Familial Undercurrents

Not long after her father died, Afsaneh Najmabadi discovered that her father had a secret second family and that she had a sister she never knew about. In Familial Undercurrents, Najmabadi uncovers her family’s complex experiences of polygamous marriage to tell a larger story of the transformations of notions of love, marriage, and family life in mid-twentieth-century Iran. She traces how the idea of “marrying for love” and the desire for companionate, monogamous marriage acquired dominance in Tehran’s emerging urban middle class. Considering the role played in that process by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century romance novels, reformist newspapers, plays, and other literature, Najmabadi outlines the rituals and objects---such as wedding outfits, letter writing, and family portraits---that came to characterize the ideal companionate marriage. She reveals how in the course of one generation men’s polygamy had evolved from an acceptable open practice to a taboo best kept secret. At the same time, she chronicles the urban transformations of Tehran and how its architecture and neighborhood social networks both influenced and became emblematic of the myriad forms of modern Iranian family life.

Humane, thought provoking, and moving, this hybrid literary portrait of a place makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities, and our histories. The Undercurrents is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the city’s theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma. When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell—a British-American art critic, adrift in her midforties—becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives.

Published in 1999. Despite considerable comment about divorce reform and the post-divorce family, in the press and in academia, by professionals and politicians, much has been left unsaid. There are 'undercurrents' of divorce which are not visible and are not discussed because they do not fit into the dominant discursive framework for talk about divorce. This book brings these undercurrents to the surface and does two things. It explains how and why aspects of divorce and the lives of those divorcing, have become marginalized in professional and political discussion and it makes visible the practical and legal effects of such exclusion. It argues that there are good policy reasons for this particular socio-legal critique at this time, as the implementation of the Family Law Act 1996 gets underway.

"This book builds upon my early work and the work and others by offering a comprehensive guide to practitioners interested in facing and helping to heal trauma and manage the drama systemically with a special focus on children and adolescents. The FST Model is a contribution to the fields of trauma, family sciences, and human development practice." --Charles R. Figley, PhD; Kurzweg Chair in Disaster Mental Health at Tulane University in New Orleans This is the first book that addresses trauma treatment for child and adolescents using a Family Systems Trauma (FST) model which goes beyond individual therapy to include the child and their entire family. Co-written by a renowned family therapist who created the Parenting with Love and Limits® model, it delivers a research-based , step-by-step approach that incorporates the child’s immediate family along with their extended family to treat the traumatized child or adolescent. Using a "stress chart," the child or adolescent's trauma symptoms are quickly identified. This strategy guides therapists in accurately diagnosing root causes of the child's trauma and culminates in the creation of co-created "wound playbooks" to heal trauma in both the child as well as other family members. Additional helpful features include extensive case examples, a menu of trauma techniques, wound playbook examples, evaluation forms, client handouts, and other practical tools to provide the therapist with a complete guide to implementing this approach. Child and family therapists, social workers, mental health counselors, and psychologists working in a variety of settings will find this book a valuable resource. Key Features: Provides a step-by-step, practice focused, time-limited model Uses a family systems approach for addressing child and adolescent trauma--the only book of its kind Includes useful tools such as checklists, client handouts, and evaluation forms

Second in the hard-hitting military science fiction Orphan's Legacy series. Ace intelligence operative Lt. Jazen Parker parachutes into a giant habitat known as Paleozoic on a mission to bring down the local politicos. He quickly realizes he's been handed a near-impossible task. Paleozoic is a politically quarantined nightmare world with a culture confined to iron rivet technology and a ruling regime a bit to the right of Heinrich Himmler. Jazen's inclined to abandon this particular hellhole to its ways¾that is, until he uncovers a plot afoot that will throw a five hundred-planet alliance into the death-throes of anarchy. So the local Nazis must go. Unfortunately, all Jazen's got to work with is a handful of rust-bucket tanks, a retread rebellion, and two strong, beautiful women who love him, but think he's tilting at windmills and is about to get himself killed. What they don't know is, once committed, Jazen Parker is the best there is when it comes to getting the dirty job done on the ground. It's the local bullies who are about to be taught a lesson in losing. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

For both Zane and Darby, their small town roots hold a terrible secret. Now, decades later, they've come together to build a new life. But will the past set them free or pull them under? Zane Bigelow grew up in a beautiful, perfectly kept house in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Strangers and even Zane’s own aunt across the lake see his parents as a successful surgeon and his stylish wife, making appearances at their children’s ballet recitals and baseball games. Only Zane and his sister know the truth, until one brutal night finally reveals cracks in the facade, and Zane escapes for college without a thought of looking back... Years later, Zane returns to his hometown determined to reconnect with the place and people that mean so much to him, despite the painful memories. As he resumes life in the colorful town, he meets a gifted landscape artist named Darby, who is on the run from ghosts of her own. Together they will have to teach each other what it means to face the past, and stand up for the ones they love.

It's one of the most successful - and surprising - of phenomena in the entire crime fiction genre: detectives (and proto-detectives) solving crimes in earlier eras. There is now an army of historical sleuths operating from the mean streets of ancient Rome to the Cold War era of the 1950s. And this astonishingly varied offshoot of the crime genre, as well as keeping bookshop tills ringing, is winning a slew of awards, notably the prestigious CWA Historical Dagger. Barry Forshaw, one of the UK s leading experts on crime fiction, has written a lively, wide-ranging and immensely informed history of the genre, which might be said to have begun in earnest with Ellis Peters crime-solving monk Brother Cadfael in the 1970s and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose in 1980 (with another monkish detective), but which has now taken readers to virtually every era and locale in the past. As in earlier entries in his Noir series, Forshaw has produced the perfect reader's guide to a fascinating field; every major writer is considered, often through a concentration on one or two key books, and exciting new talents are highlighted. 'Historical Noir covers crime novels (and their authors) set in ancient Greece and beyond to the 1950s ... what a splendid, varied bunch Forshaw provides' - Times 'A very worthy addition to this great series' - Crime Squad Look out for the other books in Barry Forshaw's Noir series, Euro Noir, Nordic Noir, Brit Noir and American Noir, and for his latest book, Crime Fiction: A Reader's Guide.