Purged

An award-winning novel of two women dogged by secrets buried in Estonia’s shameful Soviet past—“[A] bold combination of history, politics, and suspense” (The Sunday Times). When Aliide Truu, an older woman living alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a disheveled girl huddled in her front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara is a young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, but a photo she carries with her soon makes it clear that her arrival at Aliide’s home is no coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex plot of suspicion and revelation as they attempt to discover each other’s motives. As their stories come to light, they reveal a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia’s Soviet occupation. “A stirring and humane work of art” by the acclaimed Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen, Purge won numerous awards including the Finlandia Prize and the Prix Femina (The New Republic). “A stunner.” —The Plain Dealer “[A] taut, well-crafted tale of Europe’s still living post-war pain.” —Booklist “A dark, harrowing, and at times difficult read that wrings every ounce of emotion from the reader.” —The Bookseller

Purge is a beautifully crafted memoir that has a Girl, Interrupted feel. In this raw and engaging account of her months in rehab, Nicole Johns documents her stay in a residential treatment facility for eating disorders. Her prose is lucid and vivid, as she seamlessly switches verb tenses and moves through time. She unearths several important themes: body image and sexuality, sexual assault and relationships, and the struggle to piece together one's path in life. While other books about eating disorders and treatment may sugarcoat the harsh realities of living with and recovering from an eating disorder, Purge does not hold back. The author presents an honest, detailed account of her experience with treatment, avoiding the clichd happily-ever-after ending while still offering hope to those who struggle with eating disorders, as well as anyone who has watched a loved one fight to recover from an eating disorder. Purge sends a message: though the road may be rough, ultimately there is hope.

From acclaimed author Sarah Darer Littman, a striking story about a girl's recovery from bulimia in the tradition of CUT, PERFECT, and GIRL INTERRUPTED. Janie Ryman hates throwing up. So why does she binge eat and then stick her fingers down her throat several times a day? That's what the doctors and psychiatrists at Golden Slopes hope to help her discover. But first Janie must survive everyday conflicts between the Barfers and the Starvers, attempts by the head psychiatrist to fish painful memories out of her emotional waters, and shifting friendships and alliances among the kids in the ward.

The sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours described how mixing water with dust from the tomb St. Martin would create a potion that would act as a "celestial purgative." Indeed, Gregory could observe Christians being purged of sickness and sin all around him. By contrast, God's willingness to purge Christians of their sin after death was a more complicated proposition. As a process hidden from view, it raised questions: What was purgatory like? Who would experience it? Did purgatory purify souls, punish them, or both? And how painful would it be? This book explores purgatory's earliest history from the first century to the eighth. This was an era in which the idea that sinful Christians might improve their lot after death was often contentious, even heretical. In this, the first study focused on purgatory's history in late antiquity, Moreira explores a wide variety of interests and influences at play in purgatory's early formation. Some of the influences discussed are ideas about punishment and correction in the Roman world, slavery, the value of medical purges at the shrines of saints, and the authority of visions of the afterlife for informing Christians on the hereafter. Finally, this study challenges the deeply ingrained supposition that purgatory was a symptom of barbarized Christianity. It assesses the extent to which Irish and Germanic views of society, and the sources associated with them - penitentials and legal tariffs - played a role in purgatory's formation. Highlighting the importance of the Anglo-Saxon contribution to purgatory, special attention is given to the writings of the last patristic author of antiquity, the Northumbrian monk, Bede.

This book provides historical background on Stalin's purges and explores controversies surrounding the purges. It offers first hand accounts from those who experienced the effects of Stalin's purges. One account describes a Ukrainian childhood during the famine while another essayist recalls childhood under Stalin's terror. Nikita Khruschev decries Stalin and the purges. A young Russian woman remembers the Gulag. Your readers will be forever changed by this compelling book.

Bone Marrow Processing and Purging: A Practical Guide provides an up-to-date practical guide to the major ex vivo procedures associated with bone marrow transplantation. Previously, this information was communicated primarily by word of mouth; now experts in the field present detailed descriptions and evaluations of methods for marrow harvesting, evaluation (including tumor infiltration, flow cytometric analysis, and colony assays), comparative methods for automated nucleated cell separation and enumeration, tumor cell purging, T cell depletion, stem cell selection, gene transfer, and cytopreservation. Special sections address quality control and FDA regulations. The book provides a unique information source intended for clinicians, researchers, technical staff, transplant nurses, and medical students involved in this rapidly expanding area of medicine.

The United States routinely has one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any developed democracy in the world. That rate is also among the most internally diverse, since the federal structure allows state-level variations in voting institutions that have had—and continue to have—sizable local effects. But are expansive institutional efforts like mail-in registration, longer poll hours, and “no-excuse” absentee voting uniformly effective in improving voter turnout across states? With How the States Shaped the Nation, Melanie Jean Springer places contemporary reforms in historical context and systematically explores how state electoral institutions have been instrumental in shaping voting behavior throughout the twentieth century. Although reformers often assume that more convenient voting procedures will produce equivalent effects wherever they are implemented, Springer reveals that this is not the case. In fact, convenience-voting methods have had almost no effect in the southern states where turnout rates are lowest. In contrast, the adverse effects associated with restrictive institutions like poll taxes and literacy tests have been persistent and dramatic. Ultimately, Springer argues, no single institutional fix will uniformly resolve problems of low or unequal participation. If we want to reliably increase national voter turnout rates, we must explore how states’ voting histories differ and better understand the role of political and geographical context in shaping institutional effects.