Related products
Purple Hibiscus is set in postcolonial Nigeria, a country beset by political instability and economic difficulties. The central character is Kambili Achike, aged fifteen for much of the period covered by the book, a member of a wealthy family dominated by her devoutly Catholic father, Eugene. Eugene is both a religious zealot and a violent figure in the Achike household, subjecting his wife Beatrice, Kambili herself, and her brother Jaja to beatings and psychological cruelty.
The story is told through Kambili’s eyes and is essentially about the disintegration of her family unit and her struggle to grow to maturity. A key period is the time Kambili and her brother spend at the house of her father’s sister, Ifeoma, and her three children. This household offers a marked contrast to what Kambili and Jaja are used to. It practices a completely different form of Catholicism, making for a happy, liberal place that encourages its members to speak their minds. In this nurturing environment, both Kambili and Jaja become more open and more able to voice their own opinions. While at Aunty Ifeoma’s, Kambili also falls in love with a young priest, Father Amadi, which awakens her sense of her own sexuality.
Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.
‘Angela Davis swings a wrecking ball into the racist and sexist underpinnings of the American prison system’—Cynthia McKinney, former Congresswoman, US.
Davis’ central point is worth studying and bringing to the foreground in the prison reform movement. She argues that prisons do not solve crime. Within the last two decades the prison boom simply has intensified the criminalization of certain types of behavior, rather than having brought official crime rates down.—http://www.politicalaffairs.net
Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village is a 1966 book by William H. Hinton that describes the land-reform campaign during the Chinese Civil War conducted from 1945 to 1948 by the Chinese Communist Party in “Long Bow Village” (the name used in the book for the village of Zhangzhuangcun in Shanxi province). Hinton lived in the village in spring and summer of 1948 and witnessed scenes described in the book and recreates earlier events based on local records and interviews with participants. He explains party strategy to present the campaign’s successes in building a revolutionary consciousness and a power-base among the poor peasants, but also its errors and excesses, especially the violence toward rich peasants and landlords. Fanshen has been compared to Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China and characterized as “perhaps the book that most changed American cold war perceptions of the Chinese Revolution.”
Originally published: 1966
Author: William H. Hinton
Poems selected and translated from Marathi by Dilip Chitre
Namdeo Dhasal tr. Dilip Chitre
‘This is Mumbai without her makeup, her botox, her power yoga; the Mumbai that seethes, unruly, menacing, yet vitally alive’—The Hindu
‘This elegant book is a journey through the bowels of those quarters over which we have constructed robust mental flyovers’—The Sunday Times of India
‘Chitre succeeds in reproducing the images and metaphors of Dhasal’s work, and his unmistakable, hard-hitting voice’—Outlook
‘Dhasal employs an aesthetic of fracture… towards writing into existence the continuing alienation of dalits seduced by the shiny assurances of a still-new nation’—Biblio: A Review of Books
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.