Book picks similar to
Blue Daughter of the Red Sea: A Memoir by Meti Birabiro
ethnic
horn-of-africa
immigration
other-countries
Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops: A Memoir
Allison Hong Merrill - 2021
Sixteen months into their marriage, one day Allison goes home to their apartment and discovers that during her two-hour absence Cameron has moved everything out, cut off all services, withdrawn all the money in their bank account, and served her divorce papers. From a powerless, abandoned immigrant bride to a confident woman in command of her own destiny, 99 Fire Hoops, A Memoir tells the story of how Allison’s choice to break the Chinese cultural expectation for women to submit to men’s will allows her to create her own destiny.
Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang
T.W. Ward - 2012
Ward's eight and a half years in Los Angeles conducting participant observation with MS-13, Gangsters Without Borders: An Ethnography of a Salvadoran Street Gang takes an inside look at gang life in the United States and in a global context.Taking us through their journey from their homeland in El Salvador to the mean streets of Los Angeles, Gangsters Without Borders offers a perspective from the point of view of the hard-core members who live this hard, fast, and dangerous life.A powerful and engaging overview of gang dynamics, Gangsters Without Borders contextualizes the sources and severity of the marginalization felt by Salvadoran immigrants and debunks myths about street gangs in the United States. This account of gangsters' lives before, during, and after theirinvolvement with the gang delivers an intimate and analytical portrait unlike any other.
Suits: A Woman on Wall Street
Nina Godiwalla - 2010
While others in Nina Godiwalla's Persian-Indian immigrant community were content to fulfill their parents' dreams, Nina's fierce ambition pulled her from Houston to New York to become a banker. With steely determination, Nina bullied her way into an internship after her freshman year of college. That first rarefied taste of power left her hungry for more.Showered with Broadway tickets and ferried around in sleek, black town cars, Morgan Stanley recruits led a fast and flashy lifestyle, but at a steep cost. Nina worked harder, longer hours than her peers to prove her worth, but to whom?Suits is a story of fathers and daughters, family pride, and the pursuit of success and honor. This raw and unflinching memoir exposes the world of banking and finance from the perspective of a woman and outsider.
Aliens in America
Sandra Tsing Loh - 1997
From the best-selling author of Depth Takes a Holiday comes a comic monologue for sons and daughters everywhere, who feel that their parents must have been beamed to Earth from another planet.
Handcarts to Zion: The Story of a Unique Western Migration, 1856-1860
Leroy R. Hafen - 1992
Many of the three thousand hardy souls who trudged across thirteen hundred miles of prairie, desert, and mountain from 1856 to 1860 were European converts to the Mormon faith. Without funds for wagons and oxen, they carried their possessions in two-wheeled carts powered and aided by their own muscle and blood. Some of the weary travelers would finally be welcomed by their brethren in Salt Lake City; others would go to wayside graves or get caught in early winter storms in the Rockies and hope to be rescued by the parties sent out by Brigham Young. The migration is described in Handcarts to Zion, which draws on diaries and reports of the participants, rosters of the ten companies, and a collection of the songs sung on the trail and at "The Gathering." LeRoy R. Hafen and Ann W. Hafen dedicated the book to his mother, Mary Ann Hafen, who wrote about the long journey in Recollections of a Handcart Pioneer of 1860: A Woman’s Life on the Mormon Frontier, also a Bison Book.
Anjum's New Indian
Anjum Anand - 2008
Collecting together the best of Indian regional cooking - light, modern dishes that are ideal for today's busy cooks - these recipes are divided into chapters on brunches and light meals, seafood, chicken, lamb, vegetables, beans and lentils, bread and rice and raitas and chutneys.
Red Lightning
Laura Pritchett - 2015
Now she returns to the eastern plains of Colorado, full of raw rage at herself and at the universe, yearning for the life she never lead and the daughter she left behind. As a levantona who has been running drugs and illegal immigrants once they’re beyond the US-Mexico border, she’s knowingly and even defiantly entered into a harsh and dangerous world. But suddenly her world has become darker than she can bear: The largest wildfire in Colorado history is blazing. Immigrants are dead. She’s haunted by the memory of a Mexican woman she couldn’t save and a lost Mexican girl she did. Traffickers – of both immigrants and drugs – are now hunting her down. But most of all, Tess is at the mercy of her own traumatized soul, and the weight of it is cracking her apart.Before completing the only courageous action she can think of, Tess must now face her dying mother, her sister, and her daughter, and most importantly, herself. This book broaches timely topics essential in the West—immigration, rural poverty, wildfires —with suspense and gritty wisdom as well as Pritchett’s trademark lyricism and grace. Like Libby, her sister and the central character of Pritchett’s novel Sky Bridge, Tess has her own coming-of-age, in a revelatory story of hard-earned transformation and redemption.
Plan B
Hayley Oakes - 2020
Penny didn’t expect to be left holding the baby when she agreed to be a surrogate,She wanted her payday and for her life to get a little easier for once.Matt didn’t expect to lose his wife before the baby even arrived,He wanted to forget the whole thing and drown himself in alcohol.Tragedy changed their plans and made their worlds collide,Out of all the pain, can two very different people achieve the ultimate Plan B?Plan B - A love story in reverse
The Emigrant Edge: How to Make It Big in America
Brian Buffini - 2017
Brian Buffini embodies the classic rags to riches tale: born and raised in Dublin, Ireland, he arrived in San Diego, California at nineteen years old with just ninety-two dollars in his pocket. Since then he has become one of his new nation’s top real estate moguls and a founder of the largest business training company, Buffini & Co., in North America. And Brian isn’t alone in his circle of success: while immigrants compose thirteen percent of the American population, they are responsible for creating a quarter of all new businesses. So, what’s their secret? In The Emigrant Edge, Brian shares seven key characteristics that he and other successful immigrants have in common that can help produce a high level of achievement for anyone—no matter their vocation. He then challenges us to leave the comfort of our current work conditions to apply these secrets and achieve the success of our dreams. With a timely message sure to resonate with anyone who wants to prosper in the business world, The Emigrant Edge is a passionate, deeply personal story bound to inspire. So what are the secrets? In The Emigrant Edge, Brian shares seven characteristics that he and other successful immigrants have in common that can help anyone reach a higher level of achievement, no matter their vocation. He then challenges readers to leave the comfort of their current work conditions to apply these secrets and achieve the success of their dreams.
Ride Like Hell and You'll Get There: Detours into Mayhem
Paul Carter - 2013
. . Paul Carter. He's still risking his life performing daredevil acts like trying to break speed records on unusually fueled vehicles, and he is still up to hijinks with his friends and a cast of complete strangers, both in Australia and in the U.S. Decidedly odd things seem to happen to Paul Carter (in this case falling through the floor of his own bathroom—don't ask). But, more importantly, he's still the funniest man in the bar and the nicest alpha male you'll ever meet as he rudely risks all for the sake of a good story.
The Beach at Galle Road: Stories from Sri Lanka
Joanna Luloff - 2012
At least not until Janaki’s sister, Lakshmi—now a refugee whose husband, a Tamil, has disappeared—comes back to live with her family. And when Sam, an American Peace Corps worker who boards with Janaki’s family, falls in love with one of his students, a young girl from the north, he, too, becomes acutely aware of the dangers that exist for any- one who gets drawn into the conflict, however marginally. Skillfully weaving together the stories of these and other intersecting lives, The Beach at Galle Road explores themes of memory and identity amid the consequences of the Sri Lankan civil war. From different points of view, across generations and geographies, it pits the destructive power of war against the resilient power of family, individual will, and the act of storytelling itself.
Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America
Gregory Rodriguez - 2007
Rodriguez deftly delineates the effects of mestizaje throughout the centuries, traces the northern movement of this "mongrelization," explores the emergence of a new Mexican American identity in the 1930s, and analyzes the birth and death of the Chicano movement. Vis-a-vis the present era of Mexican American confidence, he persuasively argues that the rapidly expanding Mexican American integration in to the mainstream is changing not only how Americans think about race but how we envision our nation.Deeply informative--as historically sound as it is anecdotally rich, brilliantly reasoned, and highly though provoking--Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds is a major contribution to the discussion of the cultural and political future of the United States.From the Hardcover edition.
I Ask the Impossible
Ana Castillo - 2001
She shares over twelve years of poetic inspiration, from her days as a writer who ?once wrote poems in a basement with no heat," through the tenderness of motherhood and bitterness of loss, to the strength of love itself, which can ?make the impossible a simple act." Radiant with keen perception, wit, and urgency, sometimes erotic, often funny, this inspiring collection sounds the unmistakable voice of a "woman on fire? / and more worthy than stone."
Reflections on Judging
Richard A. Posner - 2013
Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers.For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to tackling these problems. Formalist judges--most notably Justice Antonin Scalia--needlessly complicate the legal process by advocating canons of constructions (principles for interpreting statutes and the Constitution) that are confusing and self-contradictory. Posner calls instead for a renewed commitment to legal realism, whereby a good judge gathers facts, carefully considers context, and comes to a sensible conclusion that avoids inflicting collateral damage on other areas of the law. This, Posner believes, was the approach of the jurists he most admires and seeks to emulate: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly, and it is an approach that can best resolve our twenty-first-century legal disputes.