Bøger udgivet af Baraka Books

Liz, born in China and raised in Montreal, is about to land in Germany for a summer physics internship at the end of her freshman year. Eager for a new beginning, she hopes to break free of her unrealized childhood dream of becoming a pianist, a dead-end romantic relationship, and the tug of war between her Chinese and Canadian identities. In Germany, she meets fellow intern Haider, an Indian Muslim from Toronto, and they fall in love against expectations. But summer doesn't last forever. Once they return to Canada, culture clashes and family disapproval threaten to pull them apart. As her sense of self is pushed dangerously close to a tipping point, Liz must summon the courage to survive the chaos that her life has become.

Connected via the fictional town of St Anne' s, a community along Nova Scotia's western shore, each story takes its title from the children's rhyme Counting Crows. One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a message, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told. Within each tale an individual (often from the same family, always from the same town) will note the number of crows in their midst and recall the poem as it relates to the prophecy and the story at hand. Between the last century and the current one, the characters (for the most part, women) walk a shifting landscape carved out by war, poverty, and patriarchal expectations. Beneath the gaze of a small town and these intelligent birds whose memories are unforgiving, we are as close as a heartbeat to the souls upon these pages.

In the fiery political debates in and about Italy, silence reigns about the country's colonial legacy. Reducing European colonial history to Britain and France has effectively concealed an enduring phenomenon in Italian history that lasted for 80 years (1882 to 1960). It also blots out the history of the countries it colonized in Northeastern Africa. Francesco Filippi challenges the myth of Italians being " nice people" or " good" colonialists who simply built roads for Africans. Despite extensive historiography, the collective awareness of the nations conquered and the violence inflicted on them remains superficial, be it in Italy or internationally. He retraces Italy's colonial history, focusing on how propaganda, literature and popular culture have warped our understanding of the past and thereby hampered our ability to deal with the present. Filippi's unique approach in which he deftly pits historical facts against popular myths provides a model that can be adapted to countries everywhere, including the United States and Canada.

The Thickness of Ice is a tender and tragic tale set in the remote sub-arctic tundra, in the small town of Churchill with a transient population on Hudson Bay. The barren icy landscape pervades the characters' lives and relationships. As the novel opens Wade confesses that he was responsible the death of his best friend Jack, out on the tundra, three years after meeting him. They had been arguing about a Dene woman, Tess, they were both in love with. Jack's body was never found, and Wade never admitted to the act. It was asssumed that Jack had left abruptly. However, many years later, Wade meets Esther who moves to Churchill to live with him. She hears the story of Jack's disappearance. For Wade's sake, she determines to resolve what happened to Jack and bring some closure. For Wade, everything is now threatened.

Two young writers who grew up in the shadow of the huge chimney of a copper refinery in Rouyn-Noranda speak out. They refuse to be lulled by the songs of gold that have silenced the people who built the city and enriched the foundry owners for many decades. They subtly and poetically illustrate the love-hate relationship they maintain with the " piles of slag and copper." This passionate dialogue has hit Quebec bookstores like a tornado and will echo in mining towns across North America. The title is inspired by the Marguerite Duras book Hiroshima Mon Amour and the film by Alain Resnais.

Born during the Great Depression, Jean-Claude Morel is an Everyman, an ordinary Montreal construction worker who has built the city with his own hands, digging its metro, creating islands, and weaving expressways through the downtown core. But the progress has come at a cost: neighbourhoods have been razed, streets wiped off the map, and the Morel family expropriated. Teeming with life, Morel uncovers a story of Montreal that has been buried under years of glitzy urban renewal and modernization. This intricately constructed literary novel is a profoundly human portrait of one man and his time, a monument to a city, and a toast to days gone by.

Wendake, Odanak, Wô linak, Pointe-du-Lac, Kahnawake, Kanesatake, Akwesasne, Kitigan Zibi are communities located all along the St. Lawrence River valley and its tributaries. They have been home to descendants of the Huron-Wendat, Algonquin, Nipissing, and Iroquois nations. These First Nations have in common the fact that their ancestors were allies of the French and had converted to Christianity. Historians have ignored these nations described as " domiciled Indians" (" sauvages domicilié s" ) by the French administrators. Jean-Pierre Sawaya carefully studied how an alliance of such diverse " missions" was created, developed and conducted to become The Seven Nations of Canada. How did this confederation come about? Who took part and what were their roles? The answers are mined in the massive colonial archives. Seven Fires is original research at its best, combining detailed analysis and systematic investigation, that has enabled the author to dispel the tenacious colonial myth about irrational, submissive, and fatalistic Indigenous peoples. Readers will discover forward-looking people motivated by a deep desire for independence and solidarity.

Bloody Sunday (1972) catapulted the Irish " troubles" onto the world stage, exacerbating suspicion in US intelligence circles that the IRA might turn to the Soviets for guns. South Boston native Raymond Daly, just off a CIA stint in Laos, is sent to Ireland to re-establish a line running guns to the IRA. He deftly earns the trust of gunrunner Slowey, a tough money-making South Boston native, who introduces him to an IRA splinter group operating near Blacklion, a town bordering on Northern Ireland. Ray begins to manipulate Aoife, an Irish woman, in order to gain the trust of the community and embed himself in the organization. After the British Special Air Services raid a safehouse, Ray finds himself involved in executing an informant and his wife. But he also finds himself getting soft on some of those he was sent to infiltrate and becoming more like his cover, " an Irish American gunrunner with a romantic attachment to the Cause," and less like an obedient CIA operative. Events spiral, culminating in a shootout with the British army that compels Ray to make a Faustian decision on his future and that of Aoife and the others he was assigned to manipulate.

Tess has just moved to Montreal from Nova Scotia, and seeks to lose herself by involving herself in the lives of others. She befriends an older man while delivering meals to the elderly. Her interest in his past veers into obsession after furtively going through his photos and letters and "e;borrowing"e; his journal. Though fact and fiction are blurred, they reveal a man shaken by political polarization and repression in his Latin-American homeland. Tess learns about a young, passionate man in the 1970s forced to reconcile his love for a militant young woman and his dedication to his best friend whose family is on the other side of the political divide. As she delves deeper into Mr. the man's story, she questions her own life choices, emotions, and obsessions. Exploring cultural and personal memory, Almost Visible reflects on what can happen when a lonely person intervenes in another person's life.

Alfred Thomas Wood was nothing and everything. One hundred years before the Hollywood film The Great Impostor, Wood, the Great Absquatulator, roved through the momentous mid-19th century events from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to New England, Liberia, Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Canada, the U.S. Mid-West, and the South. An Oxford-educated preacher in Maine and Boston, he claimed to be a Cambridge-educated doctor of divinity in Liberia, whereas neither University admitted black students then. He spent 18 months in an English prison. In Hamburg in 1854, he published a history of Liberia in German. Later, in Montreal, he claimed to have been Superintendent of Public Works in Sierra Leone. He served the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as an Oxford-educated DD, then toiled in post-Civil War Tennessee as a Cambridge-trained MD. People who knew him couldn't wait to forget him. In his Foreword, Rapper Webster (Aly Ndiaye) compares Wood to a mid-19th-century Forrest Gump but also to Malcolm X, before Malcolm became political.

Legend would have it that Mussolini put roofs over Italians' heads, developed the economy, had trains running on time, stood up for justice and against the mafia, protected the Jews from Nazi Germany, was a feminist, and put Italy on the map as a respected power. The founder of fascism's only mistake was allying with Hitler. Though this is entirely false, it didn't prevent Antonio Tahani, president of the European Union, from declaring in 2019 that "e;if we must be honest, he [Mussolini] did positive things to realize infrastructures ... he reclaimed many parts of our Italy."e; In fact, only 6 percent of the improvements referred to were done during the 21 years of fascist rule. Surgically, but with wit, Francesco Filippi demolishes each and every myth that has taken root about Mussolini and fascism in an uplifting handbook for political and intellectual self-defense. No stones are left unturned, including the colonial devastation of Libya and Ethiopia. Though written first for Italians, it is relevant and timely for North Americans. Through a study of Mussolini and Italy, Filippi shows how such legends are built on webs of lie, manipulation of History, and constant uncontested repetition, explaining at the same time why so many people fall victim to the propaganda.

In this hard-hitting anthology, Ishmael Reed and Carla Blank have invited a diverse group of informed and accomplished writers, both women and men, who are rarely heard to comment on the long-standing bigotry on Broadway towards many different ethnic minorities.

When Ishmael Reed wrote The Terrible Twos about the American infantile need for instant gratification, he could not have realized that in June 2020, journalist Nicole Wallace would be referring to a president as a "e;toddler."e; Reed had parodied other genres, the gothic novel, the detective novel, the western, and the neo-slave narrative, a term that he coined in 1984, and which began a big academic payroll as it was included in syllabi nation-wide. From his first novel, The Free-Lance Pallbearers, Afro-Futurist before the critical term existed, Ishmael Reed has reshaped traditional forms and extended them. As a Jazz pianist, who has performed in clubs and even in a palace in Italy, he compares it to taking cliche chords and re-harmonizing them. The Terrible Fours follows The Terrible Twos (1982) and The Terrible Threes (1989). It is part science fiction, part Washington Novel (Think Drew Pearson's novel, The Senator, films Seven Days In May and The Manchurian Candidate) and part Christmas Novel. Some characters have been dropped and some of the principals are back. St. Nicholas is here, but his sidekick Black Peter is missing. Dean Clift, the president who was removed from office, still resides in a Maryland sanatorium. Televangelist Clement Jones still runs the White House. "e;The Rapture"e; that Jones and the figurehead president Jesse Hatch promised hasn't arrived. The citizens of the planet Dido await an invasion from earth and their planet, an alien in the body of a deceased television producer, works inside the government and attempts to disrupt the invasion. Termite Control, a follower of Odin and a necrophiliac who was dismissed as a political threat in The Terrible Threes, is gaining in the polls, and more and more and more. Reviewing The Terrible Twos, the late John Leonard wrote in The New York Times: "e;Mr. Reed is as close as we are likely to get to a Garcia Marquez, elaborating his own mythology even as he trashes ours."e;

The War of Rebellion still divides the United States. Some rebel generals, whom the famous pro-confederate propaganda film "e;Gone With The Wind"e; referred to as "e;Knights,"e; earned their massacre bona fides by murdering thousands of blacks, Mexicans, and Native Americans. The "e;Knight"e; Robert E. Lee fought children during the Battle of Buena Vista in 1847. The children, Los niños heroes, refused to surrender and were slaughtered. The subjects addressed in this book include white nationalism, Donald Trump, Quentin Tarantino and Django, the musical Hamilton, Ferguson, Missouri, Amiri Baraka, a different take on #metoo, the one-at-a-time tokenism of an elite, who chooses winners and losers among minority artists, the Alt-Right, the use of immigrants to shame black America, and much more.

In the late 19th century, French-Canadian Catholic immigrants were deemed a threat to the US, potential terrorists in service of the Pope. A conspiracy theory suggested the immigrants were plotting to annex parts of the US to an independent Quebec. This groundbreaking study sets this neglected tale in the broader context of North American history.

Hydro-Québec manages one of the largest power grids on the continent. It is among the most profitable, the least expensive, and the greenest. With a stunning renewable energy rate of 99.8%, Quebec has two-generation advance on places like California and Ontario. Combining a reporters' style with thought, philosophy, and a touch of humour, Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau look into Hydro-Québec's future as the public utility marks the 75th anniversary of its founding. The future is now and it is electric. It spans widely diverse fields such as big data aggregation centers, exports to the United States, acquisitions in Mexico, Chinese buses, mega-batteries, bitcoins, charging stations, and much more. Between now and Hydro-Québec's 100th anniversary, the challenges will be vast. As habits and expectations change radically, everything will be on the table, from solar panels to rates, from remote heating control to underground power lines, and from the environment to relations with the indigenous peoples.

When President Barack Obama demanded formally in the summer of 2011 that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad step down, it was not the first time Washington had sought regime change in Damascus. The United States had waged a long war against Syria from the very moment the country's fiercely independent Arab nationalist movement-of which Assad and his father Hafez al-Assad were committed devotees-came to power in 1963. Washington sought to purge Arab nationalist influence from the Syrian state and the Arab world more broadly because it was a threat to its agenda of establishing global primacy and promoting business-friendly investment climates for US banks, investors and corporations throughout the world. Arab nationalists aspired to unify the world's 400 million Arabs into a single super-state capable of challenging United States hegemony in West Asia and North Africa and becoming a major player on the world stage free from the domination of the former colonial powers and the US. Washington had waged long wars on the leaders of the Arab nationalist movement-Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq's Saddam, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, and Syria's Assads, often allying with particularly violent forms of political Islam to undermine its Arab nationalist foes. By 2011, only one pan-Arabist state remained in the region-Syria. In Washington's Long War on Syria Stephen Gowans examines the decades-long struggle between secular Arab nationalism, political Islam, and United States imperialism for control of Syria, the self-proclaimed Den of Arabism, and last secular pan-Arabist state in the region.

Before the Davie Crockets, the Daniel Boones and Jim Bridgers, the French had pushed far west and north establishing trade and kin networks across the continent. They founded settlements that would become great cities such as Detroit, Saint Louis, and New Orleans, but their history has been largely buried or relegated to local lore or confined to Quebec. In this seminal work, Foxcurran, Bouchard, and Malette scrutinize primary sources and uncover the alliances between early French settlers and voyagers and the indigenous nations.

Including material and photographs not included in most of the 100 other books about the champion, Ishmael Reed's The Complete Muhammad Ali is more than just a biography-it is a fascinating portrait of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. An honest, balanced portrayal of Ali, the book includes voices that have been omitted from other books. It charts Ali's evolution from Black Nationalism to a universalism, but does not discount the Nation of Islam and Black Nationalism's important influence on his intellectual development. Filipino American author Emil Guillermo speaks about how "e;The Thrilla' In Manila"e; brought the Philippines into the 20th century. Fans of Muhammad Ali, boxing fans, and those interested in modern African American history and the Nation of Islam will be fascinated by this biography by an accomplished American author.

Revealing a little-known part of North American history, this lively guide tells the fascinating tale of the settlement of the St. Lawrence Valley. It also tells of the Montreal and Quebec-based explorers and traders who travelled, mapped, and inhabited a very large part of North America, and ""embrothered the peoples"" they met, as Jack Kerouac wrote.

Tells the fascinating story of Montreal, Canada, from prehistoric time through the 21st century. From the Iroquoian community of Hochelaga to the bustling economic metropolis that Montreal has become, this account describes the social, economic, political, and cultural forces and trends that have driven the city's development, shedding light on the city's French, British, and American influences.