Loyalties

Acclaimed poet Nilofar Shidmehr’s debut story collection is an unflinching look at the lives of women in post-revolutionary Iran and the contemporary diaspora in Canada. The stories begin in 1978, the year before the Iranian Revolution. In a neighbourhood in Tehran, a group of affluent girls play a Cinderella game with unexpected consequences. In the mid 1980s, women help their husbands and brothers survive war and political upheaval. In the early 1990s in Vancouver, Canada, a single-mother refugee is harassed by the men she meets on a telephone dating platform. And in 2003, a Canadian woman working for an international aid organization is dispatched to her hometown of Bam to assist in the wake of a devastating earthquake. At once powerful and profound, Divided Loyalties depicts the rich lives of Iranian women and girls in post-revolutionary Iran and the contemporary diaspora in Canada; the enduring complexity of the expectations forced upon them; and the resilience of a community experiencing the turmoil of war, revolution, and migration.

From the author of the Richard and Judy Book Club Pick No and Me. Adults are as lost as the children they should be protecting, in this compelling exploration of the destructive secrets and loyalties that are kept behind closed doors 'Packs a hefty emotional punch. It reminded me of Leila Slimani's terrific Lullaby' Bookseller 'Narrated with punch and pace. You're kept reading helplessly to the desperate cliffhanger finish' Daily Mail Thirteen-year-old Théo and his friend Mathis have a secret. Their teacher, Hélène, suspects something is not right with Théo and becomes obsessed with rescuing him, casting aside her professionalism to the point of no return. Cécile, mother of Mathis, discovers something horrifying on her husband's computer that makes her question whether she has ever truly known him. Respectable facades are peeled away as the four stories wind tighter and tighter together, pulling into a lean and darkly gripping novel of loneliness, lies and loyalties.

The final chapter relates the evolution of these conflicting loyalties to the global weakening of the nation-state, and distinguishes what is particular to the Soviet state and its demise from more significant questions of analytical importance posed by the collapse of a major contemporary multi-national state.

Faith Negotiating Loyalties draws readers into the world of Christian faith in South Africa and the question of loyalties in the new post-apartheid state. It carries out its investigation in two parts. Part one examines Christian faith and loyalty during the first nation-building exercise following the South African War, positioning the creation and contestation of three Christianities corresponding to three nationalisms, each of which imagined South Africa in a particular way, shaping faith accordingly. The idea of an undifferentiated South African Christianity gives way to contesting and contested Christianities, nationalism gives way to nationalisms, and faith emerges in tension with and in criticism of these loyalties. Part two discusses the American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr in South Africa. Three kinds of faith in his wittings are set forth: social faith, radial faith, and reconstructing faith. Contextualized within the South African story, Niebuhr's ideas suggest self and society as constituted by hybridities and suspended in a web of loyalties. Faith Negotiating Loyalties suggests the message for faith in a post-apartheid South Africa is the importance of negotiating covenants which allow for crossings, hybridities, and contestations.

This study provides a detailed, in-depth analysis of a single incident rooted in the effort of a group of professional employees to serve the public welfare. It reveals in microcosm the interplay of political forces, economic interests, personal ambition, organizational structure, and professional ethics that culminated in an act of whistle-blowing. The incident took place during the final construction phase of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System (BART), designed to be America's first attempt at space-age mass transportation. Three BART engineers, convinced of the lack of responsiveness of management to their concerns about the system's safety, were fired for insubordination and other organizational sins. Based upon repeated interviews with the engineers, with BART managers and directors, and with the professional societies involved, as well as upon an extensive body of documents and court depositions, legislative reports, media reports, and institutional memoranda. Divided Loyalties sets a theoretical context for the issues, traces the incident from its beginning, examines the aftermath of the engineers' dismissal, and concludes with a set of recommendations that should be considered by public and private organizations, professional associations, agencies of government, and individual professional employees.

Deep friendship may express profound loyalty, but so too may virulent nationalism. What can and should we say about this Janus-faced virtue of the will? This volume explores at length the contours of an important and troubling virtue -- its cognates, contrasts, and perversions; its strengths and weaknesses; its awkward relations with universal morality; its oppositional form and limits; as well as the ways in which it functions in various associative connections, such as friendship and familial relations, organizations and professions, nations, countries, and religious tradition.

An empirical study of how conflicts of interest arise in the private practice of law and how law firms respond