The House My Father Built

A novel.

About the Book Anna Kudro blends fact with fiction in this historical fiction novel that tells the story of her family. A family that was caught in the middle of a war they wanted no part in. A war that forever altered their lives as they knew them. This is the Staffa family’s story and how their family survived a side of World War II not often discussed. About the Author Anna Kudro immigrated to the United States at the age of 18 to escape the memories of Russian tanks surrounding her home. She is married with five children. Once her children were older, she attended college and received a degree in finance, which led her to work on Wall Street. Yet memories of her childhood and her family’s struggles remained. She felt compelled to journey back to her homeland to put these memories to paper to remind her children to value the freedom her family so desperately fought for.

The Restless Hungarian is the saga of an extraordinary life set against the history of the rise of modernism, the Jewish Diaspora, and the Cold War. A Hungarian Jew whose inquiring spirit helped him to escape the Holocaust, Paul Weidlinger became one of the most creative structural engineers of the twentieth century. As a young architect, he broke ranks with the great modernists with his radical idea of the “Joy of Space.” As an engineer, he created the strength behind the beauty in mid-century modern skyscrapers, churches, museums, and he gave concrete form to the eccentric monumental sculptures of Pablo Picasso, Isamu Noguchi, and Jean Dubuffet. In his private life, he was a divided man, living behind a wall of denial as he lost his family to war, mental illness, and suicide. In telling his father’s story, the author sifts meaning from the inspiring and contradictory narratives of a life: a motherless child and a captain of industry, a clandestine communist who designed silos for the world’s deadliest weapons during the Cold War, a Jewish refugee who denied he was a Jew, a husband who was terrified of his wife’s madness, and a man whose personal saints were artists.

In The Fence My Father Built, when legally separated Muri Pond, a librarian, hauls her kids, teenage Nova and eleven year-old Truman, out to the tiny town of Murkee, Oregon, where her father, Joe Pond lived and died, she’s confronted by a neighbor’s harassment over water rights and Joe’s legacy: a fence made from old oven doors. The fence and accompanying house trailer horrify rebellious Nova, who runs away to the drug-infested streets of Seattle. Muri searches for her daughter and for something to believe in, all the while trying to save her inheritance from the conniving neighbor who calls her dad Chief Joseph. Along with Joe’s sister, Aunt Lutie, and the Red Rock Tabernacle Ladies, Muri must rediscover the faith her alcoholic dad never abandoned in order to reclaim her own spiritual path.

For two sisters growing up surrounded by the Civil War, there is conflict both outside and inside their house.

"Reading My Father" is an intimate, moving, and beautifully written portrait of the novelist William Styron by his daughter, Alexandra.

'A charming account of a daughter, a house and a fastidious dad' Sunday Times Shelley Klein grew up in the Scottish Borders, in a house designed on a modernist open-plan grid. With colourful glass panels set against a forest of trees, it was like living in a work of art. Her father, Bernat Klein, was a textile designer whose pioneering colours and textures were a major contribution to 1960s and 70s style. Thirty years on, Shelley moves back home to care for her father, now in his eighties: the house has not changed and neither has his uncompromising vision - or his distinctive way of looking at the world. Told with great tenderness and humour, this is Shelley's account of looking after an adored yet maddening parent and a piercing portrait of the grief that followed his death. 'A sad, funny, utterly fascinating book about families, home and how to say goodbye' Mark Haddon 'Original, moving and bracingly honest... often hilarious' Blake Morrison, Guardian 'It is strange that grief should produce such a life-affirming book, but it has. Read it for the solace it contains, or for its captivating descriptions. Either way, it's a delight' Telegraph

Godly thriving leaders are precious and valuable, but developing those leaders is not easy. Many leaders feel stuck, tired and frustrated in their growth and calling. This can change. In Mining for Gold, pastor and master-coach, Tom Camacho, offers a fresh perspective on how to draw out the best in ourselves and in those around us. Cutting through the complexity and challenges of leadership development, he gives us practical and effective tools to help leaders grow personally and develop those around them. Coaching, through the power of the Holy Spirit, provides the clarity and momentum we need to grow. When we get clarity, everything changes. Coaching helps us better understand our identity in Christ, our God-given wiring, and how we naturally bear the most fruit. There is gold in God’s people, waiting to be discovered. Let’s learn to draw out that treasure and help others flourish in their life and leadership.

The beating of Rodney King and the resulting riots in South Central Los Angeles. The violent clash between Hasidim and African-Americans in Crown Heights. The boats of Haitian refugees being turned away from the Land of Opportunity. These are among the many racially-charged images that have burst across our television screens in the last year alone, images that show that for all our complacent beliefs in a melting-pot society, race is as much of a problem as ever in America. In this vastly important, widely-acclaimed volume, Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanaian philosopher who now teaches at Harvard, explores, in his words, "the possibilities and pitfalls of an African identity in the late twentieth century." In the process he sheds new light on what it means to be an African-American, on the many preconceptions that have muddled discussions of race, Africa, and Afrocentrism since the end of the nineteenth century, and, in the end, to move beyond the idea of race. In My Father's House is especially wide-ranging, covering everything from Pan Africanism, to the works of early African-American intellectuals such as Alexander Crummell and W.E.B. Du Bois, to the ways in which African identity influences African literature. In his discussion of the latter subject, Appiah demonstrates how attempts to construct a uniquely African literature have ignored not only the inescapable influences that centuries of contact with the West have imposed, but also the multicultural nature of Africa itself. Emphasizing this last point is Appiah's eloquent title essay which offers a fitting finale to the volume. In a moving first-person account of his father's death and funeral in Ghana, Appiah offers a brilliant metaphor for the tension between Africa's aspirations to modernity and its desire to draw on its ancient cultural roots. During the Los Angeles riots, Rodney King appeared on television to make his now famous plea: "People, can we all get along?" In this beautiful, elegantly written volume, Appiah steers us along a path toward answering a question of the utmost importance to us all.