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| the thing around your neck the american embassy: The Thing Around Your Neck Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2010-06-01 These twelve dazzling stories from the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are her most intimate works to date. In these stories Adichie turns her penetrating eye to the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the United States. In “A Private Experience,” a medical student hides from a violent riot with a poor Muslim woman, and the young mother at the centre of “Imitation” finds her comfortable life in Philadelphia threatened when she learns that her husband has moved his mistress into their Lagos home. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Adichie’s prodigious literary powers. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Imitation Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2015-05-13 A Vintage Shorts “Short Story Month” selection from the award-winning, bestselling author Nkem is living a life of wealth and security in America, until she discovers that her husband is keeping a girlfriend back home in Nigeria. In this high-intensity story of passion and the masks we all wear, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of the acclaimed novels Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah and winner of the Orange Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, explores the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. “Imitation” is a selection from Adichie’s collection The Thing Around Your Neck. An eBook short. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: The Thing Around Your Neck Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2009-06-16 From the award-winning, bestselling author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists—a dazzling story collection filled with indelible characters who jump off the page and into your head and heart (USA Today). In these twelve riveting stories, the award-winning Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie explores the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow, and longing, these stories map, with Adichie's signature emotional wisdom, the collision of two cultures and the deeply human struggle to reconcile them. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Notes on Grief Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2021-05-11 From the globally acclaimed, best-selling novelist and author of We Should All Be Feminists, a timely and deeply personal account of the loss of her father: “With raw eloquence, Notes on Grief … captures the bewildering messiness of loss in a society that requires serenity, when you’d rather just scream. Grief is impolite ... Adichie’s words put welcome, authentic voice to this most universal of emotions, which is also one of the most universally avoided” (The Washington Post). Notes on Grief is an exquisite work of meditation, remembrance, and hope, written in the wake of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's beloved father’s death in the summer of 2020. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged around the world, and kept Adichie and her family members separated from one another, her father succumbed unexpectedly to complications of kidney failure. Expanding on her original New Yorker piece, Adichie shares how this loss shook her to her core. She writes about being one of the millions of people grieving this year; about the familial and cultural dimensions of grief and also about the loneliness and anger that are unavoidable in it. With signature precision of language, and glittering, devastating detail on the page—and never without touches of rich, honest humor—Adichie weaves together her own experience of her father’s death with threads of his life story, from his remarkable survival during the Biafran war, through a long career as a statistics professor, into the days of the pandemic in which he’d stay connected with his children and grandchildren over video chat from the family home in Abba, Nigeria. In the compact format of We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele, Adichie delivers a gem of a book—a book that fundamentally connects us to one another as it probes one of the most universal human experiences. Notes on Grief is a book for this moment—a work readers will treasure and share now more than ever—and yet will prove durable and timeless, an indispensable addition to Adichie's canon. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Last Men Out Bob Drury, Tom Clavin, 2012-04-03 Last Men Out tells the riveting story of the last 11 United States soldiers to escape South Vietnam on April, 30, 1975, the day America ended its combat presence. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: The Ungrateful Refugee Dina Nayeri, 2020-09-15 A Finalist for the 2019 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction Nayeri combines her own experience with those of refugees she meets as an adult, telling their stories with tenderness and reverence.” —The New York Times Book Review Nayeri weaves her empowering personal story with those of the ‘feared swarms’ . . . Her family’s escape from Isfahan to Oklahoma, which involved waiting in Dubai and Italy, is wildly fascinating . . . Using energetic prose, Nayeri is an excellent conduit for these heart–rending stories, eschewing judgment and employing care in threading the stories in with her own . . . This is a memoir laced with stimulus and plenty of heart at a time when the latter has grown elusive.” —Star–Tribune (Minneapolis) Aged eight, Dina Nayeri fled Iran along with her mother and brother and lived in the crumbling shell of an Italian hotel–turned–refugee camp. Eventually she was granted asylum in America. She settled in Oklahoma, then made her way to Princeton University. In this book, Nayeri weaves together her own vivid story with the stories of other refugees and asylum seekers in recent years, bringing us inside their daily lives and taking us through the different stages of their journeys, from escape to asylum to resettlement. In these pages, a couple fall in love over the phone, and women gather to prepare the noodles that remind them of home. A closeted queer man tries to make his case truthfully as he seeks asylum, and a translator attempts to help new arrivals present their stories to officials. Nayeri confronts notions like “the swarm,” and, on the other hand, “good” immigrants. She calls attention to the harmful way in which Western governments privilege certain dangers over others. With surprising and provocative questions, The Ungrateful Refugee challenges us to rethink how we talk about the refugee crisis. “A writer who confronts issues that are key to the refugee experience.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer and The Refugees |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2010-10-29 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A New York Times Notable Book • Recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “Winner of Winners” award • From the award-winning, bestselling author of Dream Count, Americanah, and We Should All Be Feminists—a haunting story of love and war With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor full of revolutionary zeal; Olanna, the professor’s beautiful young mistress who has abandoned her life in Lagos for a dusty town and her lover’s charm; and Richard, a shy young Englishman infatuated with Olanna’s willful twin sister Kainene. Half of a Yellow Sun is a tremendously evocative novel of the promise, hope, and disappointment of the Biafran war. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Lost in Transition Kristen Ghodsee, 2011-09-14 Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: A Most Wanted Man John le Carre, 2009-08-04 A half-starved young Russian is smuggled into Hamburg at dead of night. He has an improbable amount of cash secreted in a purse around his neck. He is a devout Muslim. Or is he? |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Kabul in Winter Ann Jones, 2007-03-06 Soon after the bombing of Kabul ceased, award-winning journalist and women's rights activist Ann Jones set out for the shattered city, determined to bring help where her country had brought destruction. Here is her trenchant report from inside a city struggling to rise from the ruins. Working among the multitude of impoverished war widows, retraining Kabul's long-silenced English teachers, and investigating the city's prison for women, Jones enters a large community of female outcasts: runaway child brides, pariah prostitutes, cast-off wives, victims of rape. In the streets and markets, she hears the Afghan view of the supposed benefits brought by the fall of the Taliban, and learns that regarding women as less than human is the norm, not the aberration of one conspicuously repressive regime. Jones confronts the ways in which Afghan education, culture, and politics have repeatedly been hijacked?by Communists, Islamic fundamentalists, and the Western free marketeers?always with disastrous results. And she reveals, through small events, the big disjunctions: between U.S promises and performance, between the new democracy' and the still-entrenched warlords, between what's boasted of and what is. At once angry, profound, and starkly beautiful, Kabul in Winter brings alive the people and day-to-day life of a place whose future depends so much upon our own-- |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Trash Andy Mulligan, 2010-10-12 In an unnamed Third World country, in the not-so-distant future, three “dumpsite boys” make a living picking through the mountains of garbage on the outskirts of a large city. One unlucky-lucky day, Raphael finds something very special and very mysterious. So mysterious that he decides to keep it, even when the city police offer a handsome reward for its return. That decision brings with it terrifying consequences, and soon the dumpsite boys must use all of their cunning and courage to stay ahead of their pursuers. It’s up to Raphael, Gardo, and Rat—boys who have no education, no parents, no homes, and no money—to solve the mystery and right a terrible wrong. Andy Mulligan has written a powerful story about unthinkable poverty—and the kind of hope and determination that can transcend it. With twists and turns, unrelenting action, and deep, raw emotion, Trash is a heart-pounding, breath-holding novel. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Americanah Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2023-05-11 SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEY'S WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 'A delicious, important novel' The Times 'Alert, alive and gripping' Independent 'Some novels tell a great story and others make you change the way you look at the world. Americanah does both.' Guardian As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can. Ifemelu--beautiful, self-assured--departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze--the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor--had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Thirteen years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion--for their homeland and for each other--they will face the toughest decisions of their lives. Fearless, gripping, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story of love and expectation set in today's globalized world. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: An Accidental American Alex Carr, 2007-04-17 Forced out of a self-imposed exile, one woman faces a lifetime’s worth of secrets and betrayal–all in the name of staying alive. Nicole Blake had planned to leave her criminal life in the past. She had done her time in a dank prison in Marseille and relinquished the world of forgery and counterfeiting for an unassuming career as a freelance consultant. Now her world is a small farm in the French Pyrenees, with daily fresh eggs and the companionship of her devoted dog. But when U.S. intelligence operative John Valsamis shows up at her door, Nicole is reminded that she’ll always be an ex-con. Valsamis is after Nicole’s former lover, Rahim Ali, and soon Nicole finds herself back in Lisbon, tracking down Rahim in all their old haunts. Except now Rahim isn’t just a document forger–he’s a suspected terrorist. Unwittingly drawn into an international web of fundamentalism, crime, and corruption, Nicole discovers that its threads stretch from the cobbled streets of Lisbon to the once-beautiful city of her birth, Beirut, and to the top levels of the government that sent Valsamis to find her. And as with any good web, the harder Nicole fights to free herself, the tighter it closes around her. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: How to Write About Africa Binyavanga Wainaina, 2023-06-06 From one of Africa’s most influential and eloquent essayists, a posthumous collection that highlights his biting satire and subversive wisdom on topics from travel to cultural identity to sexuality “A fierce literary talent . . . [Wainaina] shines a light on his continent without cliché.”—The Guardian “Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. . . . Africa is to be pitied, worshipped, or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.” Binyavanga Wainaina was a pioneering voice in African literature, an award-winning memoirist and essayist remembered as one of the greatest chroniclers of contemporary African life. This groundbreaking collection brings together, for the first time, Wainaina’s pioneering writing on the African continent, including many of his most critically acclaimed pieces, such as the viral satirical sensation “How to Write About Africa.” Working fearlessly across a range of topics—from politics to international aid, cultural heritage, and redefined sexuality—he describes the modern world with sensual, emotional, and psychological detail, giving us a full-color view of his home country and continent. These works present the portrait of a giant in African literature who left a tremendous legacy. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Argo Antonio Mendez, Matt Baglio, 2013-02-06 The true account of a daring rescue that inspired the film ARGO, winner of the 2012 Academy Award for Best Picture On November 4, 1979, Iranian militants stormed the American embassy in Tehran and captured dozens of American hostages, sparking a 444-day ordeal and a quake in global politics still reverberating today. But there is a little-known drama connected to the crisis: six Americans escaped. And a top-level CIA officer named Antonio Mendez devised an ingenious yet incredibly risky plan to rescue them before they were detected. Disguising himself as a Hollywood producer, and supported by a cast of expert forgers, deep cover CIA operatives, foreign agents, and Hollywood special effects artists, Mendez traveled to Tehran under the guise of scouting locations for a fake science fiction film called Argo. While pretending to find the perfect film backdrops, Mendez and a colleague succeeded in contacting the escapees, and smuggling them out of Iran. Antonio Mendez finally details the extraordinarily complex and dangerous operation he led more than three decades ago. A riveting story of secret identities and international intrigue, Argo is the gripping account of the history-making collusion between Hollywood and high-stakes espionage. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: A Companion to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Ernest Emenyo̲nu, 2017 Frontcover -- Contents -- Notes on Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Narrating the Past: Orality, History & the Production of Knowledge in the Works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -- 2. Deconstructing Binary Oppositions of Gender in Purple Hibiscus: A Review of Religious/Traditional Superiority & Silence -- 3. Adichie & the West African Voice: Women & Power in Purple Hibiscus -- 4. Reconstructing Motherhood: A Mutative Reality in Purple Hibiscus -- 5. Ritualized Abuse in Purple Hibiscus -- 6. Dining Room & Kitchen: Food-Related Spaces & their Interfaces with the Female Body in Purple Hibiscus -- 7. The Paradox of Vulnerability: The Child Voice in Purple Hibiscus -- 8. 'Fragile Negotiations': Olanna's Melancholia in Half of a Yellow Sun -- 9. The Biafran War & the Evolution of Domestic Space in Half of a Yellow Sun -- 10. Corruption in Post-Independence Politics: Half of a Yellow Sun as a Reflection of A Man of the People -- 11. Contrasting Gender Roles in Male-Crafted Fiction with Half of a Yellow Sun -- 12. 'A Kind of Paradise': Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Claim to Agency, Responsibility & Writing -- 13. Dislocation, Cultural Memory & Transcultural Identity in Select Stories from The Thing Around Your Neck -- 14. 'Reverse Appropriations' & Transplantation in Americanah -- 15. Revisiting Double Consciousness & Relocating the Self in Americanah -- 16. Adichie's Americanah: A Migrant Bildungsroman -- 17. 'Hairitage' Matters: Transitioning & the Third Wave Hair Movement in 'Hair', 'Imitation' & Americanah -- Appendix: The Works of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -- Index |
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| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Minute Zero Todd Moss, 2015-09-15 An extraordinary international thriller by the former deputy assistant secretary of state and author of the national bestseller The Golden Hour. In the life of every country, at a moment of extreme national disruption, there is a brief period of breakdown, when everything is uncertain, events can turn on a dime. That is the moment to act, to shape events how you want them to go. That is Minute Zero. Fresh off the harrowing events of The Golden Hour, State Department crisis manager Judd Ryker is suddenly thrown into a quickly developing emergency in Zimbabwe, where a longtime strongman is being challenged for the presidency. Rumors are flying furiously: armed gangs, military crackdowns, shady outside money pouring in, and, most disturbing for the United States, reports of highly enriched uranium leaking into the market. And that’s all before Ryker even lands in the country. It gets much worse after that. If he can’t get control, shape his Minute Zero, a lot of people are going to die—not least of all himself. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Know Thine Enemy Edward Shirley, 2019-03-06 This book gives an account of Shirley's trip into Iran as a spy to provide an insight into Iranian character. It is a vivid, firsthand portrait of the clash of Western and Muslim civilizations. The book portrays Iranians in a way different from what the most Americans know about them. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Reading Lolita in Tehran Azar Nafisi, 2015-10-13 Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come to share their own stories, dreams and hopes with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom. Azar Nafisi's bestselling memoir is a moving, passionate testament to the transformative power of books, the magic of words and the search for beauty in life's darkest moments. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: For Love of Biafra Amanda N. Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 1998 |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Afropolitan Horizons Ulf Hannerz, 2022-02-11 Introduction. Nigerian Connections -- Palm Wine, Amos Tutuola, and a Literary Gatekeeper -- Bahia-Lagos-Ouidah: Mariana's Story -- Igbo Life, Past and Present: Three Views -- Inland, Upriver with the Empire: Borrioboola-Gha -- The City, according to Ekwensi . . . and Onuzo -- Points of Cultural Geography: Ibadan . . . Enugu, Onitsha, Nsukka -- Been-To: Dreams, Disappointments, Departures, and Returns -- Dateline Lagos: Reporting on Nigeria to the World -- Death in Lagos -- Tai Solarin: On Colonial Power, Schools, Work Ethic, Religion, and the Press -- Wole Soyinka, Leo Frobenius, and the Ori Olokun -- A Voice from the Purdah: Baba of Karo -- Bauchi: The Academic and the Imam -- Railtown Writers -- Nigeria at War -- America Observed: With Nigerian Eyes -- Transatlantic Shuttle -- Sojourners from Black Britain -- Oyotunji Village, South Carolina: Reverse Afropolitanism. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Cross-worlds Suzanne S. Choo, 2015 |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: My Forbidden Face Latifa, 2008-09-04 Latifa was born into an educated middle-class Afghan family in Kabul in 1980. She dreamed of one day of becoming a journalist, she was interested in fashion, movies and friends. Her father was in the import/export business and her mother was a doctor. Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul. From that moment, Latifa, just 16 years old became a prisoner in her own home. Her school was closed. Her mother was banned from working. The simplest and most basic freedoms - walking down the street, looking out a window - were no longer hers. She was now forced to wear a chadri. My Forbidden Face provides a poignant and highly personal account of life under the Taliban regime. With painful honesty and clarity Latifa describes the way she watched her world falling apart, in the name of a fanatical interpretation of a faith that she could not comprehend. Her voice captures a lost innocence, but also echoes her determination to live in freedom and hope. Earlier this year, Latifa and her parents escaped Afghanistan with the help of a French-based Afghan resistance group. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini, 2007 Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Snobs Julian Fellowes, 2006-01-24 Preparing to marry heir Charles Broughton, attractive accountant's daughter Edith Lavery makes humorous and astute observations about contemporary England's class system. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Baghdad Burning Riverbend, 2005-04-01 Since the fall of Bagdad, women’s voices have been largely erased, but four months after Saddam Hussein’s statue fell, a 24 year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging. In 2003, a twenty-four-year-old woman from Baghdad began blogging about life in the city under the pseudonym Riverbend. Her passion, honesty, and wry idiomatic English made her work a vital contribution to our understanding of post-war Iraq—and won her a large following. Baghdad Burning is a quotidian chronicle of Riverbend’s life with her family between April 2003 and September of 2004. She describes rolling blackouts, intermittent water access, daily explosions, gas shortages and travel restrictions. She also expresses a strong stance against the interim government, the Bush administration, and Islamic fundamentalists like Al Sadr and his followers. Her book “offers quick takes on events as they occur, from a perspective too often overlooked, ignored or suppressed” (Publishers Weekly). “Riverbend is bright and opinionated, true, but like all voices of dissent worth remembering, she provides an urgent reminder that, whichever governments we struggle under, we are all the same.” —Booklist “Feisty and learned: first-rate reading for any American who suspects that Fox News may not be telling the whole story.” —Kirkus |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: In the Cauldron Lew Paper, 2019-11-05 “The underbrush through which Mr. Paper cuts his way . . . would be challenging for any writer. But Mr. Paper, with an eye for character and an easy narrative style, manages to keep his subject interesting. . . . And even though we know how it’s all going to end, Mr. Paper manages to add a measure of suspense to his narrative — a tribute to his abilities as a writer.” —The Washington Times This is not just another book about Pearl Harbor. It is the story of Joseph Grew, America’s ambassador to Japan, and his frantic effort in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack to orchestrate an agreement between Japan and the United States to avoid the war he saw coming. It is a story filled with hope and heartache, with complex and fascinating characters, and with a drama befitting the momentous decisions at stake. And more than that, it is a story that has never been told. In those months before the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan and the United States were locked in a battle of wills. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic sanctions were crippling Japan. America's noose was tightening around Japan's neck — but the country's leaders refused to yield to American demands. In this cauldron of boiling tensions, Joseph Grew offered many recommendations to break the deadlock. Having resided and worked in Tokyo for almost ten years, Grew understood what Roosevelt and his administration back home did not: that the Japanese would rather face annihilation than endure the humiliation of surrendering to American pressure. The President and his administration saw little need to accept their ambassador’s recommendations. The administration’s policies, they believed, were sure to succeed. And so, with increasing urgency, Grew tried to explain to the President and his administration that Japan’s mindset could not be gauged by Western standards of logic and that the administration’s policies could lead Japan to embark on a suicidal war with the United States “with dangerous and dramatic suddenness.” Relying on Grew’s diaries, letters and memos, interviews with members of the families of Grew and his staff, and an abundance of other primary source materials, Lew Paper presents the gripping story of Grew’s effort to halt the downward spiral of Japan’s relations with the United States. Grew had to wrestle with an American government that would not listen to him – and simultaneously confront an increasingly hostile environment in Japan, where pervasive surveillance, arbitrary arrest, and even unspeakable torture by Japan's secret police were constant threats. In the Cauldron reads like a novel, but it is based on fact. And it is sure to raise questions whether the Pearl Harbor attack could have been avoided. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Don't Hide the Madness William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, 2018 An intense, compelling conversation between legendary Beat icons William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, featuring photos by Ginsberg, and details of Burroughs' shamanic exorcism of the demon that led him to shoot his wife and drove his work as a writer. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Moody Food Ray Robertson, 2006-09 Inspired by the exploits of ill-fated country-rock visionary Gram Parsons, this mid-60s tale of idealism and escape traces the trials of a fictionalized draft-dodging flower child from the United States to Canada and back. It is the late 1960s in Yorkville, Toronto's hippie ghetto of artists, intellectuals, drunken poets, and would-be rock stars. In this idyllic haven, narrator Bill Hansen, a drummer, meets Thomas Graham, an American musician on the lam from the draft. The two form a band, but even as they revel in music and freedom, Graham is hobbled by another love: a drug habit that becomes his reason for living and, eventually, for dying. Graham's emotional trip and failed, revolutionary life reflect the rise and fall of an entire generation's aspirations. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Leaving Berlin Joseph Kanon, 2015-03-03 New York Times Notable Book * Named one of NPR and Wall Street Journal's Best Books of the Year * The acclaimed author of The Good German “deftly captures the ambience” (The New York Times Book Review) of postwar East Berlin in his “thought-provoking, pulse-pounding” (Wall Street Journal) New York Times bestseller—a sweeping spy thriller about a city caught between political idealism and the harsh realities of Soviet occupation. Berlin, 1948. Almost four years after the war’s end, the city is still in ruins, a physical wasteland and a political symbol about to rupture. In the West, a defiant, blockaded city is barely surviving on airlifted supplies; in the East, the heady early days of political reconstruction are being undermined by the murky compromises of the Cold War. Espionage, like the black market, is a fact of life. Even culture has become a battleground, with German intellectuals being lured back from exile to add credibility to the competing sectors. Alex Meier, a young Jewish writer, fled the Nazis for America before the war. But the politics of his youth have now put him in the crosshairs of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Faced with deportation and the loss of his family, he makes a desperate bargain with the fledgling CIA: he will earn his way back to America by acting as their agent in his native Berlin. But almost from the start things go fatally wrong. A kidnapping misfires, an East German agent is killed, and Alex finds himself a wanted man. Worse, he discovers his real assignment—to spy on the woman he left behind, the only woman he has ever loved. Changing sides in Berlin is as easy as crossing a sector border. But where do we draw the lines of our moral boundaries? At betrayal? Survival? Murder? Joseph Kanon’s compelling thriller is a love story that brilliantly brings a shadowy period of history vividly to life. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Happiness, Like Water Chinelo Okparanta, 2013 A moving debut story collection centered on Nigerian women, as they build lives out of longing and hope, faith and doubt, the struggle to stay and the mandate to leave, and the burden and strength of love. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: The Bookseller Mark Pryor, 2012-10-09 Who is killing the celebrated bouquinistes of Paris? Max—an elderly Paris bookstall owner—is abducted at gunpoint. His friend, Hugo Marston, head of security at the US embassy, looks on helplessly, powerless to do anything to stop the kidnapper. Marston launches a search, enlisting the help of semiretired CIA agent Tom Green. Their investigation reveals that Max was a Holocaust survivor and later became a Nazi hunter. Is his disappearance somehow tied to his grim history, or even to the mysterious old books he sold? On the streets of Paris, tensions are rising as rival drug gangs engage in violent turf wars. Before long, other booksellers start to disappear, their bodies found floating in the Seine. Though the police are not interested in his opinion, Marston is convinced the hostilities have something to do with the murders of these bouquinistes. Then he himself becomes a target of the unknown assassins. With Tom by his side, Marston finally puts the pieces of the puzzle together, connecting the past with the present and leading the two men, quite literally, to the enemy's lair. Just as the killer intended. From the Trade Paperback edition. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: In the Garden of Beasts Erik Larson, 2012-05-01 Erik Larson, New York Times bestselling author of Devil in the White City, delivers a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power. The time is 1933, the place, Berlin, when William E. Dodd becomes America’s first ambassador to Hitler’s Nazi Germany in a year that proved to be a turning point in history. A mild-mannered professor from Chicago, Dodd brings along his wife, son, and flamboyant daughter, Martha. At first Martha is entranced by the parties and pomp, and the handsome young men of the Third Reich with their infectious enthusiasm for restoring Germany to a position of world prominence. Enamored of the “New Germany,” she has one affair after another, including with the suprisingly honorable first chief of the Gestapo, Rudolf Diels. But as evidence of Jewish persecution mounts, confirmed by chilling first-person testimony, her father telegraphs his concerns to a largely indifferent State Department back home. Dodd watches with alarm as Jews are attacked, the press is censored, and drafts of frightening new laws begin to circulate. As that first year unfolds and the shadows deepen, the Dodds experience days full of excitement, intrigue, romance—and ultimately, horror, when a climactic spasm of violence and murder reveals Hitler’s true character and ruthless ambition. Suffused with the tense atmosphere of the period, and with unforgettable portraits of the bizarre Göring and the expectedly charming--yet wholly sinister--Goebbels, In the Garden of Beasts lends a stunning, eyewitness perspective on events as they unfold in real time, revealing an era of surprising nuance and complexity. The result is a dazzling, addictively readable work that speaks volumes about why the world did not recognize the grave threat posed by Hitler until Berlin, and Europe, were awash in blood and terror. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver, 2005-07-05 The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: The American Mission Matthew Palmer, 2015-04-07 One of NPR's Best Books of 2014! After witnessing a devastating incident in Darfur, Alex Baines is stripped of his security clearance and relegated to a desk job. He’s about to resign when his former mentor—now the current Ambassador to the Congo—offers him an opportunity to start over. But the post isn’t what Alex imagined. The US company Consolidated Mining seems to be everywhere. When a hostage situation involving a survey team arises, Alex is sent in, finding himself in the middle of the conflict with a guerilla leader and Marie Tsiolo, a native geologist on the team. As violence escalates in the region, Alex struggles to balance the interests of the U.S. with the greater good of the people of the Congo—and somehow stay alive. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Moondogs Alexander Yates, 2012-06-05 A singularly effervescent novel pivoting around the disappearance of an American businessman in the Philippines and the long-suffering son, jilted lover, slick police commissioner, misguided villain, and supernatural saviors who all want a piece of him. Mourning the recent loss of his mother, twentysomething Benicio—aka Benny—travels to Manila to reconnect with his estranged father, Howard. But when he arrives his father is nowhere to be found—leaving an irritated son to conclude that Howard has let him down for the umpteenth time. However, his father has actually been kidnapped by a meth-addled cabdriver, with grand plans to sell him to local terrorists as bait in the country’s never-ending power struggle between insurgents, separatists, and “democratic” muscle. Benicio’s search for Howard reveals more about his father’s womanizing ways and suspicious business deals, reopening the old hurts that he’d hoped to mend. Interspersed with the son’s inquiry and the father’s calamitous life in captivity are the high-octane interconnecting narratives of Reynato Ocampo, the local celebrity-hero policeman charged with rescuing Howard; Ocampo’s ragtag team of wizardry-infused soldiers; and Monique, a novice officer at the American embassy whose family still feels feverishly unmoored in the Philippines. With blistering forward momentum, crackling dialogue, wonderfully bizarre turns, and glimpses into both Filipino and expat culture, the novel marches toward a stunning climax, which ultimately challenges our conventional ideas of family and identity and introduces Yates as a powerful new voice in contemporary literature. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: The Things They Carried Tim O'Brien, 2013 |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Absurdistan Gary Shteyngart, 2007-04-03 “Absurdistan is not just a hilarious novel, but a record of a particular peak in the history of human folly. No one is more capable of dealing with the transition from the hell of socialism to the hell of capitalism in Eastern Europe than Shteyngart, the great-great grandson of one Nikolai Gogol and the funniest foreigner alive.” –Aleksandar Hemon From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook comes the uproarious and poignant story of one very fat man and one very small country Meet Misha Vainberg, aka Snack Daddy, a 325-pound disaster of a human being, son of the 1,238th-richest man in Russia, proud holder of a degree in multicultural studies from Accidental College, USA (don’t even ask), and patriot of no country save the great City of New York. Poor Misha just wants to live in the South Bronx with his hot Latina girlfriend, but after his gangster father murders an Oklahoma businessman in Russia, all hopes of a U.S. visa are lost. Salvation lies in the tiny, oil-rich nation of Absurdistan, where a crooked consular officer will sell Misha a Belgian passport. But after a civil war breaks out between two competing ethnic groups and a local warlord installs hapless Misha as minister of multicultural affairs, our hero soon finds himself covered in oil, fighting for his life, falling in love, and trying to figure out if a normal life is still possible in the twenty-first century. With the enormous success of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Gary Shteyngart established himself as a central figure in today’s literary world—“one of the most talented and entertaining writers of his generation,” according to The New York Observer. In Absurdistan, he delivers an even funnier and wiser literary performance. Misha Vainberg is a hero for the new century, a glimmer of humanity in a world of dashed hopes. |
| the thing around your neck the american embassy: Class Paul Fussell, 1983 This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom. |
Thingiverse - Digital Designs for Physical Objects
Find and print unique, unexpected items from across Thingiverse. Subscribe for news, community spotlights, and more! Download millions of 3D models and files for your 3D printer, laser cutter, …
THING Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of THING is an object or entity not precisely designated or capable of being designated. How to use thing in a sentence.
1164 Synonyms & Antonyms for THING - Thesaurus.com
Find 1164 different ways to say THING, along with antonyms, related words, and example sentences at Thesaurus.com.
THING | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
THING definition: 1. used to refer in an approximate way to an object or to avoid naming it: 2. your possessions or…. Learn more.
Thing - Definition, Meaning & Synonyms - Vocabulary.com
Use the noun thing to refer to something without naming it specifically. You might describe your sister's bizarre outfit by saying, "She was wearing this puffy orange thing around her waist and …
Thing - Wikipedia
Thing or The Thing may refer to: The Thing from Another World, often referred to as The Thing, 1951 science fiction film based on the novella Who Goes There? The Thing (1982 film), a …
thing - WordReference.com Dictionary of English
anything that is an object of thought or discussion: another thing I want to talk to you about. circumstances in general: How are things? a particular fact or circumstance: His death was a …
Thing - definition of thing by The Free Dictionary
thing - a statement regarded as an object; "to say the same thing in other terms"; "how can you say such a thing?"
THING Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
Thing definition: a material object without life or consciousness; an inanimate object.. See examples of THING used in a sentence.
Thing Definition & Meaning - YourDictionary
An object or entity that is not or cannot be named specifically. What is this thing for? An individual object, especially an inanimate object. There wasn't a thing in sight. That which is done, has …
Thingiverse - Digital Designs for Physical Objects
Find and print unique, unexpected items from across Thingiverse. Subscribe for news, community spotlights, and more! Download millions of 3D models and files for your 3D printer, laser cutter, …
THING Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of THING is an object or entity not precisely designated or capable of being designated. How to use thing in a sentence.
1164 Synonyms & Antonyms for THING - Thesaurus.com
Find 1164 different ways to say THING, along with antonyms, related words, and example sentences at Thesaurus.com.
THING | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
THING definition: 1. used to refer in an approximate way to an object or to avoid naming it: 2. your possessions or…. Learn more.
Thing - Definition, Meaning & Synonyms - Vocabulary.com
Use the noun thing to refer to something without naming it specifically. You might describe your sister's bizarre outfit by saying, "She was wearing this puffy orange thing around her waist and a …
Thing - Wikipedia
Thing or The Thing may refer to: The Thing from Another World, often referred to as The Thing, 1951 science fiction film based on the novella Who Goes There? The Thing (1982 film), a remake …
thing - WordReference.com Dictionary of English
anything that is an object of thought or discussion: another thing I want to talk to you about. circumstances in general: How are things? a particular fact or circumstance: His death was a …
Thing - definition of thing by The Free Dictionary
thing - a statement regarded as an object; "to say the same thing in other terms"; "how can you say such a thing?"
THING Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
Thing definition: a material object without life or consciousness; an inanimate object.. See examples of THING used in a sentence.
Thing Definition & Meaning - YourDictionary
An object or entity that is not or cannot be named specifically. What is this thing for? An individual object, especially an inanimate object. There wasn't a thing in sight. That which is done, has been …
