Familiar Stranger

"Sometimes I feel myself to have been the last colonial." This, in his own words, is the extraordinary story of the life and career of Stuart Hall—how his experiences shaped his intellectual, political, and theoretical work and how he became one of his age's brightest intellectual lights. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, Jamaica, still then a British colony, the young Stuart Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. He lived among Kingston's stiflingly respectable brown middle class, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white elite. As colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world. In 1951 a Rhodes scholarship took Hall across the Atlantic to Oxford University, where he met young Jamaicans from all walks of life, as well as writers and thinkers from across the Caribbean, including V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming. While at Oxford he met Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals, with whom he helped found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall faced a new struggle: that of building a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar England so rife with racism that it could barely recognize his humanity. With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds.

A fascinating adventure on the trail of time. An encyclopedic work well illustrated and laced with anecdotes, quotations, and parables, written by a timesmith who ranges the clockshops of the Precambrian to the restaurant at the end of the universe. Fraser is a leading authority in the world on the study of time.

Recruited by a secret paranormal organization to hunt demons, Jack Harris never guessed the revenge he sought for his partner's death would be this complicated. Jack's worldview is black-and-white—until he is ordered to follow Mersey Bane, a beautiful woman who is also a familiar with shape-shifting abilities. Mersey belongs to the Cadre—a peaceful hermetic order that captures and studies Otherworldly Entities—which is at odds with Jack's organization. As Jack delves deeper into the inner workings of the Cadre, he finds himself drawn to Mersey like a moth to a flame. She may challenge all his beliefs, but she brings color and passion to his world. Jack doesn't know whether what he feels for Mersey is love or lust. But if he doesn't figure it out soon, they may become the hunted instead of the hunters.

Things like this do not happen to people like me. It couldn’t possibly be Michael--he died four years ago. The world of Karen Benét, a Silicon Valley executive, is turned upside down when she runs into the stranger-who-has-to-be-Michael. Although Karen values transparency, she is suddenly caught up in clandestine meetings and secrets kept from friends and associates. As Karen and Michael struggle to protect the people they care about, their duplicity is putting those very relationships at risk. When the lie is so big, will the truth set them free?

The Chinese-speaking Muslims have for centuries been an inseperable but anomalous part of Chinese society--Sinophone yet incomprehensible, local yet outsiders, normal but different. Long regarded by the Chinese government as prone to violence, they have challenged fundamental Chinese conceptiosn of Self and Other and denied the totally transforming power of Chinese civilization by tenaciously maintaining connectios with Central and West Asia as well as some cultural differences from their non-Muslim neighbors. Familiar Strangers narrates a history of the Muslims of northwest China, at the intersection of the frontiers of the Mongolian-Manchu, Tibetan, Turkic, and Chinese cultural regions. Based on primary and secondary sources in a variety of languages, Familiar Strangers examines the nature of ethnicity and periphery, the role of religion and ethnicity in personal and collective decisions in violent times, and the complexity of belonging to two cultures at once. Concerning itself with a frontier very distant from the core areas of Chinese culture and very strange to most Chinese, it explores the influence of language, religion, and place on Sino-Muslim identity.

She Survived The Loss, But Will She Survive The Truth? Pamela is forced to revisit her past. The one she has buried and moved on. A photograph in a magazine turns her life as a wife, mother and art teacher into a nightmare. Her quest for answers takes her through the breadth of the country. From Darjeeling to Kolkata to Mumbai. In a novel that is filled with astonishing revelations and thrills, The Familiar Stranger is the story of a woman who must unravel the truth behind the incident that changed the course of her life. Just when everything seems to be settling down, life deals her a hand where she must play by her instincts, with no one to trust or fall back upon

This book argues that Britain is gripped by an endemic and ongoing panic about the position of children in society – which frames them as, alternately, victims and threats. It argues the press is a key player in promoting this discourse, which is rooted in a wide-scale breakdown in social trust.

Who helps in situations of forced displacement? How and why do they get involved? In Helping Familiar Strangers, Louise Olliff focuses on one type of humanitarian group, refugee diaspora organizations (RDOs), to explore the complicated impulses, practices, and relationships between these activists and the "familiar strangers" they try to help. By documenting findings from ethnographic research and interviews with resettled and displaced persons, RDO representatives, and humanitarian professionals in Australia, Switzerland, Thailand, and Indonesia, Olliff reveals that former refugees are actively involved in helping people in situations of forced displacement and that individuals with lived experience of forced displacement have valuable knowledge, skills, and networks that can be drawn on in times of humanitarian crisis. We live in a world where humanitarians have varying motivations, capacities, and ways of helping those in need, and Helping Familiar Strangers confirms that RDOs and similar groups are an important part of the tapestry of care that people turn to when seeking protection far from home.