In the Dari language used in northern Afghanistan, Farishta means angel. This story covers the life of an American Foreign Service Officer, Angela Morgan, who becomes an angel to female refugees in this region. Farishta is fiction rather than a documentary and is based on author Patricia McArdle’s own experience as a diplomat in Northern Afghanistan.

In the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Angela loses her husband and baby.  After recuperating in the U. S., she tries to reconstruct her career by accepting a post in Northern Afghanistan. Stationed at a Bristish outpost, she is the only woman and feels unwelcome.

Excellent language skills help Angela to feel less marginalized in her new job.  She develops a solar ovens project as she sees the only firewood available for cooking is brush from areas surrounding the refugee camps. Angela builds, tests, and successfully demonstrates these ovens to women in the displaced persons camp. She earns the admiration of some of the Afghans and the British officers. Now retired, Patricia McArdle spends time promoting the technology of solar ovens.

Listen to Patricia discussing solar cooking in Afghanistan.

www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000508631   2010 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Finalist: General Fiction

Lila, a British teenager born in England, is from a Ghanaian family with divorced parents. She lives with her mother, Mum, in a cramped flat in London and constantly tries to please her Mum. As Lila matures she strives to become independent and live her own life. Struggling with issues caused by her mother’s strong anti-boy attitude leads to Lila’s departure for Ghana.

Enrolled in Ghana’s Dadaba Girl’s Secondary School, Lila stands out as a London girl, or “Broni”. An aunt gives Lila advice not to be “too known” because she was born in England. Many of her schoolmates treat Lila as someone very different from themselves. Eventually, she forms deep roots in her family’s homeland and deeper friendships.

Soon Lila travels to New York City and moves in with her estranged father, stepmother and stepbrother and sister.  Here Lila meets a photographer who has taken pictures for National Geographic while in Ghana, including her school.

His request for Lila to write captions for the photographs leads to a book deal of narrative nonfiction for Lila. The book deal helps Lila to merge her travels to Ghana and New York with her life in London and create a new sense of home base. Lila ultimately decides perhaps the point of life’s questions is to keep your head up or wear your powder necklace.

To learn more about the author, visit her website at www.nanaekua.com She is a graduate of Vassar College and lives in New York City.

This novel offers a sensitive portrayal of Afghans and their culture and traditions that contribute to their struggles to build a life in America.  An underlying theme of this novel is the relationship between Amir and his boyhood friend Hassan who is Hazara, descendants of the Mogul people. Hazaras are Shi’a Muslims, while Amir is of the Pashtuns people, who are Sunni Muslims. Hassan is the son of a servant to Amir’s father.

Amir has only his father, Baba, due to his mother’s death in childbirth. His father molds the world around him except for Amir who escapes his father’s aloofness in his dead mother’s books.  Amir reads Rumi, Saadi, Victor Hugo, Jules Vern, Mark Twain and Ian Fleming. Amir prefers to read poetry and to write stories over hunting with his father or playing soccer.

The one sport Amir likes is kite running. Hassan runs the kite, while Amir controls it in the air. Hassan is an expert in knowing the direction the wind blows and eventually they win an important kite contest. The win leads to a better relationship with his father, who is now proud of his son.

Politics interrupt Afghan life as the Russians come into Afghanistan. The resulting chaos leads to Baba and Amir going to America to start a new life. California is a place for Amir to bury his memories and for Baba to mourn his. The relationship of Amir and his father changes in America. Amir sees him as a man who misses greeting people who knew him and his father, knew his grandfather, people who shared ancestors with him and whose pasts were intertwined with his. Baba does not want to accept food stamps and his greatest fear is that an Afghan will see him buying food with welfare money.

In America Amir marries and his father is happy for him. Soon his father dies and Amir goes back to Pakistan for the death of a family friend. He meets the son of Hassam and adopts him and brings him to America, as Hassam no longer lives. Hassam’s son takes up kite running and is as good as his father.

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, son of a diplomat whose family received political asylum in the United States. He lives in northern California and is a physician. The Kite Runner is his first novel.

A review from Publisher’s Weekly:

In an engaging personal memoir, Mackall, an Ohio-based writer and professor of English, describes the close-knit relationship he has cultivated over more than a decade with a neighboring Amish family. This is neither an exposé nor an outsider’s fanciful romanticization of the Amish. By focusing on the loves and losses of one large Amish clan, Mackall breathes life into a complex group often idealized or caricatured. He refers, for example, not to “the Amish” writ large, but instead to “the Swartzentruber Amish I know,” describing in some detail the tremendous differences between the Swartzentrubers, by far the most traditional sect, and the Old Order, New Order, Beachy and other Amish groups. The Swartzentrubers not only eschew electricity but also padded or upholstered chairs, souped-up buggies, indoor plumbing, the tradition of rumspringa (a running-around period for some Amish teens) and perhaps most important for this narrative contact with “the English.” Mackall’s is the first book to venture behind-the-scenes of this most conservative Amish group. At times Mackall is critical of the Swartzentruber way of life (such as when an eight-year-old girl dies in a buggy accident because the sect rejects safety measures for buggies), but it is a deeply respectful account that never veers toward sensationalism. 

Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

Want to know more?

Curious about Amish culture?  Check out a great cultural profile.

Listen to a podcast!  Mackall talks to Andrea Seabrook of NPR about how he gained the trust of his Amish neighbor, how the community takes care of its own members even as it subverts their individuality, the plight of Amish women, and what it’s really like to ride in a buggy.

Check out the book’s official website.

Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch

Nina attempts to find comfort and solace from her sister’s death from cancer by reading a book a day. She sets up a web site for book exchanges and reviews each daily book for a year. Nina feels books offer a window into how other people deal with life and looks to books for empathy, guidance and experience. Books are obtained from libraries, a favorite book store and recommendations from friends and many are international in setting and author.

Sitting in her old, newly covered, purple chair Nina weaves the lives of her husband, immigrant parents, two sisters, and four children into the books she reads. Books are connected to different experiences such as the Freedom Movement in Chicago and her father’s experience in Europe in World War II. How Nina experiences the grief of her sister’s death during her year of reading loosely ties this story together.

Nina finds posting book reviews on her ReadAllDay.org web site brings connections with readers around the world. On any given day, hundreds of readers may pick up and read the same book. Nina receives emails from readers around the world commenting on her reviews and suggesting new books to read.

Nina Sankovitch’s ReadAllDay.org web site is currently up and running. The web site includes a place to contact Nina with comments and book recommendations. The 365 books read are listed by date of reading along with book recommendations for groups.

Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism

 by Belva Davis with Vicki Haddock

Guest Review by Donna

This book is a memoir of the amazing life of a black, female journalist. Belva‘s memoir begins with her birth to a young, poor laundress in Louisiana during the Great Depression. She lived with several relatives without a bed to call her own and little affection. Her family moved to Oakland, CA and she faced double prejudice as a black Southerner.

A recreation center in West Oakland is credited with the rise of locals such as the Pointer Sisters and Bill Russell, a star basketball player. Belva spent much time at the recreation center and tried to make herself useful to staff.

College was not an option. Belva’s journalist career started by volunteering to write about black women’s organizations for local small publications. She submitted community news items and blurbs about notable individuals from the black community in the Bay area. Eventually, she landed a job at a magazine where Belva learned to meticulously record the details that bring a story to life.

This beginning led to a career where Belva covered many of the most important stories of the last half of the century and the first decade of this century. She has served as anchor for three large networks and has won several journalistic awards.

To find out more about this inspiring journalist you can visit:

Belva Davis’s Homepage

An interview with Belva in the Capitol Weekly

A video of Belva speaking with Judy Woodruff about her pioneering career in broadcast news

Here’s an excerpt from the book:

Chapter Nine Dreams Deferred

By 1964, the local NAACP was plotting lawsuits to force recalcitrant Bay Area businesses to halt discriminatory hiring. But then a new tactic, swifter and more effective, began to catch on: the demonstration. The first big one was against Mel’s Drive-In, a burger joint that served blacks but refused to hire them. Targeting the San Francisco diner — which was co-owned by San Francisco supervisor and mayoral candidate Harold Dobbs — more than one hundred people occupied all the seats, and they refused to order until Mel’s hired blacks. Pickets went up at the diner and at Dobbs’s home. After losing the election, he signed an agreement to integrate hiring for up-front jobs.

At Lucky’s grocery stores, protesters would fill their shopping carts to the brim, unload their contents at the counter, wait until cashiers had rung up every item by hand, and then declare, “I’ll pay for these items when you start hiring Negros!” As checkout registers clogged, shopping ground to a standstill.

At San Francisco’s swank Sheraton Palace Hotel, which employed 19 blacks in only menial cleaning jobs out of a staff of 550, about five hundred demonstrators clasped hands and encircled the hotel inside and out; then they staged a “sleep in” that transformed the lobby floor into a wall-to-wall carpet of protesters. And because the car dealerships that lined “Auto Row” along Van Ness Avenue also hired blacks only as janitors, hundreds of white and black protesters staged demonstrations at both the Cadillac dealership and the Lincoln-Mercury dealership to force a hiring accord.

As challenging as the situation was for blacks, women faced multiple obstacles, especially in media. Although a few females had been working as reporters, columnists, and editors for newspapers, and a handful more as DJs or radio hosts, we mostly were consigned to covering life’s curlicues: fashion, entertainment, society happenings. Whether white or black, females did fluff.

But I knew I wanted more. I felt as though someone had hit the fast-forward button and the world around me was advancing in a blur. I was captivated by the big stories, and I wanted to be a part of them.

From the book “The Morning News Is Exciting,” by Don Mee Choi (Action Books).

“Instructions from the Inner Room,” part 6.

Seattle Time’s author’s note: In pre-modern Korea, self-educated, upper-class women wrote instructional poem-songs (kyubang kasa) that were mainly passed down from woman to woman, mother to daughter. These poems, usually recorded in vernacular Korean, “hangul,” spoke of family genealogy, proper conduct, duty and obedience to husbands, in-laws and parents.

I have one more thing to tell you

Don’t envy another’s wealth

Don’t be negligent of nation

Concentrate on house management

Pack bags, pack eggs

pack pegs, pack pigs

It’s done, well done

Your in-laws will smile

Sit for a while

Your husband is the sky

He’ll land one day

Act in a timely manner

Explain to him in an orderly fashion your zeal

Stand up appropriately when you leave

You are peeved

Pack up, pack north

pack down, pack south

Remove your seal and beg

Your husband is the sky

He’ll land one day

Open his seam then close

Open again.

In October, she won the 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award for her debut poetry book, “The Morning News Is Exciting.” Just 10 writers per year win this prestigious award.

“Poetry frees me up in the most magical way,” she said. “I can be inventive — with the language, with the syntax, with the grammar.”

Choi was born in South Korea in 1962; in her book, she writes about the “shoeshine boys” — young children, orphaned in the Korean War, who were forced to make a living shining shoes in the streets. During an uprising known as the 1960 South Korean Student Revolution, these children joined the protest as a last resort, and many were killed.

“They threw their lives to the revolution because they had nothing more to lose,” Choi said.

The fame hasn’t made her lose track of her priorities. Her focus remains on not only writing but also on translation, raising a teenage stepson and teaching her students — whom she is drawn to helping, having experienced times of unrest and transition in her own life.

“I like helping them move forward,” she said. “They inspire me.”

Read more in this December, 2011 article in the Seattle Times: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2017040878_choi18.html

Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

Guest Review by Donna

This historical book tells the life of the first American Indian to graduate from Harvard College. To enroll in Harvard, Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, born around 1646, must cross to English ways from the cultural ways of an Indian tribe of Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard). While inspired by a true story, the book is a work of fiction.

Telling this story is Bethia, who grew up in a small Island settlement of Great Harbor amid a group of early English Puritans. She meets Caleb at age twelve and bonds with him and they struggle to navigate the intellectual, behavioral and cultural ways that separate their two cultures.  Bethia is the daughter of Thomas Mayhew, Great Harbor’s minister who feels called to convert Caleb’s tribe to Calvinism. In this process, Thomas comes to love Caleb as a son.

Makepeace, son of Thomas and brother of Bethia, feels great envy and jealously towards Caleb. Caleb has superior intellect and ability to learn languages such as Latin. Much of this story details the complicated relationships of Bethia to her father, brother and Caleb.  The fictional exchanges between Bethia and Caleb are based upon accounts of conversations with native islanders in 1660’s missionary journals. The Harvard Yard Indian College archaeological dig provided information on the material culture of seventeenth-century Harvard. 

The extensively researched detail and fascinating fiction brought Geraldine Brooks a Pulitzer prize for this book.