Indien & Südasien

In 1975, author Elizabeth Jacks Scott was a young matron from New York with a husband and two small children and the new owner of an old sail loft building in Tenants Harbor, Maine. It had been in her family for years, and it was filled with memories and history, six generations of them, a jumble of contradictory, conflictual, tragic, and happy memories.JOURNEY TO SAFE HARBOR covers three generations of a family where the personal and emotional sacrifices made in the name of mission, commitment and duty, aiming 'to do good in the world', ended with unintended tragic consequences for their children. It is about a professional family, educated, religious and idealistic, but did they understand love? Scott shares a narrative of her collected records, her experiences, and her journey. It narrates the saga of the origins of her family's trauma in Tenants Harbor, how it played out in India and on the south side of Chicago. She toggles between Tenants Harbor, India and Chicago to show the interweaving of three eras and how they resulted in the family's fragmentation and great tragedy. The memoir chronicles the journey of healing through the ups and down of life resulting in Scott, family and the community reconnecting. Elizabeth Jacks Scott taught American and World history for five years, practiced psychotherapy and family therapy in New York City for more than two decades, ran grief groups at St. Bartholomew's Church for seven years, and cofounded Hudson Valley Weddings at The Hill. She is an ordained interfaith minister and a clinical social worker. Scott lives with her husband in New York City, the Hudson Valley, and the coast of Maine. Combined with her husband, they have four children and eight grandchildren.

Since Indiana joined the Union in 1816, residents and visitors alike have pondered the essential question: What is a Hoosier? The final answer may never be determined, but there are, at least, ways to understand the Hoosier character. It was African American pilots taking a stand for equal rights. It was a speech by a presidential candidate that helped keep peace on a tragic night. It was the triumph and near tragedy involving a Mercury Seven astronaut. And it was a sacrifice that ensured a crucial American victory in the Pacific during World War II. As Kurt Vonnegut once said, I don't know what it is about Hoosiers, but wherever you go there is always a Hoosier doing something very important there. Award-winning biographer Ray E. Boomhower tells us why.

Two young children, newcomers to Australia in the 1950s, are left in a children's home by their father. The story begins with this drama of separation and leans back into the past to uncover the circumstances of this unfortunate event and its unexpected outcome.Emerging from the early 20th century, the narrative follows the threads of two families as they weave through four generations in South Asia, culminating in immigration to Australia. These two strands of history traverse important historical events that changed colonial empires as well as individual lives.We meet the first family in India in the 1920s where the early death of a violent husband causes a young Irish/French woman to raise her family alone in the highlands of southern India, rather than return to her homeland. As her family grows, the magic of their childhood, spent in the jungles of the Western Ghats with monkeys, tigers and the Indian people that surround them, colours their lives. As the children reach adulthood, life takes over and Indian Independence, Partition and the 2nd World War create untenable conditions.The life of the second family depicts the childhood of children born to a Scottish tea-planter and his beautiful Indian wife in the highlands of Ceylon at the turn of the 20th century. Their idyllic life is similarly shattered by tragedy which causes them to leave Ceylon for Singapore. Whilst family life in Singapore initially is full of happiness, the Japanese invasion and subsequent Fall of Singapore as well as forced evacuation finds the separated family in Ceylon once again, but now as refugees.Three generations later, four present-day daughters set out on a personal quest to travel into the landscapes of the stories they were told as children in order to reconnect and trace family footsteps. Through their travels in India and Ceylon they discover steep-forested mountains, manicured tea plantations, fragrant spice forests, burning bodies and the warmth and richness of cultures, as they interact with the people of South Asia.Family stories told over generations, form the basis of this narrative that weaves together family saga, memoir and travelogue. These reveal love and loss, tragedy and joy, despair and hope. The strength of women, dealing with raising a family, battling adversity and racism, is woven throughout this narrative as the world changes around them.A number of historical and contemporary travel photos enrich the text.<BR>

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Inspiration for the major film starring Hugh Bonneville, Gillian Anderson, Manish Dayal and Huma Qureshi and directed by Gurinder Chadha.Seventy years ago, at midnight on 14 August 1947, the Union Jack began its final journey down the flagstaff of Viceroy's House, New Delhi. A fifth of humanity claimed their independence from the greatest empire history has ever seen - but the price of freedom was high, as a nation erupted into riots and bloodshed, partition and war.This is an electrifying and acclaimed account of the dying days of the British Raj and the drama played out between Lord Mountbatten, Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, as an empire undertook a violent transformation into the new India and Pakistan.

A journalist explores his family’s history to reveal the hybrid cultural and political landscape of Pakistan, the world’s first Islamic democracy<BR> <BR>Shahan Mufti’s family history, which he can trace back fourteen hundred years to the inner circle of the prophet Muhammad, offers an enlightened perspective on the mystifying history of Pakistan. Mufti uses the stories of his ancestors, many of whom served as judges and jurists in Muslim sharia courts of South Asia for many centuries, to reveal the deepest roots—real and imagined—of Islamic civilization in Pakistan.<BR> <BR>More than a personal history, The Faithful Scribe captures the larger story of the world’s first Islamic democracy, and explains how the state that once promised to bridge Islam and the West is now threatening to crumble under historical and political pressure, and why Pakistan’s destiny matters to us all.