Seventeen of the twenty-two years the author served with the United Nations Development Programme were spent with his wife, Delores, on assignments in Thailand, Samoa, China and Vietnam. The main focus of the book is a collection of vignettes describing experiences of living in these four countries. Some stories are humorous and are to be read just for fun (e.g., living conditions on a small isolated island). Other stories are serious and somber (e.g., retracing major battle sites of the Vietnam War). Some are pure adventure (e.g., the midnight visit to the leatherback turtle beach). Fascinating travel adventures in Malaysia and Burma (Myanmar) are also included. The first two chapters describe the author’s introduction to values, politics and social justice issues. In addition, the author describes his experiences as a congressional staffer and college professor.

For decades, political observers and pundits have characterized the Islamic Republic of Iran as an ideologically rigid state on the verge of collapse, exclusively connected to a narrow social base. In A Social Revolution, Kevan Harris convincingly demonstrates how they are wrong. Previous studies ignore the forceful consequences of three decades of social change following the 1979 revolution. Today, more people in the country are connected to welfare and social policy institutions than to any other form of state organization. In fact, much of Iran’s current political turbulence is the result of the success of these social welfare programs, which have created newly educated and mobilized social classes advocating for change. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted in Iran, Harris shows how the revolutionary regime endured through the expansion of health, education, and aid programs that have both embedded the state in everyday life and empowered its challengers. This focus on the social policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran opens a new line of inquiry into the study of welfare states in countries where they are often overlooked or ignored.

How do you think your family would react if you told them youand theywere going to serve in the Peace Corps in Malawi? Do you think theyd be excited to make such a move? Do you think you and your family would be able to make a positive influence on the people of Malawi? In 1973, the Linn family of Ashland, Oregon, did just that. In Letters from the Linns of Lilongwe, DeVon Wayne Linn, his wife Fae, and their three children, Jennifer, Jay, and Douglas recount their experiences serving in the Peace Corps in Malawi, Africa. Their travels, day-to-day experiences with schools, and service in the Warm Heart of Africa are shared through 155 complete letters and numerous letter excerpts to friends and family. DeVon Wayne Linn, the father, gained in-depth professional knowledge from his experience as Malawis Chief Fisheries Officer. Fae A. Linn, the mother and wife, worked as a volunteer in a health-care facility in Lilongwe and cared for their home and children. Their three children attended private schools with Malawian and other international students. Letters from the Linns of Lilongwe: A Peace Corps Volunteer Family Odyssey, Malawi 19731975 provides unique insight into a foreign nation and the influences people from one culture can have on those from another.

This book explores the legacies of the genocide of Roma in Europe after the end of the Second World War. Hundreds of thousands of people labelled as ‘Gypsies’ were persecuted or killed in Nazi Germany and across occupied Europe between 1933 and 1945. In many places, discrimination continued after the war was over. The chapters in this volume ask how these experiences shaped the lives of Romani survivors and their families in eastern and western Europe since 1945. This book will appeal to researchers and students in Modern European History, Romani Studies, and the history of genocide and the Holocaust.

Ann Kerr’s is a personal account of an American family during the most tumultuous years of Beirut’s political strife. It begins with the tragic assassination of her husband Malcolm Kerr, one of the most respected scholars of Middle East studies, in 1984, seventeen months after he became president of the American University of Beirut. She retraces in detail the events that brought them to the Middle East, and reaches back into her childhood to describe a lifelong affinity for Lebanon. For a young American woman caring for a family in Lebanon and Egypt, life was like nothing she had ever known, but Ann Kerr approached it with a sense of adventure, which would help her deal with the beauty, chaos, and the ultimate horror of life during the country’s most volatile years of the last three decades. The personal saga of her family and the events surrounding her husband’s untimely death merge with the political episodes that have shaped U.S.-Arab relations since World War II.

In his intimate and profoundly moving Jewish family history—a memoir of displacement, prejudice, hope, despair, and love—award-winning New York Times columnist Roger Cohen turns a compassionate and discerning eye on the legacy of his own forebears. Beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through to the present day, Cohen tracks his family’s story of repeated upheaval, four generations of wandering from pre-Shoah Lithuania to apartheid-era South Africa, and then to England, the United States, and Israel. At the heart of Cohen’s story is the powerful bond he had with his mother, the “girl” forced to travel far from home. Tormented by a deep depression yet stoic in her struggle, she embodied her son’s complex inheritance. Graceful, honest, and sweeping, The Girl from Human Street is a remarkable chronicle of the quest for belonging across generations, a gripping saga, and a resonant portrait of identity and memory in the modern age.

Ever dream of selling up and running away to sea? Diane Stuemer and her husband, Herbert, were once a typical suburban couple entering middle age, with a comfortable home and three boys under twelve. A year later they had sold their business, rented out their house, and were setting out to circumnavigate the globe in a 40-year-old yacht. Their entire sailing experience consisted of six afternoons on the Ottawa River. Over the next four years, squeezed into quarters no bigger than the Stuemers’ old bedroom, the family of five would become seasoned mariners. They would battle deadly storms at sea and evade real-life pirates. Dodge waterspouts and lightning strikes and witness the bombing of the USS Cole. See the staggering beauty of Borneo’s rainforest, and its destruction from logging. Be arrested at gunpoint and entertained like visiting royalty. In all, they would visit 34 countries and cover 35,000 nautical miles. Almost everywhere they went, the family made lasting friendships. They learned to trust each other and embrace opportunity, and in Kenya they learned the true meaning of humanity. As Northern Magic pushed onward, many thousands followed the family’s progress in Diane’s dispatches to the Ottawa Citizen, and thousands more turned out to cheer when the amazing Stuemers came home.