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Steve Grant was laid off in March of 2020. He was fifty and had cancer, so he needed health insurance, fast. Which is how he found himself a rural letter carrier in Appalachia, back in his old hometown. Suddenly, he was the guy with the goods, delivering dog food and respirators and lube and heirloom tomato seeds and Lord of the Rings replica swords. He transported chicken feed to grandmothers living alone in the mountains and forded a creek with a refrigerator on his back. But while he carried the mail, he also carried a whole lot more than just the mail.

At just 10 years old, Sonita Alizada was nearly sold into marriage. By the time she turned 16, her price was set at $9,000—a sum meant to buy her future for someone else’s benefit. In a world where nearly 15 million girls are forced into marriage each year, Sonita’s story is a heartbreaking but all-too-common reality. Yet, she refused to let her fate be sealed. In her eponymous memoir, Sonita shares her powerful journey from the streets of Afghanistan to international stages as a rap artist and activist.

Calvin Duncan was nineteen when he was incarcerated for a 1981 New Orleans murder he didn’t commit. The victim of a wildly incompetent public defense system and a badly compromised witness, Duncan was left to rot in the waking nightmare of confinement. Armed with little education, he took matters into his own hands. At twenty-one, he filed his first motion from prison: “Motion for a Law Book,” which launched his highly successful, self-taught, legal career. Trapped within this wholly corrupted system, Calvin became a legal advocate for himself and his fellow prisoners as an Inmate Counsel.

The son of Egyptian immigrants, Aymann Ismail came of age in the shadow of 9/11, tracking the barrage of predatory headlines pervading the media and influencing the popular consciousness about Muslims. After a series of bomb threats were directed at his Islamic school in Teaneck, New Jersey, just a few miles from downtown Manhattan, his parents—anxious that it was no longer safe to be so explicitly Muslim—enrolled him in public school, where he was the only Muslim his new friends had ever met.

This superb book is borne of Marina Warner’s work with the project Stories in Transit, which organises storytelling workshops in the UK and in Palermo, bringing young migrant students together with artists, writers and musicians. What is sanctuary for those who have been displaced? Why do people flee different situations and conflicts worldwide, and what would a perfect version of sanctuary for those forced out of their homes look like? How can art, which has always recorded and reflected the worst experiences of humanity, also be a salve, an escape or a route to somewhere new.

In her compelling debut, Miriam Casco Benard and her siblings emerge as resilient survivors, recounting her extraordinary experiences in the gripping memoir Tender Memories of Fire and Dust: Earthquakes, Revolution, and Family.

Rosanna Moseley Gore had a German Jewish father who escaped Nazi Berlin on a Kindertransport in 1939, a Russian mother who was born in Manchuria, and a beloved Russian grandmother who fled her homeland during the post-revolution civil war. Her childhood in London was unusual. Driving holidays in Europe were normal, friends and family with strong accents were normal, baked beans and rice pudding were not. When a huge family archive of letters, photographs and documents came to her after her parents died, she realised she had a story to tell . . .

Born to a devout Hindu family in the late 1800s in India, Arjun Roy dutifully followed the path that was laid out ahead of him--the path of a Brahmin priest. He was raised in an environment steeped in the ritualism of Hinduism. As a young schoolboy, Roy had an encounter with a Christian friend, which was the start of a lifelong journey to seek the truth. Along his journey, Roy received warnings from God that the path he was on was not the right one.

Having spent ten summers on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park, part of her doctoral fieldwork for a PhD in Native American Art History, forty-two-year-old Lynne Spriggs thinks of Montana as her healing place. When she moves to “Big Sky Country” from the East Coast in a quest to reset her life, she has high hopes for what awaits her. Great Falls, a farming and military town in central Montana, is not what Lynne imagined when she decided to leave city life behind.

A Universityのテーマは「複雑な世界で、より善く生きる」タイパ・コスパと言った、いかに効率よく生きるかを競うことばかりに注目が集まる時代。

On 1st February 1963, Eileen and her family migrated from England to Australia. Leaving behind a close knit family and many treasured memories. They sailed on a ship to a land of blue skies, sunshine and vast horizons. In `Day Dream Believers’ we follow Eileen and her families journey from the migrant town of Elizabeth West to the top end of Australia. Eileen comes from an Irish, Catholic background. Their family life in Elizabeth West in Adelaide is described in loving detail.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Five years ago, Lonnae O’Neal grabbed some seeds for her backyard garden, including seeds for Bibb lettuce. She had no idea how deeply she’d wind up digging, or how far she would travel. Lonnae’s fourth great-grandmother, Keziah, was enslaved by the Kentucky Bibb family, including John Bigger Bibb, who developed the Bibb lettuce strain, which remains a culinary darling more than 150 years later.

An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.

その日、僕は出家した、彼女と社会を捨てて――。道元が開いた曹洞宗の本山・永平寺。ひとたび山門を潜れば、そこは娑婆とは別世界。東司（トイレ）にも行鉢（食事）にも厳格な作法がある。新入りは、古参僧侶に罵倒され、規矩を徹底的に叩き込まれる。

1980s Albania. The world's most isolated country and "the first atheistic state." Captain Dosti knows that by secretly listening to a Christian radio station he could put his life and the life of his whole family at risk. And yet, he cannot resist. This inspiring story of Berti's journey from Captain Dosti to Pastor Dosti gives us a glimpse of the explosive growth of the early Albanian church after nearly half a decade of repressive atheism and the untiring efforts of Trans World Radio to broadcast the Christian message across closed borders to Albanians.