Without A Map

Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life that encircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one, her lost son finds her. Hall learns that he grew up in gritty poverty with an abusive father—in her own father's hometown. Their reunion is tender, turbulent, and ultimately redemptive. Hall's parents never ask for her forgiveness, yet as they age, she offers them her love. What sets Without a Map apart is the way in which loss and betrayal evolve into compassion, and compassion into wisdom.

Shows how to determine locations in the wilderness, in a desert, in snow-covered areas, and on the ocean, applying methods used by aboriginal peoples and early explorers

Poet, traveller, artist, and mystic - the story of one extraordinary woman's many lives.

A balanced look at Russia's attempts to build capitalism on the ruins of Soviet central planning. Recent commentators on Russia's economic reforms have almost uniformly declared them a disappointing and avoidable—failure. In this book, two American scholars take a new and more balanced look at the country's attempts to build capitalism on the ruins of Soviet central planning. They show how and why the Russian reforms achieved remarkable breakthroughs in some areas but came undone in others. Unlike Eastern European countries such as Poland or the Czech Republic, to which it is often compared, Russia is a federal, ethnically diverse, industrial giant with an economy heavily oriented toward raw materials extraction. The political obstacles it faced in designing reforms were incomparably greater. Shleifer and Treisman tell how Russia's leaders, navigating in uncharted economic terrain, managed to find a path around some of these obstacles. In successful episodes, central reformers devised a strategy to win over some key opponents, while dividing and marginalizing others. Such political tactics made possible the rapid privatization of 14,000 state enterprises in 1992-1994 and the defeat of inflation in 1995. But failure to outmaneuver the new oligarchs and regional governors after 1996 undermined reformers' attempts to collect taxes and clean up the bureaucracy that has stifled business growth.Renewing a strain of analysis that runs from Machiavelli to Hirschman, the authors reach conclusions about political strategies that have important implications for other reformers. They draw on their extensive knowledge of the country and recent experience as advisors to Russian policymakers. Written in an accessible style, the book should appeal to economists, political scientists, policymakers, businesspeople, and all those interested in Russian politics or economics.

Gardner McKay's Journey Without a Map, with introduction by Jimmy Buffett, is a memoir extraordinaire one of those rare books that just keeps getting better and better as you read along, its last half transfixing. McKay was a maverick who went into the South American forest alone for nearly two years; starred in, and walked away from, the starring role in an expensive hour-long TV series after four years; raised lions and cheetah in the wilds of Beverly Hills; was the theatre critic for the LA Herald; wrote successful plays, novels, poetry and stories; walked across Venezuela; was a world-class sailor; a sculptor, with pieces in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum; wrote and kept over 200 journals (the basis for this memoir); turned down nearly 50 starring movie roles; served as a film critic; taught university courses; rode with the Egyptian camel corps; and finished this memoir as he was dying of cancer, giving him what he called "a real deadline." He was, above all, an adventurist. Of his quitting television, after he had acquired international fame: "Fame is so cheap that I wanted to go someplace where someone, some stranger, might be able to make up his own mind about me without already having formed an opinion based on drivel that needed to be overcome or ignored."

Every woman longs to be a good mother. But what about those women who grew up “undermothered”—whose own mothers were well-meaning but unavailable, absent, distracted, or depressed? How are they to become the good mothers they aspire to be? In this beautifully articulate book, Kathryn Black, whose own mother’s early death inspired her award-winning In the Shadow of Polio, offers affirming news: One doesn’t have to have had a good mother to become one. Probing for answers from experts in psychiatry and psychoanalysis, social work, biology, and other disciplines, Black reveals that there are other paths to discovering the good mother within. This moving and powerful book shows how “wounded daughters” can become “healing mothers” who give their own children a legacy of security, happiness, and love. On the web: http://www.motheringwithoutamap.com

A Map to the Door of No Return is a timely book that explores the relevance and nature of identity and belonging in a culturally diverse and rapidly changing world. It is an insightful, sensitive and poetic book of discovery. Drawing on cartography, travels, narratives of childhood in the Caribbean, journeys across the Canadian landscape, African ancestry, histories, politics, philosophies and literature, Dionne Brand sketches the shifting borders of home and nation, the connection to place in Canada and the world beyond. The title, A Map to the Door of No Return, refers to both a place in imagination and a point in history—the Middle Passage. The quest for identity and place has profound meaning and resonance in an age of heterogenous identities. In this exquisitely written and thought-provoking new work, Dionne Brand creates a map of her own art.

The British author embarks on an awe-inspiring trek through 1930s West Africa in “one of the best travel books [of the twentieth] century” (The Independent). When Graham Greene left Liverpool in 1935 for what was then an Africa unmarked by colonization, it was to leave the known transgressions of his own civilization behind for those unknown. First by cargo ship, then by train and truck through Sierra Leone, and finally on foot, Greene embarked on a dangerous and unpredictable 350-mile, four-week trek through Liberia with his cousin, and a handful of servants and bearers, into a world where few had ever seen a white man. For Greene, this odyssey became as much a trip into the primitive interiors of the writer himself as it was a physical journey into a land foreign to his experience. “No one who reads this book will question the value of Greene’s experiment, or emerge unshaken by the penetration, the richness, the integrity of this moving record.” —The Guardian