Strange Harvest

Illuminates the wondrous yet disquieting medical realm of organ transplantation by drawing on the voices of those most deeply involved: transplant recipients, clinical specialists, and the surviving kin of deceased organ donors. This ethnographic study explores how these parties think about death, loss, and mourning.

Illuminates the wondrous yet disquieting medical realm of organ transplantation by drawing on the voices of those most deeply involved: transplant recipients, clinical specialists, and the surviving kin of deceased organ donors. This ethnographic study explores how these parties think about death, loss, and mourning.

"[Strange Harvests is] an impressive addition to the modern travelogue, painting some of the world's most remote terrain in visceral and sometimes breathtaking prose . . . an engrossing read." --NPR An original and magical map of our world and its riches, formed of the stories of the small-scale harvests of seven natural objects In this beguiling book, Edward Posnett journeys to some of the most far-flung locales on the planet to bring us seven wonders of the natural world--eiderdown, vicuña fiber, sea silk, vegetable ivory, civet coffee, guano, and edible birds' nests--that promise ways of using nature without damaging it. To the rest of the world these materials are mere commodities, but to their harvesters they are imbued with myth, tradition, folklore, and ritual, and form part of a shared identity and history. Strange Harvests follows the journeys of these uncommon products from some of the most remote areas of the world to its most populated urban centers, drawing on the voices of the people and little-known communities who harvest, process, and trade them. Blending history, travel writing, and interviews, Posnett sets these human stories against our changing economic and ecological landscape. What do they tell us about capitalism, global market forces, and overharvesting? How do local microeconomies survive in a hyperconnected world? Is it possible for us to live together with different species? Strange Harvests makes us see the world with wonder, curiosity, and new concern.

The moments in Christ's human life noted in the creeds (his conception, birth, suffering, death, and burial) are events which would likely appear in a syllabus for a course in social anthropology, for they are of special interest and concern in human life, and also sites of contention and controversy, where what it is to be human is discovered, constructed, and contested. In other words, these are the occasions for profound and continuing questioning regarding the meaning of human life, as controversies to do with IVF, abortion, euthanasia, and the use of bodies or body parts post mortem plainly indicate. Thus the following questions arise, how do the instances in Christ's life represent human life, and how do these representations relate to present day cultural norms, expectations, and newly emerging modes of relationship, themselves shaping and framing human life? How does the Christian imagination of human life, which dwells on and draws from the life of Christ, not only articulate its own, but also come into conversation with and engage other moral imaginaries of the human? Michael Banner argues that consideration of these questions requires study of moral theology, therefore, he reconceives its nature and tasks, and in particular, its engagement with social anthropology. Drawing from social anthropology and Christian thought and practice from many periods, and influenced especially by his engagement in public policy matters including as a member of the UK's Human Tissue Authority, Banner aims to develop the outlines of an everyday ethics, stretching from before the cradle to after the grave.

In a small community hidden back in the woods, swamp and marsh land, is three-hundred-acre farm. John and Beth Averley are the proud owners of this quiet and laid-back retreat they call home in Ontario, Canada. You see, life in the city for John and Beth was downright depressing, overrated, and as far as they were concerned, no place to bring up a family. They were looking for a tranquil place to build a solid foundation, that they could call home and would not crumble, like their lives were about to do if they were to stay in the city any longer. Finding the perfect place was relentless day after day, until one day right in front of them, their dream had come true, time and patience had finely paid off . John would always say Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Theres a problem with that saying, and it would alter the Averleys lives forever. All things are truly beautiful in their way, but sometimes beauty can deceive the beholder. Therefore, whatever you sow, isnt always what you will reap.

The eighty-year anniversary edition of the once-banned, #1 New York Times–bestselling novel of interracial romance and discrimination in Georgia. Alice Walker said it best: “The South can hardly be said to recognize itself without this book.” Igniting controversy upon its publication in 1944, Strange Fruit was banned in Boston and Detroit and the US Postal Service refused to send it through the mail until Eleanor Roosevelt intervened—all because of its portrayal of a town divided along racial lines and the forbidden love that dared to cross them . . . Despite having left Maxwell, Georgia, to attend college, Nonnie Anderson returned to her hometown to work for a prominent white family—and to rejoin the man she had always loved, Tracy Deen. Tracy, the directionless son of the town’s doctor, has come back from war and is being pressured to finally get his life in order. Across the street, his high school sweetheart desperately waits for a marriage proposal. On the other side of town, Nonnie offers him a safe place to land, asking nothing in return. But now, she’s pregnant. As a Christian revival inspires the locals to cease their sinful ways, a heady and dangerous mix of passion, religion, and racism takes hold. And when a white man is killed in a Black part of town, the event exposes the evil simmering just below the town’s placid surface—an inferno waiting to erupt . . . “A very moving book and an extraordinary one.” —Eleanor Roosevelt “Strange Fruit is so wide in its human understanding . . . [its] tragedy becomes the tragedy of anyone who lives in a world in which minorities suffer.” —The Nation “An absorbing novel, of high literary merit, terrific and tender.” —The Boston Globe