This is a story depicting the author’s early life growing up in third world country Guyana, South America. The author reflects on her family’s origin and her adolescent years spent in Bengal and Plantation Highbury. She writes about her travel, studying and working in various countries and how she was able to cope with the adversity, and diversity of life. Throughout the book the author writes about the different places she called home and how it impacted her life. Her stories cover four and a half decades living in western societies and how she was able to hold on to hope during the days of despair. It seems our life is just a shadow that does not linger forever and it’s just a story.
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Navigators Travel to Guyana is the follow up to Navigators Travel to Barbados written by Howard Liverpool. This time our intrepid explorers travel to Guyana and learn about the history and geography of the country. They also sample some of the local cuisine and have a scary encounter with a ram sheep.
Presents a collection of more than 120 recipes for sweets from around the world, including shortbread, tarts, brownie bites, truffles, marzipan, toffees, and brittles.
Breakout by Sukree Boodram is a stunning memoir about an Indian woman who survives abuse and alcoholism and winds up triumphant. There have been many books about breaking free from an abuser or an alcoholic, but now, in Breakout, Sukree Boodram tells the story of how she, a woman from the West Indies, had to shatter the traditions she grew up to appreciate in order to free herself emotionally and physically. A naïve young wife, she was married for twenty-one years to an alcoholic husband who was verbally and emotionally abusive. Enveloped by her culture and her tradition not to reveal any personal problems or suffering to outsiders, choosing not to ask for help or to stand up to her husband, Boodram found herself in a bind without any real support. As her children grew into their teens, she finally made a crucial decision. Relying on her own optimistic nature, strength, and bravery, she reveals how she was able to break free from the painful structure of her marriage, to leave it behind and attempt to build a new life. Deeply honest, beautifully written, and brave, Breakout by Sukree Boodram shows readers how there is always hope, no matter how dire the circumstances. As Boodram charts her emotional growth, she shows step-by-step how she was able to protect her children and herself and exit her marriage safely. A revelatory story of a person’s courage, Breakout is also a gorgeous story of heartbreak, disappointment, and survival, showing that our own inner strength can always be counted on, and that one can always triumph over the odds.circumstances. Some Excerpts/Quotes Below: “Facing the Truth: Alcoholism” “Our problems are ours to fix, not someone else’s responsibility.” “Throughout the process, I have learned a lot about alcoholism. I learned that alcoholism is a mental illness and a disease. It can be caused by a family history of drinking, drinking being viewed as an acceptable social behavior in a culture or community, or keeping company and drinking with others who are already drinking heavily. Alcoholism is a progressive disease, becoming worse over time, and can eventually be fatal. Overuse of alcohol can cause both physical and psychological problems for the drinker. Physical signs can include withdrawal symptoms like ‘the shakes’ that can be observed visually when an alcoholic suddenly stops drinking. Other physical health problems can include liver disease, gastritis, anemia, and nervous disorders. There could also be psychological problems such as impairment in thinking, and changes in mood and behavior. These changes can sometimes lead to issues such as strained interpersonal relationships, marriage problems, child abuse, and domestic abuse. In many cases a person can begin to have issues with work or school, sometimes leading to costly legal and financial problems. I learned that denial is a key part of the disease and becomes a major obstacle to recovery. Denial can cause a person to believe they have control over drinking and how much they can drink, this impairment in thinking can cause a person to deny having a drinking problem. The denial may not be intentional; to those who are outside of the disease, it could appear that the alcoholic simply does not want to make a change.” ______________________________________________________________________ “As I continue to learn about the disease, I am also trying really hard to keep an open mind and not to blame the person or the disease. This can be very difficult at times, but I know my knowledge is in its infancy stages and it would be premature to blame either. However, I have resolved never to give power over my life to someone else.” “You may never know what results come of your actions, but if you do nothing, there will be no results.”-Ghandi
For Joan Wong, growing up in a Chinese family in the political turmoil of 1960s Guyana, family history is never straightforward. There are the examples of her grandmothers – Clarice Chung, iron-willed matriarch who has ensured the family’s survival through unremitting toil, with her pride in maintaining racial and cultural identity, and Susan Leo, whose failures have shamed the family, who found comfort from harsh poverty in relationships with two Indian men and adopting an Indian life-style. Later, when Joan Wong makes her own pilgrimage to ancestral China at the turn of the twenty-first century, there are surprises in store.
1910, South America. A time of racial tension and poverty. A time where forbidden love must remain a secret.
Winnie Cox lives a privileged life of dances and dresses on her father’s sugar cane plantation. Life is sweet in the kingdom of sugar and Winnie along with her sister Johanna, have neither worries nor responsibilities, they are birds of paradise, protected from the poverty in the world around them.
But everything can change in a heartbeat… When Winnie falls in love with George Quint, the post-office boy, a ‘darkie’ from the other side, she soon finds herself slipping into a double life. And as she withdraws from her family, she discovers a shocking secret about those whom are closest to her. Now, more than ever, Winnie is determined to prove her love for George, whatever price she must pay and however tragic the consequences might be.
A breath-taking love story of two people fighting to be together, in a world determined to break them apart.
Acclaim for Sharon Maas:
‘A terrific writer’. Barbara Erskine
‘A page-turning story, full of humanity, crossing cultures and continents, reminiscent of Andrea Levy.’ Katie Fforde
‘A beautiful story about tragic love and ultimately about forgiveness… with powerful messages about love, life and learning to let things go in order to be happy.’ Life With Joy
‘Rich in detail and emotion and has the most beautiful and real description of loss I have ever read.’ Shaz’s Book blog
Four diamonds-the Stone of Fire, the Stone of Water, the Stone of Air, and the Stone of Earth-have all been stolen. Their absence could lead to the mass destruction of Iliana’s dimension and the mortal world. Can Iliana alter the dangerous path of the world’s most certain future? Fifteen-year-old Iliana’s to-do list did not include being sucked into another dimension called Airafia with a guy named Stephon. When she’s asked to go on a mission with him to save the four diamonds, she isn’t sure what to do. Does she want fire to dance across her fingertips? And what is this heated tension she feels between her and her rescuer, Jayden? It seems like everyone in Airafia has a secret, and even though she isn’t sure that she wants to, Iliana is about to discover everything. She and Stephon are the chosen ones to save one of the most powerful items in Airafia-The Stone of Fire. Will they succeed? The first book in the Secrets series is a ride through dimensions where intense battles that secure the well-being of the mortal world rage on. Unbeknownst to some, they are all too real for others like Iliana.
For any woman who’s ever wondered where all the good brothers have gone, The Black Man Drought is a bold exploration into the disappearance of Black men from the lives of their women and children. Upfront about the issues; from drugs to jail to interracial dating and homosexuality, this sometimes funny, sometimes serious, sometimes sassy in your face narrative forces an internal look into the choices of Black men and how they affect the whole community.
During the colonial period in Guyana, the country’s coastal lands were worked by enslaved Africans and indentured Indians. In Creole Indigeneity, Shona N. Jackson investigates how their descendants, collectively called Creoles, have remade themselves as Guyana’s new natives, displacing indigenous peoples in the Caribbean through an extension of colonial attitudes and policies.
Looking particularly at the nation’s politically fraught decades from the 1950s to the present, Jackson explores aboriginal and Creole identities in Guyanese society. Through government documents, interviews, and political speeches, she reveals how Creoles, though unable to usurp the place of aboriginals as First Peoples in the New World, nonetheless managed to introduce a new, more socially viable definition of belonging, through labor. The very reason for bringing enslaved and indentured workers into Caribbean labor became the organizing principle for Creoles’ new identities.
Creoles linked true belonging, and so political and material right, to having performed modern labor on the land; labor thus became the basis for their subaltern, settler modes of indigeneity—a contradiction for belonging under postcoloniality that Jackson terms “Creole indigeneity.” In doing so, her work establishes a new and productive way of understanding the relationship between national power and identity in colonial, postcolonial, and anticolonial contexts.
Turtle News from the Thatch Patch is a true story of how, as a family, we use the animals we see in our backyard to teach and learn. Our backyard is a wonderland for teaching and learning across the K-12 curriculum. On any given day, there are turtles, armadillos, foxes, many different kinds of birds, squirrels, cats, dogs, many different kinds of frogs…scampering around in our yard in Valparaiso, Florida. So, we have started naming and writing about them! Science is Live in the Thatch household! Come read about them…