Nobody S Home

After caring for his mother at the end of her life, Thomas Gass took a job as a nursing home aide in a for-profit long term care home. This graphic, poignant & chilling book details his experiences in this 'warehouse' for the elderly & asks fundamental questions about care in American nursing homes.

In her long career, Ugresic has published several novels (e.g., The Ministry of Pain), but she made her name with her essay collections, which have caused controversy and earned her the admiration of writers and critics abroad. In these latest musings, written over the course of several years, Ugresic leaves no stone unturned and no thought contained, doing what she does best: writing about the human condition through her own experience. Refusing to establish a central theme, she touches upon a wide range of topics: the paradox of multiculturalism, metaphors as our "defense against nightmares," the eerie similarities between capitalism and communism, and ways in which we try to rise hopelessly above our less-than-perfect existence. Along the way, she pays homage to the works of literature that have influenced her own creative process, in an effort to pay "a symbolic literary tax on narcissim" because "writing is not the humblest of vocations." Perhaps not, but Ugresic certainly knows how to balance being a critic with being criticized. Recommended for all libraries collecting cultural criticism.--Mirela Roncevic, Library Journal Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Nobody's Home is a bold view of the American novel from its beginnings to the contemporary scene. Focusing on some of the deepest instincts of American life and culture--individual liberty, freedom of speech, constructing a life--Arnold Weinstein brilliantly sketches the remarkable career of the American self in some of the major works of the past one hundred fifty years. Weinstein contends that American writers are haunted by the twin specters of the self as a mirage, as Nobody, and by the brutal forces of culture and ideology that deny selfhood to people on the basis of money, sex, and color of skin. His central thesis is that language makes possible freedoms and accomplishments that are achievable in no other realm, and that American fiction is a fascinating record of the human fight against coercion, of the kinds of maneuvering room that we may find in life and in art. This study is unique in several respects: it offers some of the keenest readings of major American texts that have ever been written, including some of the most significant works of the past decades, and it fashions a rich and supple view of the American novel as a writerly form of freedom, in sharp contrast to today's critical emphasis on blindness and co-option.

The scourge of the monster house affects communities all across Canada, so while the Toronto neighbourhood of York Mills is not unique in this respect, it has suffered more than most, owing to the generous size of its residential lots in what has now become the centre of the city. York Mills was still a rural community until after the Second World War, when a post-war population boom created a housing boom that gobbled up the local woods and farmland. By 1960 most of this land had been sacrificed for housing, and by the mid-1970s it was all gone. Then a strange thing began to happen. Developers, who had the money to outbid legitimate home buyers, started tearing down perfectly liveable post-war homes to build monster houses. Today, over fifty years later, this destructive practice continues. The environmental costs have been devastating, as affordable houses are demolished—their remains dumped in landfills—and mature trees are cut down to facilitate the new construction: construction that demands copious amounts of wood, cement, and other new building materials. The social cost has been equally damaging, as affordable homes are destroyed and replaced by multi-million-dollar houses that are out of reach of families who once called these neighbourhoods home. The three hundred colour photos in this book recall but a fraction of the homes we have lost in this one community alone. The text tells their stories, stories that take us back to a time when houses were places to live, not get-rich-quick schemes.

...sometimes we need to go through the darkness to get to the light and that it may be emotionally painful...” the Needs Based Method of [overcoming] alcohol and drug abuse,” and how Oden deals with the why dependency happens. Many can benefit from Oden’s eye-opening and highly successful method. —”the emotional, physical, or social absence of or ‘neglect’ by a caretaker, or when nobody’s home.” -US Review of Books

Jade is a little girl growing up in a small town of two thousand people. She doesn’t know any better, but to take the abuse her mother has to dole out. Her father doesn’t acknowledge her or try to save her, although he knows what is going on. This story is about how a little girl gets through her childhood not knowing where to turn or where to run. Everywhere she looks and thinks to go for help, she finds that her mother has already painted her as an uncontrollable child. When Jade looks for help, she receives blank stares back as if nobody’s home. She finds the strength to survive it all only to start out her adulthood unsure of what the future is holding for her. Nobody’s Home was written to inspire others who are in the same situation or know someone who needs help that is in an abusive household.

For the first time in his esteemed career, Tim Powers returns to the setting (and a central character) from his landmark time travel novel, "The Anubis Gates." Tracking the murderer of her fiancee through 19th century London's darkest warrens, Jacky Snapp has disguised herself as a boy but the disguise fails when, trying to save a girl from the ghost of her jealous husband, Jacky finds that she has made herself visible to the ghosts that cluster around the Thames And one of them is the ghost of her fiancee, who was poisoned and physically transformed by his murderer but unwittingly shot dead by Jacky herself. Jacky and the girl she rescued, united in the need to banish their pursuing ghosts, learn that their only hope is to flee upriver to the barge known as Nobody's Home where the exorcist whose name is Nobody charges an intolerable price.

In this broad-based study of American fiction, canonical and otherwise, Arnold Weinstein examines closely the strong ties between language, history and culture, with a particular focus on freedom of the self.