Mother Of Rebellion

The breaking was only the beginning... Rebellion brews as nations struggle for power. Survival is pitted against compassion, duty against faith, and loyalties against love. The Schism, a war that raged a thousand years ago, left the continent of Leyumin broken. Near constant war and destruction define the millenium afterward, but the heavens have promised reunifcation and with it peace. Now, two nations vie for dominance and the title of Unitor. One does so through politics and manipulation, the other through brute force and self-proclaimed pure blood. Five unlikely people will shape the things to come: a slave-wife, a warrior, a guardian of history, a disciple, and a young nobleman. As they embark upon their journeys, their decisions sow the beginnings of change, and the consequences they reap prove to be more than they're prepared to handle. Meanwhile, all wait in anticipation for the Unitor to emerge as the future looms uncertain.

Eleanor's Rebellion is the extraordinary story of a man who discovered in middle age that almost nothing he had grown up believing about his parents was true. When at the age of forty David Siff learned--in the first of a series of shocks--that he was adopted, he began a roller-coaster journey into his family's past. He discovered that his biological father was not the man who had raised him, but someone he had never met: the actor Van Heflin. He discovered that he had been born out of wedlock, placed in an orphanage at birth, and subsequently adopted by his own mother. He learned that his mother had not been the contented homebody he had believed her to be. He discovered the ambitions and frustrations of the woman who had given birth to him--the adventurous, rebellious young Eleanor, in determined pursuit of a new and better world and an acting career, who suddenly detoured into marriage for the sake of her child. He discovered the roots of his puzzling behaviors, casting his own acting career in a new light. In his account of the fascinating and rocky process by which he finally came to know his mother--moving from shock to bitterness to an increasingly profound appreciation of her life--David Siff has given us a heartfelt and enriching book.

In Breaking the Ocean, diversity and inclusion specialist Annahid Dashtgard addresses the long-term impacts of exile, immigration, and racism by offering a vulnerable, deeply personal account of her life and work. Annahid Dashtgard was born into a supportive mixed-race family in 1970s Iran. Then came the 1979 Revolution, which ushered in a powerful and orthodox religious regime. Her family was forced to flee their homeland, immigrating to a small town in Alberta, Canada. As a young girl, Dashtgard was bullied, shunned, and ostracized both by her peers at school and adults in the community. Home offered little respite, with her parents embroiled in their own struggles, exposing the sharp contrasts between her British mother and Persian father. Determined to break free from her past, Dashtgard created a new identity for herself as a driven young woman who found strength through political activism, eventually becoming a leader in the anti–corporate globalization movement of the late 1990s. But her unhealed trauma was re-activated following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Suffering burnout, Dashtgard checked out of her life and took the first steps towards personal healing, a journey that continues to this day. Breaking the Ocean introduces a unique perspective on how racism and systemic discrimination result in emotional scarring and ongoing PTSD. It is a wake-up call to acknowledge our differences, addressing the universal questions of what it means to belong and ultimately what is required to create change in ourselves and in society.

Adam Wheeler is a fourteen year-old who arrives in Toronto in the autumn of 1837 after crossing from England on a filthy and crowded immigrant ship. He has emigrated in company with his uncle's family, but, once in Upper Canada, he quarrels with his uncle and sets out on his own. Adam finds work in a paper mill at the village of Todmorden on the banks of the Don River. Adam soon learns that William Lyon Mackenzie is mounting a rebellion. When the uprising begins, he is drawn into the conflict both because his employer sends him to deliver paper to the rebel camp at Montgomery's Tavern, and also because his uncle joins Mackenzie's force. Among those Adam befriends are two teenage girls, Cornelia and Charlotte de Grassi. These historical figures, aged thirteen and fourteen at the time, served as spies and messengers for the government side during Mackenzie's Rebellion. Although this book is a work of fiction, it is solidly based on real history. The events of the 1837 Rebellion have been carefully researched and are presented as accurately as possible. Captain and Mrs de Grassi and their daughters, and several other characters, were real people and, improbable as it may seem, the girls' work as spies and messengers during the rebellion days is fully authenticated. When it comes to presenting human beings however, historical documents are usually uninformative. To bring the characters to life, the author has invented certain scenes and details, all of which she based carefully on what she learned about the de Grassi family, and on the life and circumstances of the time.

Spirited young Eunice will not settle for a woman’s lot in 1800s Canada. She sees the inequitable use of power everywhere, from her abusive father to the elite-ruled government, and she cannot help but challenge it. This historical fiction follows her escape from trouble into more and more trouble, through which her ignorance gives way to a more sophisticated understanding of her society. Impatient to claim a place in it, Eunice dresses as a boy in order to join a rebellion against the government. She lands in jail for stealing a rich man’s horse, and there, the stories of her socially marginalized female cellmates – in particular a young black prisoner – forces her to confront anew the startling injustices of race and social class and the institutionalized cruelty of prison. Readers will fall in love with Eunice for her integrity and tenacity against all odds.

This study explores the mother-daughter relationship as the most fundamental and most intimate female relationship. It draws on both early and contemporary writings of Arab women to illuminate the traditional and evolving nature of mother-daughter relationships in Arab families and how these family dynamics reflect and influence modern Arab life.

“Those who enjoyed Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle will find much to admire” (Booklist, starred review) in this “thoroughly engrossing” (The New York Times Book Review) memoir about a boy on the run with his mother, as she abducts him to Latin America in search of the revolution. Carol Andreas was a traditional 1950s housewife from a small Mennonite town in central Kansas who became a radical feminist and Marxist revolutionary. From the late sixties to the early eighties, she went through multiple husbands and countless lovers while living in three states and five countries. She took her youngest son, Peter, with her wherever she went, even kidnapping him and running off to South America after his straitlaced father won a long and bitter custody fight. They were chasing the revolution together, though the more they chased it the more distant it became. They battled the bad “isms” (sexism, imperialism, capitalism, fascism, consumerism), and fought for the good “isms” (feminism, socialism, communism, egalitarianism). Between the ages of five and eleven, Peter lived in more than a dozen homes, moving from the comfortably bland suburbs of Detroit to a hippie commune in Berkeley to a socialist collective farm in pre-military coup Chile to highland villages and coastal shantytowns in Peru. When they secretly returned to America they settled down clandestinely in Denver, where his mother changed her name to hide from his father. A “luminous memoir” (Publishers Marketplace, starred review) and “an illuminating portrait of a childhood of excitement, adventure, and love” (Kirkus Reviews) this is an extraordinary account of a deep mother-son bond and the joy and toll of growing up in a radical age. Peter Andreas is an insightful and candid narrator of “a profound and enlightening book that will open readers up to different ideas about love, acceptance, and the bond between mother and son” (Library Journal, starred review).