intrepid
Carly
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Fuchshuber, Annegert / Kirk, Heidi / Howe, Florence, PUBLISHER: Feminist Press, This contemporary fable combines luminous illustrations with a deceptively simple but deeply resonant story. Carly is a small girl who must flee from her home when "fire falls from the heavens". She wanders the countryside seeking food, a safe home, and human kindness -- but everywhere she goes she is turned away. Rural villagers quickly chase her from their farms. Wealthy townspeople ignore her, too absorbed in their busy lives to notice a homeless girl. And poor families living on the fringes of the city have no food or shelter to spare. The intrepid Carly journeys on, encountering a series of fanciful creatures who are also unable to accept her. At last, wandering sadly in the rain, Carly comes upon a treehouse inhabited by a friendly being, dressed in jester's motley, who offers her a dry, warm place in his treetop home and introduces himself as a fool. "Is that what they call people who are kind to others?" Carly asks, as she settles happily into her new home. "If you will let me, I would like to be a fool like you". Fuchshuber's highly original and vibrant illustrations give shape to Carly's world as seen through her eyes, from the mystery of an enormous forest to the overwhelming intensity of a crowded city. With themes reminiscent of those in Maurice Sendak's We Are Down in the Dumps With Jack and Guy, Carly carries its compassionate message for adults about exclusion and its effect on abandoned and refugee children, while also reassuring young readers that they will not, finally, be left alone. An animated video of Carly, produced by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, will be released around the world in eight languages in .
Finding George Orwell in Burma
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Larkin, Emma, PUBLISHER: Penguin Press, Over the years the American writer Emma Larkin has spent traveling in Burma, she's come to know all too well the many ways this brutal police state can be described as "Orwellian." The life of the mind exists in a state of siege in Burma, and it long has. But Burma's connection to George Orwell is not merely metaphorical; it is much deeper and more real. Orwell's mother was born in Burma, at the height of the British raj, and Orwell was fundamentally shaped by his experiences in Burma as a young man working for the British Imperial Police. When Orwell died, the novel-in-progress on his desk was set in Burma. It is the place George Orwell's work holds in Burma today, however, that most struck Emma Larkin. She was frequently told by Burmese acquaintances that Orwell did not write one book about their country--his first novel, "Burmese Days"--but in fact he wrote three, the "trilogy" that included "Animal Farm" and "Nineteen Eighty-Four." When Larkin quietly asked one Burmese intellectual if he knew the work of George Orwell, he stared blankly for a moment and then said, "Ah, you mean the prophet " In one of the most intrepid political travelogues in recent memory, Emma Larkin tells of the year she spent traveling through Burma using the life and work of George Orwell as her compass. Going from Mandalay and Rangoon to poor delta backwaters and up to the old hill-station towns in the mountains of Burma's far north, Larkin visits the places where Orwell worked and lived, and the places his books live still. She brings to vivid life a country and a people cut off from the rest of the world, and from one another, by the ruling military junta and its vast network of spies and informers. Using Orwell enables her to show, effortlessly, the weight of the colonial experience on Burma today, the ghosts of which are invisible and everywhere. More important, she finds that the path she charts leads her to the people who have found ways to somehow resist the soul-crushing effects of life in this most cruel police state. And George Orwell's moral clarity, hatred of injustice, and keen powers of observation serve as the author's compass in another sense too: they are qualities she shares and they suffuse her book--the keenest and finest reckoning with life in this police state that has yet been written. A brave and revelatory reconnaissance of modern Burma, one of the world's grimmest and most shuttered police states, using as its compass the life and work of George Orwell, the man many in Burma call simply "the prophet"