In addition, government seizures of locally—but illegally—adopted children and children hidden within their birth families mean that even legal adopters have unknowingly adopted children taken from parents and sent to orphanages.             The image of the “unwanted daughter” remains commonplace in Western conceptions of China. With China’s Hidden Children, Johnson reveals the complex web of love, secrecy, and pain woven in the coerced decision to give one’s child up for adoption and the profound negative impact China’s birth-planning campaigns have on Chinese families.

Street Kid


Judy Westwater - 2006
    Abducted by her psychotic spiritualist father and kept like a dog in the backyard, she went on to suffer at the brutal hands of nuns in a Manchester orphanage, before living wild on the streets. An incredible, heart-wrenching story of a child who refused to give up.After a childhood lived in terror, in 1994 Judy was presented with an Unsung Heroes Award for her charity work with street children in South Africa. Her moving story came to light after Judy was interviewed by John Peel on BBC’s ‘Home Truths’. ‘Street Kid’ is the inspirational and heartwrenching story of her early years.At age two, in postwar Manchester, Judy was snatched from her mother and sisters by her psychotic father – a spiritualist preacher. He kept her in his backyard, leaving her to scavenge from bins to beat off starvation. At four, she was sent to an inhumanely strict catholic orphanage, before being put back in her father’s cruel care. For the next three years she was treated as a virtual slave.After being taken by her father to South Africa, Judy ran away to join the circus where she found her first taste of freedom and friendship – before her father tracked her down. Weeks later Judy was alone again and living on the streets, too terrified to turn to her circus friends. For 9 months 12-year-old Judy made her home in a shed behind a bottle store before collapsing in a shop doorway from near-starvation.Finally, aged 17, Judy managed to pay her way back to England to find her mother and sisters. But her return to Manchester cruelly shattered any dreams of a happy reunion.Determined that her childhood experiences should in some way give meaning to her life, Judy has worked tirelessly to help children in need back in South Africa in the very place she had been treated to such abuse herself. She has opened 7 centres to date.

Scent of Cloves


Norah Lofts - 1957
    Saved from Cromwell’s Irish massacres by her nurse, saved from starvation by a Dutch sea captain… Her future and any possible lasting happiness depended entirely on a ‘glove marriage’ to a man who was no more than a name. The Dutch East Indies, in the seventeenth century, were lands of legendary riches; of ‘nutmeg princes;’ of fortunes and family empires built on barbaric plantations and slavery. And amid the extravagance, the cruelty, the bizarre customs, perhaps the strangest events of all were the curious weddings that sent girls half-way around the world to husbands they had never seen. Julia, brave and stoical with a stormy and turbulent history behind her, took her ‘glove’—of yellow, pearl-sewn silk—and began the journey to the island of Rua, to a land of seeming paradise where nothing was exactly as it appeared.

What's Wrong with the World


G.K. Chesterton - 1910
    A steadfast champion of the working man, family, and faith, Chesterton eloquently opposed materialism, snobbery, hypocrisy, and any adversary of freedom and simplicity in modern society.Culled from the thousands of essays he contributed to newspapers and periodicals over his lifetime, the critical works collected for this edition pulse with the author's unique brand of clever commentary. As readable and rewarding today as when they were written over a century ago, these pieces offer Chesterton's unparalleled analysis of contemporary ideals, his incisive critique of modern efficiency, and his humorous but heartfelt defense of the common man against trendsetting social assaults.

Moonraker's Bride


Madeleine Brent - 1973
    The way she tackles this task leads to her being thrown into the grim prison of Chengfu, where she meets Nicholas Sabine - a man about to die.He asks her a cryptic riddle, the mystery of which echoes through all that befalls her in the months that follow...She is brought to England and tries to make a new life with the Gresham family, but she is constantly in disgrace and is soon involved in the bitter feud between the Greshams and a neighbouring family.There is danger, romance and heartache for Lucy as strange events build to a point where she begins to doubt her own senses.How could she see a man, long dead, walking in the misty darkness of the valley? And who carried her, unconscious, into the labyrinth of Chiselhurst Caves and left her to die?It is not until she returns to China that Lucy finds, amid high adventure, the answer to all that has baffled her.

The Minority Experience: Navigating Emotional and Organizational Realities


Adrian Pei - 2018
    If you're the only person from your ethnic or cultural background in your organization or team, you probably know what it's like to be misunderstood or marginalized. You might find yourself inadvertently overlooked or actively silenced. Even when a work environment is not blatantly racist or hostile, people of color often struggle to thrive—and may end up leaving the organization. Being a minority is not just about numbers. It's about understanding pain, power, and the impact of the past. Organizational consultant Adrian Pei describes key challenges ethnic minorities face in majority-culture organizations. He unpacks how historical forces shape contemporary realities, and what both minority and majority cultures need to know in order to work together fruitfully. If you're a cultural minority working in a majority culture organization, or if you're a majority culture supervisor of people from other backgrounds, learn the dynamics at work. And be encouraged that you can help make things better so that all can flourish.