From her home in New Mexico, Baba continues to navigate the unpredictable currents of old age with her usual ironic sense of humor. She is renting an apartment in a Victorian house where the heating and plumbing challenge her and her landlord.. Her three daughters and her grandchildren live in Oregon, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, so she must tackle airline regulations if she visits. Damp and cold weather set off arthritis in her knees and spine, but she seldom babies herself to get where she is going. When she is not playing bridge or doing crossword puzzles, she contemplates decorated sweatshirts, her pleasures and displeasures gambling in Las Vegas, the laws of physics pertaining to clogged drains, plastic and pills to enhance sexual prowess, meerkats, cell phones, the ignorance of American tourists in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness, zombies and aliens, and teenage ego-centricity. She avoids the health police whenever she can but still manages to give up smoking.

To Mitra Milutinovic, family is everything. After taking a fall in her family home, ninety-year-old Mitra decides to uproot herself for the last stage of her life and move into Maple Retirement Place. Though her family is devasted, they respect the matriarch of their family and help her with this new transition. Mitra slowly begins to settle into her environment as her great-granddaughter, Sofija, visits Mitra every week, not satisfied that her partner-in-crime has left her home. Sofija begins to reflect on their conversations and decides to write her baba’s biography. Each visit brings more questions about Mitra’s childhood in the former Yugoslavia and the love story of her great-grandparents, leading to night-long conversations about the difference in generational traditions. While Mitra delves into her past, images of her husband, Petar, and the life they made for themselves in this new country flood her memory. Though longing to be with him, she is determined to focus on her new family at Maple Retirement Place while keeping a watchful eye on her children. Yet, when a sudden illness rocks the foundation of her family, Mitra’s faith is shaken. She prays that the strength and love she and Petar created as a family will reach beyond her children's generations to comfort the next. Baba's Story celebrates Mitra's immigration to Canada and how the next generations of her family flourish in the country she now calls home.

There are personalities born on this Earth even today who are very difficult to comprehend and who give new direction to humanity. Such lives enrich not only the lives around them, but are an inspiration for future generations.

Michael Mucz's prolonged primary research into Ukrainian-Canadian folk history culminates in Baba's Kitchen Medicines. This book bursts with the cultural memory of pioneering folk from Canada's prairieland. From fever to frostbite, this incomparable compendium of tinctures, poultices, salves, decoctions, infusions, plasters, and tonics will fascinate and often mortify readers from all walks of life. The comprehensiveness of Mucz's research and interviews framed with deftly painted historical, cultural, and botanical backgrounds guarantee that this chapter of the Canadian story will continue to be told for generations to come. It is a deep, charming, and often moving work of intricate anthropology that will stir scholar and non-specialist alike.

Baba Rexheb, a Muslim mystic from the Balkans, founded the first Bektashi community in America. This is his life story and the story of his communities: the traditional Bektashi tekke in Albania where he first served, the displaced persons camps to which he escaped after the war, the centuries-old tekke in Cairo where he waited, and the Bektashi community that he founded in Michigan in 1954 and led until his passing in 1995. Baba Rexheb lived through the twentieth century, its wars, disruptions, and dislocations, but still at a profound level was never displaced. Through Bektashi stories, oral histories, and ethnographic experience, Frances Trix recounts the life and times of this modern Sufi leader. She studied with Baba Rexheb in his community for more than twenty years. As a linguistic anthropologist, she taped twelve years of their weekly meetings in Turkish, Albanian, and Arabic. She draws extensively on Baba's own words, as well as interactions at the Michigan Bektashi center, for a remarkable perspective on our times. You come to know Baba Rexheb and his gentle way of teaching through example and parable, poetry and humor. The book also documents the history of the 700-year-old Bektashi order in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Balkans and Egypt and its transposition to America. It attests to the role of Sufi centers in Islamic community life and their interaction with people of other faiths.

Sri Sai Baba, 1836-1918, spiritual leader from India.