City of Refuge

City of Refuge PDF Author: Tom Piazza
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061982814
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families—one black and one white—confront a storm that will change the course of their lives. SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward, the community where he was born and raised. His sister, Lucy, is a soulful mess, and SJ has been trying to keep her son, Wesley, out of trouble. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city's alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his own family. New Orleans' music and culture have been Craig's passion, but his wife, Alice, has never felt comfortable in the city. The arrival of their two children has inflamed their arguments about the wisdom of raising a family there. When the news comes of a gathering hurricane—named Katrina—the two families make their own very different plans to weather the storm. The Donaldsons join the long evacuation convoy north, across Lake Pontchartrain and out of the city. SJ boards up his windows and brings Lucy to his house, where they wait it out together, while Wesley stays with a friend in another part of town. But the long night of wind and rain is only the beginning—and when the levees give way and the flood waters come, the fate of each family changes forever. The Williamses are scattered—first to the Convention Center and the sweltering Superdome, and then far beyond city and state lines, where they struggle to reconnect with one another. The Donaldsons, stranded and anxious themselves, find shelter first in Mississippi, then in Chicago, as Craig faces an impossible choice between the city he loves and the family he had hoped to raise there. Ranging from the lush neighborhoods of New Orleans to Texas, Missouri, Chicago, and beyond, City of Refuge is a modern masterpiece—a panoramic novel of family and community, trial and resilience, told with passion, wisdom, and a deep understanding of American life in our time.

City of Refuge

City of Refuge PDF Author: Tom Piazza
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061982814
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
In the heat of late summer, two New Orleans families—one black and one white—confront a storm that will change the course of their lives. SJ Williams, a carpenter and widower, lives and works in the Lower Ninth Ward, the community where he was born and raised. His sister, Lucy, is a soulful mess, and SJ has been trying to keep her son, Wesley, out of trouble. Across town, Craig Donaldson, a Midwestern transplant and the editor of the city's alternative paper, faces deepening cracks in his own family. New Orleans' music and culture have been Craig's passion, but his wife, Alice, has never felt comfortable in the city. The arrival of their two children has inflamed their arguments about the wisdom of raising a family there. When the news comes of a gathering hurricane—named Katrina—the two families make their own very different plans to weather the storm. The Donaldsons join the long evacuation convoy north, across Lake Pontchartrain and out of the city. SJ boards up his windows and brings Lucy to his house, where they wait it out together, while Wesley stays with a friend in another part of town. But the long night of wind and rain is only the beginning—and when the levees give way and the flood waters come, the fate of each family changes forever. The Williamses are scattered—first to the Convention Center and the sweltering Superdome, and then far beyond city and state lines, where they struggle to reconnect with one another. The Donaldsons, stranded and anxious themselves, find shelter first in Mississippi, then in Chicago, as Craig faces an impossible choice between the city he loves and the family he had hoped to raise there. Ranging from the lush neighborhoods of New Orleans to Texas, Missouri, Chicago, and beyond, City of Refuge is a modern masterpiece—a panoramic novel of family and community, trial and resilience, told with passion, wisdom, and a deep understanding of American life in our time.

City of Refuge

City of Refuge PDF Author: Marcus Peyton Nevius
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820356425
Category : Dismal Swamp (N.C. and Va.)
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources-including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies-to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

Trust First

Trust First PDF Author: Bruce Deel
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525538178
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
If we choose to trust unconditionally, how many lives could we change? When Pastor Bruce Deel took over the Mission Church in the 30314 zip code of Atlanta, he had orders to shut it down. The church was old and decrepit, and its neighborhood--known as "Better Leave, You Effing Fool," or "the Bluff," for short--had the highest rates of crime, homelessness, and incarceration in Georgia. Expecting his time there to only last six months, Deel was not prepared for what happened next. One Sunday, he was approached by a woman he didn't know. "I've been hooking and stripping for fourteen years," she said. "Can you help me?" Soon after, Bruce founded an organization called City of Refuge rooted in the principle of radical trust. Other nonprofits might drug test before offering housing, lock up valuables, or veto a program giving job skills and character references to felons as "a liability." But Bruce believed the best way to improve outcomes for the marginalized and impoverished was to extend them trust, even if that trust was violated multiple times--and even if someone didn't yet trust themselves. Since then, City of Refuge has helped over 20,000 people in Atlanta's toughest neighborhood escape the cycles of homelessness, joblessness, and drug abuse. Of course, trust alone can't overcome a broken system that perpetuates inequality. Presenting an unvarnished window into the lives of ex-cons, drug addicts, human trafficking survivors, and displaced souls who have come through City of Refuge, Trust First examines the context in which Bruce's Atlanta neighborhood went downhill--and what City of Refuge chose to do about it. They've become a one-stop-shop for transitional housing, on-site medical and mental health care, childcare, and vocational training, including accredited intensives in auto tech, culinary arts, and coding. While most social services focus on one pain point and leave the burden on the poor to find the crosstown bus that'll serve their other needs, Bruce argues that bringing someone out of homelessness requires treating all of their needs simultaneously. This model has proven so effective that a dozen new chapters of City of Refuge have opened in the US, including in California, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia, Texas, and Georgia. More than a narrative about a single place in time, this radical primer for behavioral change belongs on every leader's shelf. Heartfelt, deeply personal, and inspiring, Trust First will break down your assumptions about whether anyone is ever truly a lost cause. Bruce will donate a portion of his proceeds from Trust First to the charitable organization City of Refuge.

The Fifth Sacred Thing

The Fifth Sacred Thing PDF Author: Starhawk
Publisher: Bantam
ISBN: 0307477657
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression. Declaration of the Four Sacred Things The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them. To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves became the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. no one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy. All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity. To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible. To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives. Praise for The Fifth Sacred Thing “This is wisdom wrapped in drama.”—Tom Hayden, California state senator “Starhawk makes the jump to fiction quite smoothly with this memorable first novel.”—Locus “Totally captivating . . . a vision of the paradigm shift that is essential for our very survival as a species on this planet.”—Elinor Gadon, author of The Once and Future Goddess “This strong debut fits well against feminist futuristic, utopic, and dystopic works by the likes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood.”—Library Journal

The City of Refuge [New and Expanded Edition]

The City of Refuge [New and Expanded Edition] PDF Author: Rudolph Fisher
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 9780826266583
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
One of the premier writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Rudolph Fisher wrote short stories depicting the multifaceted black urban experience that are still acclaimed today for their humor, grace, and objective view of Harlem life. Through his words, wrote the New York Times Book Review, “one feels, smells, and tastes his Harlem; its people come alive and one cares about them.” A definitive collection of Fisher’s short stories, The City of Refuge offers vibrant tales that deal with the problems faced by newcomers to the city, ancestor figures who struggle to instill a sense of integrity in the young, problems of violence and vengeance, and tensions of caste and class. This anthology has now been expanded to include seven previously unpublished stories that take up such themes as marital infidelity and passing for black and also relate the further adventures of Jinx and Bubber, the comic duo who appeared in Fisher’s two novels. This new edition also includes two unpublished speeches and the popular article “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” describing the craze for black music and dance. John McCluskey’s introduction has been updated to place the additional works within the context of Fisher’s career while situating his oeuvre within the broader context of American writing during the twenties. Fisher recognized the dramatic and comic power in African American folklore and music and frequented Harlem’s many cabarets, speakeasies, and nightclubs, and at the core of his work is a strong regard for music as context and counterpoint. The City of Refuge now better captures the sounds of the city experience by presenting all of Fisher’s known stories. It offers a portrait of Harlem unmatched in depth and range by Fisher’s contemporaries or successors, celebrating, as Booklist noted, “the complexity of black urban life in its encounter with the dangers and delights of the city.” This expanded edition adds new perspectives to that experience and will enhance Fisher’s status for a new generation of readers.

City of Refuge

City of Refuge PDF Author: Valerie Farber
Publisher: City of Refuge
ISBN: 098160580X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Bat-Shachar, a teenaged girl, gifted with beauty and intellect, languishes in the household of her father, a prominent Israelite scholar. Intimidated by Bat-Shachar¿s coming of age, her father grows aloof. He scrutinizes her actions, and his discipline is heavy-handed. Her father¿s rages drive Bat-Shachar from home. In the company of the family¿s Canaanite maidservant, Bat Shachar happens upon pagan rituals. The visions she sees shake her to the core of her existence. Tzuriel is a metalworking apprentice. Upon seeing the agony of his people butchered by marauders, he vows to equip his nation for battle. After infiltrating enemy territory to acquire the forbidden skills of crafting iron weapons, Tzuriel faces an awesome fate, borne of a fleeting indiscretion. The paths of Bat-Shachar and Tzuriel intertwine when they must flee from their tribal villages. They race towards a City of Refuge as bloodthirsty enemies pursue them.

City of Refuge

City of Refuge PDF Author: Michael J. Lewis
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400884314
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A fascinating exploration of the urbanism at the heart of Utopian thinking The vision of Utopia obsessed the nineteenth-century mind, shaping art, literature, and especially town planning. In City of Refuge, Michael Lewis takes readers across centuries and continents to show how Utopian town planning produced a distinctive type of settlement characterized by its square plan, collective ownership of properties, and communal dormitories. Some of these settlements were sanctuaries from religious persecution, like those of the German Rappites, French Huguenots, and American Shakers, while others were sanctuaries from the Industrial Revolution, like those imagined by Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and other Utopian visionaries. Because of their differences in ideology and theology, these settlements have traditionally been viewed separately, but Lewis shows how they are part of a continuous intellectual tradition that stretches from the early Protestant Reformation into modern times. Through close readings of architectural plans and archival documents, many previously unpublished, he shows the network of connections between these seemingly disparate Utopian settlements—including even such well-known town plans as those of New Haven and Philadelphia. The most remarkable aspect of the city of refuge is the inventive way it fused its eclectic sources, ranging from the encampments of the ancient Israelites as described in the Bible to the detailed social program of Thomas More's Utopia to modern thought about education, science, and technology. Delving into the historical evolution and antecedents of Utopian towns and cities, City of Refuge alters notions of what a Utopian community can and should be.

City of Refuge

City of Refuge PDF Author: Starhawk
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780996959506
Category : Utopias
Languages : en
Pages : 684

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Book Description
Amidst the ruins of the violent, desperate world of 2048 stands a green and flourishing city where four things are sacred-Air, Fire, Water, and Earth. When the ruthless Stewards of the Southlands invade, the people of Califia defeat them using nonviolence and magic. But they'll be back, unless the northerners can liberate the Southlands first..

Five Cities of Refuge

Five Cities of Refuge PDF Author: Lawrence Kushner
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0307523780
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
In the ancient Jewish practice of the kavannah (a meditation designed to focus one’s heart on its spiritual goal), Lawrence Kushner and David Mamet offer their own reactions to key verses from each week’s Torah portion, opening the biblical text to new layers of understanding. Here is a fascinating glimpse into two great minds, as each author approaches the text from his unique perspective, each seeking an understanding of the Bible’s personalities and commandments, paradoxes and ambiguities. Kushner offers his words of Torah with a conversational enthusiasm that ranges from family dynamics to the Kabbalah; Mamet challenges the reader, often beginning his comment far afield—with Freud or the American judiciary—before returning to a text now wholly reinterpreted. In the tradition of Israel as a people who wrestle with God, Kushner and Mamet grapple with the biblical text, succumbing neither to apologetics nor parochialism, asking questions without fear of the answers they may find. Over the course of a year of weekly readings, they comment on all aspects of the Bible: its richness of theme and language, its contradictions, its commandments, and its often unfathomable demands. If you are already familiar with the Bible, this book will draw you back to the text for a deeper look. If you have not yet explored the Bible in depth, Kushner and Mamet are guides of unparalleled wisdom and discernment. Five Cities of Refuge is easily accessible yet powerfully illuminating. Each week’s comments can be read in a few minutes, but they will give you something to think about all week long. Lawrence Kushner teaches and writes as the Emanu-El Scholar at The Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco. He has taught at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York City and served for twenty-eight years as rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Sudbury, Massachusetts. A frequent lecturer, he is also the author of more than a dozen books on Jewish spirituality and mysticism. He lives in San Francisco. David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright. He is the author of Glengarry Glen Ross, The Cryptogram, and Boston Marriage, among other plays. He has also published three novels and many screenplays, children's books, and essay collections.

Cities of Refuge

Cities of Refuge PDF Author: Michael Helm
Publisher: Tin House Books
ISBN: 1935639501
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
Cities of Refuge weaves a web of incrimination and inquiry, where mysteries live within mysteries, and stories within stories, and the power to save or condemn rests in the forces of history, and in the realm of our deepest longings. One summer night on a side street in downtown Toronto, Kim Lystrander is attacked by a stranger. In the weeks and months that follow, she returns to the night, in writing, searching for harbingers of the incident and clues to the identity of her assailant. The attack also torments Kim’s father, and as he investigates the crime on his own, he begins to unravel. Entwined in their stories are Kim’s ailing mother, a young Colombian man living in the country illegally, and a woman whose faith-based belief in the duty to give asylum to any who seek it, even those judged guilty, endangers them all. A novel of profound moral tension and luminous prose, Cities of Refuge shows how a single act of violence connects close-by fears to distant political terrors. It weaves a web of incrimination and inquiry in which mysteries live within mysteries, and stories within stories, and the power to save or condemn rests not only in the forces of history but also in the realm of our deepest longings.