[PDF] The Strangers We Became eBook

Author : Cynthia Kaplan Shamash
Publisher : Brandeis University Press
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 44,23 MB
Release : 2015-09-22
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 161168806X

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This riveting and utterly unique memoir chronicles the coming of age of Cynthia Shamash, an Iraqi Jew born in Baghdad in 1963. When she was eight, her family tried to escape Iraq over the Iranian border, but they were captured and jailed for five weeks. Upon release, they were returned to their home in Baghdad, where most of their belongings had been confiscated and the door of their home sealed with wax. They moved in with friends and applied for passports to spend a ten-day vacation in Istanbul, although they never intended to return. From Turkey, the family fled to Tel Aviv and then to Amsterdam, where Cynthia's father soon died of a heart attack. At the age of twelve, Sanuti (as her mother called her) was sent to London for schooling, where she lived in an Orthodox Jewish enclave with the chief rabbi and his family. At the end of the school year, she returned to Holland to navigate her teen years in a culture that was much more sexually liberal than the one she had been born into, or indeed the one she was experiencing among Orthodox Jews in London. Shortly after finishing her schooling as a dentist, Cynthia moved to the United States in an attempt to start over. This vivid, beautiful, and very funny memoir will appeal to readers intrigued by spirituality, tolerance, the personal ramifications of statelessness and exile, the clashes of cultures, and the future of Iraq and its Jews.

Author : Renée Carlino
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 12,52 MB
Release : 2015-08-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1501105787

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From the USA TODAY bestselling author of Sweet Thing and Nowhere But Here comes a love story about a Craigslist “missed connection” post that gives two people a second chance at love fifteen years after they were separated in New York City. To the Green-eyed Lovebird: We met fifteen years ago, almost to the day, when I moved my stuff into the NYU dorm room next to yours at Senior House. You called us fast friends. I like to think it was more. We lived on nothing but the excitement of finding ourselves through music (you were obsessed with Jeff Buckley), photography (I couldn’t stop taking pictures of you), hanging out in Washington Square Park, and all the weird things we did to make money. I learned more about myself that year than any other. Yet, somehow, it all fell apart. We lost touch the summer after graduation when I went to South America to work for National Geographic. When I came back, you were gone. A part of me still wonders if I pushed you too hard after the wedding… I didn’t see you again until a month ago. It was a Wednesday. You were rocking back on your heels, balancing on that thick yellow line that runs along the subway platform, waiting for the F train. I didn’t know it was you until it was too late, and then you were gone. Again. You said my name; I saw it on your lips. I tried to will the train to stop, just so I could say hello. After seeing you, all of the youthful feelings and memories came flooding back to me, and now I’ve spent the better part of a month wondering what your life is like. I might be totally out of my mind, but would you like to get a drink with me and catch up on the last decade and a half? M

Author : Pip Drysdale
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 18,91 MB
Release : 2020-11-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1471196984

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Imagine seeing your loving husband on a dating app. Now imagine that’s the best thing that happens to you all week … When Charlie sees a man who is the spitting image of her husband Oliver on a dating app, her heart stops. Her first desperate instinct is to tell herself she must be mistaken – after all, she only caught a glimpse from a distance as her friends laughingly swiped through the men on offer. But no matter how much she tries to push her fears aside, she can’t let it go. Because she took that photo. On their honeymoon. Suddenly other signs of betrayal start to add up and so Charlie does the only thing she can think of to defend her position – she signs up to the app to catch Oliver in the act. But Charlie soon discovers that infidelity is the least of her problems. Nothing is as it seems and nobody is who she thinks they are ... ‘…a fast-paced page-turner which I couldn’t get enough of’ The Book Cosy ‘…clever and well-paced… I’d definitely recommend this!’ Tilly Loves Books

Author : Luis Gonzales P.
Publisher :
Page : 244 pages
File Size : 13,11 MB
Release : 2020-06-22
Category :
ISBN :

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"An adventure-packed storyline. Intriguing, suspense-filled and jaw-dropping, A perfect good read."--Elizabeth Walter A funny, sexy, and ultimately moving true story about the search of love and redemption after a breakup. Luis convinced that Luna (his ex) was the one, decided to leave London for Taiwan to look for her in a city he had never been to, hoping to get back after a messy breakup. It all seemed a love tale, but there was a single problem, Luna didn't want to see him again. He religiously waited for her every night by the Taipei 101 building next to a sign that says "LOVE." In this memoir that reads like a fiction, Luis reveals an incredible story, from how the free-spirited English teacher shared her drugs with him to why he refused to go to bed with a beautiful Japanese tourist. But the true surprise is his path to emotional growth through candid reflections, not to mention that unpredictable Luna changed the course of his trip more than once.

Author : Margaret Wander Bonanno
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 460 pages
File Size : 22,58 MB
Release : 2006-08-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0743455622

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The planets Earth and Vulcan experience a mysterious first contact in this fascinating Star Trek novel featuring the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Years before the formal first contact between Earth and another planet’s inhabitants, a Vulcan space vessel crash landed in the South Pacific, forcing humanity to decide whether to offer the hand of friendship, or the fist of war. Complicating matters is a second visitation: a group of people from two hundred years in the future, who serve on a starship called Enterprise. Discover the astonishing truth about this heretofore unknown first contact and the nightmares that plague Admiral James T. Kirk. Dreams of his dead comrades, of his earliest days aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise, and of a forgotten past in which he somehow changed the course of history and destroyed the Federation before it began.

Author : Malcolm Gladwell
Publisher : Little, Brown
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 27,55 MB
Release : 2019-09-10
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0316535621

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Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

Author : Claudia Durastanti
Publisher : Text Publishing
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 16,25 MB
Release : 2022-02-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1922330760

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A bold, contemporary and urgent novel from a renowned Italian writer that examines silence in different forms, immigration, family and social class.

Author : Ian Neil Dallas
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 170 pages
File Size : 48,22 MB
Release : 1988-01-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780887069901

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Sometime in the future the head librarian at a great center of learning suddenly disappears, leaving behind a journal that describes his weariness with a world "where people teach but know nothing, where the sentences flow on endlessly but lead nowhere." His successor in the post becomes more and more intrigued by the vanished man's fate, until a series of mysterious clues lead him on a journey both inward and outward, to a world that begins where language ends. Within a matter of weeks he finds himself in the company of powerful dervishes, God-intoxicated nomads whose eyes blaze with love, and ragged beggars with the smile of the Pure One. These men, the followers of an enlightened Shaykh, speak little, but simply to be in their company fills him with ecstasy and knowledge.

Author : Joe Keohane
Publisher : Random House
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 32,57 MB
Release : 2021-07-13
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1984855786

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A “meticulously researched and buoyantly written” (Esquire) look at what happens when we talk to strangers, and why it affects everything from our own health and well-being to the rise and fall of nations in the tradition of Susan Cain’s Quiet and Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens “This lively, searching work makes the case that welcoming ‘others’ isn’t just the bedrock of civilization, it’s the surest path to the best of what life has to offer.”—Ayad Akhtar, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Homeland Elegies In our cities, we stand in silence at the pharmacy and in check-out lines at the grocery store, distracted by our phones, barely acknowledging one another, even as rates of loneliness skyrocket. Online, we retreat into ideological silos reinforced by algorithms designed to serve us only familiar ideas and like-minded users. In our politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we’ve never met. But what if strangers—so often blamed for our most pressing political, social, and personal problems—are actually the solution? In The Power of Strangers, Joe Keohane sets out on a journey to discover what happens when we bridge the distance between us and people we don’t know. He learns that while we’re wired to sometimes fear, distrust, and even hate strangers, people and societies that have learned to connect with strangers benefit immensely. Digging into a growing body of cutting-edge research on the surprising social and psychological benefits that come from talking to strangers, Keohane finds that even passing interactions can enhance empathy, happiness, and cognitive development, ease loneliness and isolation, and root us in the world, deepening our sense of belonging. And all the while, Keohane gathers practical tips from experts on how to talk to strangers, and tries them out himself in the wild, to awkward, entertaining, and frequently poignant effect. Warm, witty, erudite, and profound, equal parts sweeping history and self-help journey, this deeply researched book will inspire readers to see everything—from major geopolitical shifts to trips to the corner store—in an entirely new light, showing them that talking to strangers isn’t just a way to live; it’s a way to survive.

Author : Dean Koontz
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 705 pages
File Size : 30,3 MB
Release : 2002-10-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1440673888

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“The plot twists ingeniously...an engaging, often chilling book.”—The New York Times Book Review A writer in California. A doctor in Boston. A motel owner and his employee in Nevada. A priest in Chicago. A robber in New York. A little girl in Las Vegas. They’re a handful of people from across the country, living through eerie variations of the same nightmare. A dark memory is calling out to them. And soon they will be drawn together, deep in the heart of a sprawling desert, where the terrifying truth awaits...