Novedades

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads. Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

For this winter's adventure, I journeyed by bus from Arizona through New Mexico to El Paso crossing the border in Ciudad Juarez. Traveling exclusively by bus in Northern Mexico I traveled through Chihuahua, Parral, Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, Saltillo, Torreon, Delicias, and then back to Chihuahua and Juarez. Suggestions for easing the challenge of traveling in Northern Mexico are detailed, sights to see in each of the cities, and the great Christmas markets are described.

Just after turning forty, Steve Grove left Silicon Valley as a Google executive to move to his home state of Minnesota with his wife and fellow tech exec, Mary Grove, and their one-year-old twins. Gone from the Midwest for two decades, Grove returned home with fresh eyes. Yearning to put down new roots, he traded his career at Google for a position in state government with Governor Tim Walz. Far from working at a fast-paced tech company, Grove’s shift to leading a large government bureaucracy brought a sequence of struggles and triumphs vividly portrayed with both humor and affection.

Thronged by lakhs of devotees every month, Kerala’s Guruvayur temple rose to prominence through the lore surrounding five saintly devotees – Poonthanam Nambootiri, Melputhur Narayana Bhattathiri, Manavedan Raja, Vilwamangalam Swamiyar, and Kururamma – who are still part of the temple legends and devotional folklore of Kerala. All of them, except for Kururamma, the lone woman devotee, have composed exquisite works in Sanskrit and Malayalam. These personages stand tall in the hearts of ordinary devotees through the strength and sweetness of their devotion to Guruvayurappan. This book ...

We think of the Raj as controlling only India and Pakistan, and its breakup happening in August 1947. In reality, a quarter of the world’s population was ruled by the Viceroy from New Delhi, in a single market/rupee-currency zone that spread from the Red Sea to the borders of Thailand – an empire within an empire that included Burma, parts of Yemen, and most of the Gulf states like Dubai. The breakup of this single ‘Indian Empire’ created almost all of the conflicts which plague Asia today.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian chef Olia Hercules decided it was finally time to tell her story. Strong Roots is the story of a century in Ukraine told through four generations of one extraordinary family. It takes us from years of Russification, to Olia’s grandmother’s deportation to snowy wastelands under Stalin, to her Aunt Zhenia's school protest, to her own parents’ flight from Ukraine when their town was occupied in 2022.

'Please live' were the last words fifteen-year-old Lana said to her mother. Shortly afterwards Natalia Estemirova was kidnapped outside their apartment block in Grozny, Chechnya. On 15th July 2009, she was murdered for telling the truth. This is Lana's story of growing up in a war. Of the intense bond between a mother and daughter, desperate to be together even though it was so much safer for Lana to live elsewhere, often for months at a time. It is a book both about being brave and about being ordinary in extraordinary times.