A Far Distant Place

Born in Pakistan to Baptist missionaries from rural Georgia, Jonathan S. Addleton crossed the borders of race, culture, class, and religion from an early age. Some Far and Distant Place combines family history, social observation, current events, and deeply personal commentary to tell an unusual coming-of-age story that has as much to do with the intersection of cultures as it does with one man's life. Whether sharing ice cream with a young Benazir Bhutto or selling gospel tracts at the tomb of a Sufi saint, Addleton provides insightful and sometimes hilarious glimpses into the Muslim-Christian encounter through the eyes of a young child. His narrative is rooted in many unlikely sources, including a southern storytelling tradition, Urdu ghazal, revivalist hymnology, and the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. The natural beauty of the Himalayas also leaves a strong and lasting mark, providing solidity in a confusing world that on occasion seems about to tilt out of control. This clear-eyed, insightful memoir describes an experience that will become increasingly more common as cultures that once seemed remote and distant are no longer confined within the bounds of a single nation-state.

This book is the genealogical history of the ancestry of Jacob (Stephen) Gruben and Maria Emilie Krmer who came to the United States from Germany in the early 1880's. The book traces each of their ancestries back through German civil registration records and the earlier Catholic Church records to the 17th century. The book includes information about the first generation born in the United States. Similarly the book traces the family of Johann Gottfried (Godfrey) Nienhaus, a nephew of Jacob (Stephen) Gruben, who also came to the United States at about the same time. The book contains information on the first generation of the Nienhaus family that was born in the United States. The book is of wider interest because there is a discussion of the nature of and idiosyncrasies of the German civil registration and Catholic records available in the Dsseldorf / Cologne area of Germany. There is an extensive discussion of a method of determining a family line when faced with the sometimes scant information available in the early Catholic Church records. There are large numbers of collateral relatives listed in the lines of descendants contained in the book with over 1800 people listed, most of whom were born, lived and died in the Dsseldorf / Cologne area of Germany. There is a surname index to the lines of descendants in the Gruben section and a surname index to the lines of descendants in the Krmer section of the book.

This is the Iditarod, the most dangerous race in the world, run through the snowy wastes of Alaska. It has always been Natu's dream to run the race but she has chosen to work on the oilfields in the north. When she learns of her Inupiat grandmother's death, she knows she must be true to her native culture and return home to prepare for the race.

A debut collection of short stories which examine the human vulnerabilities of the perpetually unwanted: addicts, oddities, and the mentally ill. This exploration takes the reader everywhere from the pool of a captive orca to the gypsum dunes of New Mexico, the warzones of the Middle East, and a seaside cottage in county Donegal.

From the winner of the National Book Award and the National Books Critics’ Circle Award—and one of the most original thinkers of our time—“Andrew Solomon’s magisterial Far and Away collects a quarter-century of soul-shaking essays” (Vanity Fair). Far and Away chronicles Andrew Solomon’s writings about places undergoing seismic shifts—political, cultural, and spiritual. From his stint on the barricades in Moscow in 1991, when he joined artists in resisting the coup whose failure ended the Soviet Union, his 2002 account of the rebirth of culture in Afghanistan following the fall of the Taliban, his insightful appraisal of a Myanmar seeped in contradictions as it slowly, fitfully pushes toward freedom, and many other stories of profound upheaval, this book provides a unique window onto the very idea of social change. With his signature brilliance and compassion, Solomon demonstrates both how history is altered by individuals, and how personal identities are altered when governments alter. A journalist and essayist of remarkable perception and prescience, Solomon captures the essence of these cultures. Ranging across seven continents and twenty-five years, these “meaty dispatches…are brilliant geopolitical travelogues that also comprise a very personal and reflective resume of the National Book Award winner’s globe-trotting adventures” (Elle). Far and Away takes a magnificent journey into the heart of extraordinarily diverse experiences: “You will not only know the world better after having seen it through Solomon’s eyes, you will also care about it more” (Elizabeth Gilbert).

A man lives in total solitude in an abandoned mountain village. But each night, at the same hour, a mysterious distant light appears on the far side of the valley and disturbs his isolation. What is it? Someone in another deserted village? A forgotten street lamp? An alien being? Finally the man is driven to discover its source. He finds a young boy who also lives alone, in a house in the middle of the forest. But who really is this child? The answer at the secret heart of this novel is both uncanny and profoundly touching. Antonio Moresco's "Little Prince" is a moving meditation on life and the universe we inhabit. Moresco reflects on the solitude and pain of existence, but also on what we share with all around us, living and dead.

A “marvelous history”* of medieval Europe, from the bubonic plague and the Papal Schism to the Hundred Years’ War, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Guns of August *Lawrence Wright, author of The End of October, in The Wall Street Journal The fourteenth century reflects two contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight—in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.” Praise for A Distant Mirror “Beautifully written, careful and thorough in its scholarship . . . What Ms. Tuchman does superbly is to tell how it was. . . . No one has ever done this better.”—The New York Review of Books “A beautiful, extraordinary book . . . Tuchman at the top of her powers . . . She has done nothing finer.”—The Wall Street Journal “Wise, witty, and wonderful . . . a great book, in a great historical tradition.”—Commentary

Reeling from her husband's recent death and the discovery that he had gambled away their home and savings, Iris Chisholm takes a teaching position in a tiny Scottish Highland community, where she becomes involved in the troubles of her charges and pursues relationships with two men.