Mary Lawson, Crow Lake
Thai Women In The Global Labor Force, by Mary Beth Mills
Most research on female labor migration in Thailand focuses on that country’s infamous sex industry. Mary Beth Mills offers the first extended ethnographic analysis of rural women’s movement into less visible occupations, paying particular attention to the hundreds of thousands of young women who fill the factories and sweatshops of the Bangkok metropolis. Mills follows the women as they travel from the village of Baan Naa Sakae to Bangkok, where they encounter new forms of consumption, new “modern” lifestyles, and a new sense of identity. She finds this rural-urban migration is more than a simple economic activity, but rather an elaborate process of cultural change.
( Courtesy of Google Books, 219 pages )
Keynes and After, by Michael Stewart
Keynes’s ideas have revolutionized our lives. Before the publication of the General Theory, economists were on the touchline, passively watching the economy perform; now they are on the field as players, manipulating the conditions of economic life. Yet Keynes was not merely a theoretical economist. During both wars he was probably the most important figure at the Treasury, and the modern International Monetary Fund is partly his creation. Since the 1930s millions of people who have never heard of Keynes’s work have owed their livelihood to his ideas and policies.
But if we are all Keynesians now, are our problems the by-products of the Keynesian system? Can his ideas, which have banished the spectre of international recession, cope with the difficulties of an inflationary world? Is full employment threatened by a shortage of international liquidity, and is persistent unemployment in the U.S. an indication that Keynesian theory cannot answer the problems of automation? Are rising prices inevitable, and why is Britain constantly running into balance-of-payments crises? These questions are posed and answered this this new Pelican by Michael Stewart, whose clear and straightforward account of Keynes’s life and ideas and of their status in the modern world should be a boon to intelligent people of any age and educational level.
( from the sleeve, 272 pages )
If I Had My Life To Live Over, edited by Sandra Haldeman Martz
A companion volume to the classic seller, When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple, this collection illuminates the experiences of women, young and old, reflecting on the choices they have made. Whether exploring significant public events or small private choices, Sandra Martz again captures word portraits that resonate with authenticity from the tapestry of their lives. This absorbing collection eloquently reflects women’s choices, from a ten-year-old girl making a relationship decision to a grown woman who must choose whether or not to ‘burden’ her aging parents with the news that she is seriously ill, to a charmingly eccentric older woman who ‘would not change one stitch… not one stitch’ in the fabric of her life. Some speak of lost opportunities: ‘I wait too long; I watch the moment pass/till only ashes stir upon the grass’ or things they would do differently: ‘If I could begin again… let me begin again by being a better daughter’. More often, however, these women proclaim a sense ofsatisfaction with their lives and ‘would not change a single breathless moment’.This powerful and insightful collection features many talented contributors from Sandra Martz’s best-selling When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple. Like that earlier volume, this bestseller is a perfect gift book because it speaks to readers of all ages and as the Los Angeles Times has declared, it is a gentle reminder that we still have time to change.
( Courtesy of GoodReads, 205 pages )
When I Am Old I Shall Wear Purple, edited by Sandra Martz
This enchanting collection of fiction, poetry, and photographs evokes the beauty, humor, and courage of women living in their later years. More than 1.7 million copies have been sold, thanks to its universal message of aging as a natural gift of life. Winner of the American Booksellers Book of the Year Honors Award (1991), and two Benjamin Franklin Awards: for design and content, literature (1988), and for excellence and innovation in marketing, literature (1992), When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple has been applauded for its honest and inspiring approach to the much neglected topic of aging. When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple has created a network of support and encouragement: the sixty-plus men and women whose work is included, the readers who have taken the time to share how the book has touched their lives, and the booksellers who have so graciously recommended it to buyers. Stories and poems such as Warning, Like Mother, Like Daughter, Love at Fifty, Near Places, Far Places, and Dear Paul Newman tell of the endearing moments of joy — and passion — to be found in the rich and varied world of midlife and beyond. This award-winning anthology has earned a word-of-mouth popularity because, as the Los Angeles Times said, the time is ripe for such a message.
( Courtesy of GoodReads, 180 pages )
The Warrior Queens, the legends and the lives of the women who have led their nations in war, by Antonia Fraser
Antonia Fraser’s Warrior Queens are those women who have both ruled and led in war. They include Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, Isabella of Spain, the Rani of Jhansi, and the formidable Queen Jinga of Angola. With Boadicea as the definitive example, her female champions from other ages and civilisations make a fascinating and awesome assembly. Yet if Boadicea’s apocryphal chariot has ensured her place in history, what are the myths that surround the others? And how different are the democratically elected if less regal warrior queens of recent times: Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir? This remarkable book is much more than a biographical selection. It examines how Antonia Fraser’s heroines have held and wrested the reins of power from their (consistently male) adversaries.
( Courtesy of GoodReads, 383 pages )
A.N. Wilson, Tolstoy
AN Wilson – biographer, historian, novelist, columnist, provocateur – is the author of more than 40 books, including, most recently, Hitler: A Short Biography. His 1998 biography of Tolstoy, which won the Whitbread prize, is now being reissued.
You wrote recently that you used to regard Tolstoy as a mystery but he now makes sense. What did you mean?
I was perhaps a little bit too inclined to think of a great conversion in the middle of his life. But when you go back and read the stuff he wrote as a soldier, and the war passages in War and Peace, it’s clear he’s moving towards the position of pacifism and hatred of war that dominated the second half of his life. Similarly, inWar and Peace, the emphasis on peasant wisdom and the vacuity of the upper classes in Russia, it’s all there.
How would you sum up his writing?
The word that leads you in is realism. When I was writing this book, Anthony Powell said to me: “Why do you want to waste your time writing about him, his books are just cinema?” I know what he means, particularly if you turn to Dostoevsky, and there’s all that agitation and innerness, as if you’re inside people’s heads. Whereas with Tolstoy it’s as if you’re in the room. In many ways, he’s an extraordinarily detached writer. As I’ve got older, I’ve become keener on this.
Which novelists would you place alongside Tolstoy?
He really wrote in the tradition of history writing, which confuses people. He was writing between history and art, and to that extent the only writer who is remotely like him is Walter Scott. And Balzac to a certain extent.
( Courtesy of The Guardian, 572 pages )
Leicester Hemingway, My Brother Ernest Hemingway
My Brother, Ernest Hemingway was the only biography Ernest knew about, and he was pleased with it–although he asked his brother to postpone publication while he was still alive. First published in 1962, Leicester’s biography provides a revealing and intimate portrait of one of the great writers of our century. Ernest Hemingway was a legend in his own time, whose life was as dramatic as any of the characters in his novels and short stories. He won both the Nobel and the Pulitzer prizes for literature, and the literary style he created has been imitated but never matched.
Leicester was the archetypal kid brother, 16 years younger than the great man, whom he adored and in whose footsteps he followed, becoming a respected writer, sharing his brother’s love for high risk and adventure, and, when his health failed, choosing to end his own life as Ernest had done. In this poignant biography, Leicester has given us insight into his world-renowned brother’s life and career as no one else could. His reminiscences allow us to better understand what prompted so many of the familiar Hemingway responses, and the experiences from which he derived material for his novels and stories.
( Courtesy of Google Books, 255 pages )