The autobiographical essays in The Girls in My Town create an unforgettable portrait of a family in Los Angeles. Reaching back to her grandmother’s childhood and navigating through her own girlhood and on to the present, Angela Morales contemplates moments of loss and longing, truth and beauty, motherhood and daughterhood. She writes about her parents’ appliance store and how she escaped from it, the bowling alley that provided refuge, and the strange and beautiful things she sees while riding her bike in the early mornings. She remembers fighting for equal rights for girls as a sixth grader, calling the cops when her parents fought, and listening with her mother to Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman,” the soundtrack of her parents’ divorce. Poignant, serious, and funny, Morales’s book is both a coming-of-age story and an exploration of how a writer discovers her voice.

The volume Memories of my Town is an exploration into how town dwellers experience their environment in a complicated way .As people in urban milieus relate themselves to the environment, this takes place on many levels, where especially the time level becomes problematic. The urban buildings and settings can be looked upon as a kind of collective history, as carriers or witnesses of times past. But it is only the town dwellers that experience urban time itself, the time they live in, but through their memories also times past. In this past some elements take symbolicaly dense expressions. Through reliving and narrating their experiences the symbolically important factors in the this urban relationship will be outlined for investigations conserning three towns, Helsinki, the capital, Viborg, the ceded and lost Carelian town, and Jyväskylä, a town with dense commercial and civilisatory dimensions in the middle of Finland. The symbolic aspects are the kern in all the articles of the book Memories of my Town. The aim of the book and its articles has been to use different theoretical concepts as guidelines in analysing the different narrative texts. Thus the articles are to be seen as independent contributions to the scientific discussion about places, urbanism, memories and narratives. The ethnological outlook is on the other hand an outcome of the joint project Town Dwellers and their Places., whereby the articles substancially relate to one another. Thus the book can also be seen as a joint result of this urban project, which was sponsored by the Finnish Academy.

Memories of My Town is an exploration into how town dwellers experience their environment in a complicated way. As people in urban milieus relate themselves to the environment, this takes place on many levels, where especially the time level becomes problematic. The urban buildings and settings can be looked upon as a kind of collective history, as carriers or witnesses of times past. But it is only the town dwellers that experience urban time itself, the time they live in, but through their memories also times past. In this past some elements take symbolically dense expressions. Through reliving and narrating their experiences the symbolically important factors in this urban relationship will be outlined for investigations concerning three towns, Helsinki, the capital, Vyborg, the ceded and lost Karelian town, and Jyväskylä, a town with dense commercial and cultural dimensions in the middle of Finland. The aim of the book is to use different theoretical concepts as guidelines in analysing the different narrative texts.

The story of the abduction, beating, and rape of a teenage boy, followed by the unsolved brutal murder of his assailant, is now a moving novel written by the man who survived this vicious attack.

Slavery still exists--here. Tens of millions of humans live in bondage worldwide, tens of thousands in the US. As seen recently on Fox News, Dillon Burroughs and Charles Powell bring awareness about what’s happening in our nation and world. The book and DVD teach about: - Human trafficking - Sexual exploitation - Forced labor - Agricultural slavery Not in My Town answers questions and promotes discussion about the slavery system that crisscrosses Atlanta, Orlando, Las Vegas, New York, California, Texas, North Carolina, Haiti, Amsterdam, India, Cambodia, and beyond. The authors’ gripping journey shocks but also motivates and provides resources to equip new generations of abolitionists from all corners of society and diverse worldviews who share the common call to stop injustice.

“The amazing tales of Jewish girls on six different continents who celebrate the Jewish ritual of becoming a woman.” —The Jewish Journal Winner, Spirituality Category, New England Festival Best Books of the Holiday Season Divided into nine regions—Africa; Asia; Australia and New Zealand; the Caribbean, Europe; the former Soviet Union, former Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe; Latin America; the Middle East and North Africa; and North America—this book tells the story of each girl’s unique journey and introduction into womanhood. Gorgeously illustrated with more than 100 black and white family photographs, Today I Am a Woman also captures each area’s unique customs and how they affect the lives of Jewish girls and the local Jewish community’s traditions. “The editors scoured the globe to find powerful, varied, and moving depictions of bat mitzvah in the contemporary Jewish world. This is a rich resource for anyone interested in understanding religious diversity, folk practices, and cultural creativity through the lens of gender.” —Deborah Dash Moore, former Director of the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies and a Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of History and Judaic Studies, University of Michigan “The stories speak for themselves, putting Jewish girls and women on the center of the stage, into the limelight, and at the pulpit. By showcasing ritual innovation, they make a point about Judaism’s elasticity and women’s agency.” —Hasia R. Diner, coeditor of Remembering the Lower East Side

In this extraordinary volume, Iris Parush opens up the hitherto unexamined world of literate Jewish women, their reading habits, and their role in the cultural modernization of Eastern European Jewish society in the nineteenth century. Parush makes a paradoxical claim: she argues that because Jewish women were marginalized and neglected by rabbinical authorities who regarded men as the bearers of religious learning, they were free to read secular literature in German, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. As a result of their exposure to a wealth of literature, these reading women became significant conduits for Haskalah (Enlightenment) ideas and ideals within the Jewish community. This deceptively simple thesis dramatically challenges and revamps both scholarly and popular notions of Jewish life and learning in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. While scholars of European women's history have been transforming and complicating ideas about the historical roles of middle-class women for some time, Parush is among the first scholars to work exclusively in Jewish territory. The book will be a very welcome introduction to many facets of modern Jewish cultural historyÑparticularly the role of womenÑwhich have too long been ignored.