The Indian Independence Act of 1947 granted India freedom from British rule, signaling the formal end of the British Raj in the subcontinent. This freedom, though, came at a price: partition, the division of the country into India and Pakistan, and the communal riots that followed. These riots resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1 million Hindus and Muslims and the displacement of about 20 million persons on both sides of the border. This watershed socioeconomic–geopolitical moment cast...

Stories of Home: Place, Identity, Exile offers a window into the distinct ways that home is theorized and conceptualized across disciplines. The essays in this volume consider how people “speak” and “story” home in their everyday lives, why “home” is central to our notion of who we are, and how making home a unit of analysis in research makes a strong conceptual contribution to the field of communication. This collection engages home from diverse contexts and disparate philosophical underp...

The concept of identity has steadily emerged in importance in the field of intercultural communication, especially over the last two decades. In a transnational world marked by complex connectivity as well as enduring differences and power inequities, it is imperative to understand and continuously theorize how we perceive the self in relation to the cultural other. Such understandings play a central role in how we negotiate relationships, build alliances, promote peace, and strive for soc...

The Education of Augie Merasty offers a courageous and intimate chronicle of life in a residential school.Now a retired fisherman and trapper, Joseph A. (Augie) Merasty was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who were taken from their families and sent to government-funded, church-run schools, where they were subjected to a policy of "aggressive assimiliation."As Merasty recounts, these schools did more than attempt to mold children...

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it...

This account of a teacher in Austria—a friend of Freud and one of the millions of victims of the Holocaust—is "beautifully written and deeply moving" (Joyce Carol Oates).Peter Singer's Pushing Time Away is a rich and loving portrait of the author's grandfather, David Oppenheim, from the turn of the twentieth century to the end of his life in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Oppenheim, a Jewish teacher of Greek and Latin living in Vienna, wa...

Film star. Icon. Agitator. Martyr.Paul Robeson was a prize-winning scholar and the greatest footballer of his era, even before he ascended to global superstardom as a singer, Hollywood actor, and activist. The son of an escaped slave, Robeson stunned audiences with ‘Ol’ Man River’ and Othello, as his passion for social justice led him from Jazz Age Harlem to the mining towns of Wales, from the frontiers of the Spanish Civil War to Stalin’s Russia.C...

A veteran dog musher, Dave Olesen finished the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race eight times. After a fifteen-year career as a sled dog racer, Olesen set out to fulfill a lifelong dream. In four successive winters he steered his dogs and sled on long trips away from his remote Northwest Territories homestead, setting out in turn to the south, east, north, and west, and home again to Hoarfrost River.His narrative ranges from the personal and poignant musings of a dogsled...

In this “engrossing peek into a little-known chapter of World War II, and one family’s harrowing tale of finding the lost pieces of its own history” (Karen Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of Liar Temptress Solider Spy), a woman sets out to track down the descendants of the Jewish family her grandmother helped hide seventy years earlier.Yvette Manessis Corporon grew up listening to her grandmother’s stories about how the people of the sma...

Best known for his 1980s hit songs “Super Freak,” “Give it to Me Baby,” and “Mary Jane,” the late singer and funk music pioneer Rick James collaborated with acclaimed music biographer David Ritz in this posthumously published, no-holds-barred memoir of a rock star’s life and soul.He was the nephew of Temptations singer Melvin Franklin; a boy who watched and listened, mesmerized from underneath cocktail tables at the shows of Etta James and Miles Davis. He was a vag...

An astonishing coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who survived the foster care system and went on to become an award-winning journalist.On a rainy night in November 1999, a shoeless Stacey Patton, promising student at NYU, approached her adoptive parents' house with a gun in her hand. She wanted to kill them. Or so she thought.No one would ever imagine that the vibrant, smart, and attractive Stacey had a childhood from hell. After all, with God-fearing, ...

Mushikiwabo is a Rwandan working as a translator in Washington when she learns that most of her family back home has been killed in a conspiracy meticulously planned by the state. First comes shock, then aftershock, three months of it, during which her worst fears are confirmed: The same state apparatus has duped millions of Rwandans into butchering nearly a million of their neighbors.Years earlier, her brother Lando wrote her a letter she never got until now. Urged on by it, she ru...