In Honor

A devastating loss leads to an unexpected road trip in what Sarah Ockler calls a “beautiful, engaging journey with heart, humor, and just a pinch of Texas sass.” Three days after learning of her brother Finn’s death, Honor receives his last letter from Iraq. Devastated, she interprets his note as a final request and spontaneously sets off to California to fulfill it. At the last minute, she’s joined by Rusty, Finn’s former best friend. Rusty is the last person Honor wants to be with—he’s cocky and obnoxious, just like Honor remembers, and she hasn’t forgiven him for turning his back on Finn when he enlisted. But as they cover the dusty miles together in Finn’s beloved 1967 Chevy Impala, long-held resentments begin to fade, and Honor and Rusty struggle to come to terms with the loss they share. As their memories of Finn merge to create a new portrait, Honor’s eyes are opened to a side of her brother she never knew—a side that shows her the true meaning of love and sacrifice.

In 2002 young Fadime Sahindal was brutally murdered by her own father. She belonged to a family of Kurdish immigrants who had lived in Sweden for almost two decades. But Fadime’s relationship with a man outside of their community had deeply dishonored her family, and only her death could remove the stain. This abhorrent crime shocked the world, and her name soon became a rallying cry in the struggle to combat so-called honor killings. Unni Wikan narrates Fadime’s heartbreaking story through her own eloquent words, along with the testimonies of her father, mother, and two sisters. What unfolds is a tale of courage and betrayal, loyalty and love, power and humiliation, and a nearly unfathomable clash of cultures. Despite enduring years of threats over her emancipated life, Fadime advocated compassion for her killer to the end, believing him to be trapped by an unyielding code of honor. Wikan puts this shocking event in context by analyzing similar honor killings throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States. She also examines the concept of honor in historical and cross-cultural depth, concluding that Islam itself is not to blame—indeed, honor killings occur across religious and ethnic traditions—but rather the way that many cultures have resolutely linked honor with violence. In Honor of Fadime holds profound and timely insights into conservative Kurdish culture, but ultimately the heart of this powerful book is Fadime’s courageous and tragic story—and Wikan’s telling of it is riveting.

THE JANUARY 2022 REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK “In the way A Thousand Splendid Suns told of Afghanistan’s women, Thrity Umrigar tells a story of India with the intimacy of one who knows the many facets of a land both modern and ancient, awash in contradictions.” —Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Before We Were Yours In this riveting and immersive novel, bestselling author Thrity Umrigar tells the story of two couples and the sometimes dangerous and heartbreaking challenges of love across a cultural divide. Indian American journalist Smita has returned to India to cover a story, but reluctantly: long ago she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. As she follows the case of Meena—a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village and her own family for marrying a Muslim man—Smita comes face to face with a society where tradition carries more weight than one’s own heart, and a story that threatens to unearth the painful secrets of Smita’s own past. While Meena’s fate hangs in the balance, Smita tries in every way she can to right the scales. She also finds herself increasingly drawn to Mohan, an Indian man she meets while on assignment. But the dual love stories of Honor are as different as the cultures of Meena and Smita themselves: Smita realizes she has the freedom to enter into a casual affair, knowing she can decide later how much it means to her. In this tender and evocative novel about love, hope, familial devotion, betrayal, and sacrifice, Thrity Umrigar shows us two courageous women trying to navigate how to be true to their homelands and themselves at the same time.

One of modern science's most famous and controversial figures, Jerzy Plebanski was an outstanding theoretical physicist and an author of many intriguing discoveries in general relativity and quantum theory. Known for his exceptional analytic talents, explosive character, inexhaustible energy, and bohemian nights with brandy, coffee, and enormous amounts of cigarettes, he was dedicated to both science and art, producing innumerable handwritten articles - resembling monk's calligraphy - as well as a collection of oil paintings. As a collaborator but also an antagonist of Leopold Infeld's (a coauthor of Albert Einstein's), Plebanski is recognized for designing the "heavenly" and "hyper-heavenly" equations, for introducing new variables to describe the gravitational field, for the exact solutions in Einstein's gravity and in quantum theory, for his classification of the tensor of matter, for some outstanding results in nonlinear electrodynamics, and for analyzing general relativity with continuous sources long before Chandrasekhar et al. A tribute to Plebaski's contributions and the variety of his interests, this is a unique and wide-ranging collection of invited papers, covering gravity quantization, strings, branes, supersymmetry, ideas on the deformation quantization, and lesser known results on the continuous Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff problem.

As the title suggests, A Revolution in the International Rule of Law: Essays in Honor of Don Wallace, Jr. is a European style Festschrift or Liber Amicorum, and compiles short essays by eminent scholars and practitioners who have known Prof. Wallace during his long and distinguished career as a Professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and, among others, as the Chairman of the International Law Institute, the U.S. Delegate to UNCITRAL, the Legal Adviser to the USAID, President of the ABA Section on International Law, presiding officer of the UNIDROIT Foundation, and Of Counsel to a number of prominent international law firms including Winston & Strawn LLP, Morgan Lewis LLP, Arnold & Porter LLP, and Shearman & Sterling LLP. The primary topics covered in the book are: Foreign Investment and Political RiskInternational Investment Law and ArbitrationUnification of Private LawCommercial Law ReformPublic ProcurementRule of Law and Transitional JusticeInternational Business Law and Human RightsLegal Aspects of the United States' Foreign Affairs: Public International Law, Separation of Powers and Terrorism. Professor Wallace's friends, including the co-editors, have submitted 45 essays including a biographical piece prepared by the editors to this volume.