In 1990, Dave Muller sails to Mozambique with his wife, Sandy, and two young children, to fulfil a boyhood dream of voyaging to the tropics on the yacht he's spent ten years building. The fantasy holiday comes to a shocking end when the yacht runs aground on a stretch of beach near the Bazaruto Islands. While waiting for high tide to re-float their vessel, a patrol of five child soldiers armed with AK47s arrive, along with their two adult captives. The young boys ransack the yacht. Not Child's Play brilliantly traverses the Mullers' nightmare of seven weeks as hostages of Renamo, a militant resistance organisation in Mozambique. Dave and Sandy, desperate to protect their children, come close to collapse, plagued by intense mental and emotional strain. The fear of violence and death is a constant. Twice the camp in which they are held is attacked by the warring government forces, Frelimo. Yet, after 49 days, the family becomes strangely comfortable in their captivity. The Mullers' eventual rescue, which etched their names in history and is retold remarkably here, involved a covert operation by the SA Navy and Navy Seals - the kind of dramatic stuff that Hollywood action movies are made of!

In 1990, David Muller set sail to Mozambique with his wife and two young children, to fulfil a boyhood dream of sailing to the tropics on the yacht he had spent ten years building. The dream holiday came to a shocking end when the yacht ran aground on a stretch of beach near Bazaruto Islands. While waiting for high tide to refloat the yacht, a patrol of Renamo child soldiers, armed with AK47’s, arrive, along with two adult captives. The boys ransack the yacht, taking the terrified Muller family hostage. Later that night the child soldiers bayonet the two prisoners to death. Not Child’s Play brilliantly traverses the Muller’s nightmare of seven weeks in captivity. You will be taken into the enigmatic world of the child soldier and share the Muller’s daily battle to protect their children from the impacts of the civil war in which they had become trapped. Plagued by intense mental and emotional strain, with the fear of violence and death a constant, as the days drag by, uncannily the hostages and captors begin to bond. “Our time with Renamo was defined by constant paradox. The young boys who in cold-blood killed people, also played childhood games with our children. We could not speak their language and struggled desperately with a lack of information about our status. However, the kindness shown to us in sharing what few resources they had, transcended the brutality of the war in which we were all trapped, and required no translation. Every day held terrors, yet we were perplexed by the innate innocence of our captors. Therein lay the paradox.” The eventual dramatic rescue 49 days later, in a rescue mission carried out by the South African Navy, was the culmination of intense negotiations between South Africa and Mozambique. The ceasefire that had to be agreed to enable this operation to take place was the first between the warring parties. Two weeks after our rescue, formal peace talks began, and peace came to Mozambique two years later. Here are some reviews from the first edition of this book: The books gives a unique glimpse into the reality of war and the hardships endured by all participants. The family, which includes two very young children, survives thanks to their resilience and resourcefulness, and also thanks to the kindness of ordinary people caught in the net of warfare. A remarkable book. Read it, it will help you understand the human condition a little more fully! Reviewed in Canada - September, 2020 This book held me spellbound and I could not put it down. Descriptive and honest making it believable and challenging Reviewed in Australia - January, 2020 Not Child’s Play is an absolute page turner and a remarkable and detailed account of a families terrible and often bizarre ordeal. Go Travel Magazine – April 2020

Few things make Japanese adults feel quite as anxious today as the phenomenon called the “child crisis.” Various media teem with intense debates about bullying in schools, child poverty, child suicides, violent crimes committed by children, the rise of socially withdrawn youngsters, and forceful moves by the government to introduce a more conservative educational curriculum. These issues have propelled Japan into the center of a set of global conversations about the nature of children and how to raise them. Engaging both the history of children and childhood and the history of emotions, contributors to this volume track Japanese childhood through a number of historical scenarios. Such explorations—some from Japan’s early-modern past—are revealed through letters, diaries, memoirs, family and household records, and religious polemics about promising, rambunctious, sickly, happy, and dutiful youngsters.

Winner of the 2008 Chicago Folklore Prize Felicia R. McMahon breaks new ground in the presentation and analysis of emerging traditions of the “Lost Boys,” a group of parentless youths who fled Sudan under tragic circumstances in the 1990s. With compelling insight, McMahon analyzes the oral traditions of the DiDinga Lost Boys, about whom very little is known. Her vibrant ethnography provides intriguing details about the performances and conversations of the young DiDinga in Syracuse, New York. It also offers important insights to scholars and others who work with refugee groups. The author argues that the playful traditions she describes constitute a strategy by which these young men proudly position themselves as preservers of DiDinga culture and as harbingers of social change rather than as victims of war. Drawing ideas from folklore, linguistics, drama, and play theory, the author documents the danced songs of this unique group. Her inclusion of original song lyrics translated by the singers and descriptions of conversations convey the voices of the young men. Well researched and carefully developed, this book makes an original contribution to our understanding of refugee populations and tells a compelling story at the same time.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The lessons our children teach us are the hardest ones. What do we do when our children don’t pursue our hopes for them? In this riveting new novel, Danielle Steel explores how families can evolve and grow in unexpected ways. A senior partner at a prestigious New York law firm, Kate Morgan couldn’t be prouder of her three grown children. Tamara, Anthony, and Claire all went to great schools, chose wonderful career paths, and would have made their father proud. A single mother for years after the death of her husband, Kate keeps a tight rein on her family, her career, and even her own emotions, never once asking herself if she truly knows her children . . . or if her hopes for them are the right ones, and what they want. She is about to find out. During one hectic summer in Manhattan, Kate’s world turns upside down. One child has been keeping an astonishing secret while another confesses to an equally shocking truth. A wonderful match and picture-book wedding are traded for a relationship that shakes Kate to her core. A totally inappropriate love affair and an out-of-wedlock baby complete the chaos. Challenged as a mother and as a successful independent woman herself, Kate struggles to keep up with a dizzying and escalating chain of events, and begins to realize that she has a part to play in the chaos. Because Kate too has kept secrets from her children. Sometimes the surprising choices our children make are the right ones . . . better than what we wanted for them. More often than not, parenting is about letting go of our dreams and embracing theirs.

The author shows ways to foster a child's curiosity and creativity with activities ranging from rocket science to rock climbing, stamp collecting to sculpture.

From one of Canada’s most inspiring and gifted sports heroes, an urgently needed guide to getting our kids active and healthy. Like many of us, Silken Laumann’s fondest childhood memories are of play: staying outside until that final call for dinner, neighbourhood-wide games of Capture-the-Flag and road hockey that went on for hours. But as a parent, Silken knows the world has changed. We are afraid to let our children out of sight, our streets don’t feel safe, neighbours don’t know and rely on each other like they used to. While we recognize the need for our kids to be active, our fears, along with our busy lives and the enormous societal pressure to (simultaneously) make athletes, academics, and artists out of our children, have led us to schedule their every activity, driving them to and from soccer practice, piano lessons, tutorials. We have forgotten just how important unstructured play is for our children’s development and well-being: It keeps kids healthy, creative and active; it teaches them valuable life skills and, most importantly, it lets our kids be kids, worry-free, unfettered. Child’s Play is a call for action, a guide to reconnecting with our kids, and a blueprint for building safe, supportive communities and healthy schools. Above all, it’s a book of simple ideas for parents desperate for change.

Eight-year-old Garrett Morrow disappears from a class field trip in New Bern, North Carolina. Within days, his body is found and seven-year-old Tyler Sullivan vanishes from Beaufort, South Carolina. Journalist Abby Weaver is at first puzzled by the striking resemblance between the two boys. But when she realizes that both boys could be carbon copies of her son, Chris, Abby's world is rocked to its core. Is this merely coincidence or could Chris be next? In a race against time, Abby's frantic search for the missing child leads her to piece together clues that point to a monster in their midst. The evil she uncovers threatens to destroy her family and even the community she loves. Every parent's nightmare comes to life in this terrifyingly-real follow-up to Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines.

Is sport good for kids? When answering this question, both critics and advocates of youth sports tend to fixate on matters of health, whether condemning contact sports for their concussion risk or prescribing athletics as a cure for the childhood obesity epidemic. Child’s Play presents a more nuanced examination of the issue, considering not only the physical impacts of youth athletics, but its psychological and social ramifications as well. The eleven original scholarly essays in this collection provide a probing look into how sports—in community athletic leagues, in schools, and even on television—play a major role in how young people view themselves, shape their identities, and imagine their place in society. Rather than focusing exclusively on self-proclaimed jocks, the book considers how the culture of sports affects a wide variety of children and young people, including those who opt out of athletics. Not only does Child’s Play examine disparities across lines of race, class, and gender, it also offers detailed examinations of how various minority populations, from transgender youth to Muslim immigrant girls, have participated in youth sports. Taken together, these essays offer a wide range of approaches to understanding the sociology of youth sports, including data-driven analyses that examine national trends, as well as ethnographic research that gives a voice to individual kids. Child’s Play thus presents a comprehensive and compelling analysis of how, for better and for worse, the culture of sports is integral to the development of young people—and with them, the future of our society.

Boundaries, borderlines, limits on the one hand and rites of passage, contact zones, in-between spaces on the other have attracted renewed interest in a broad variety of cultural discourses after a long period of decenterings and delimitations in numerous fields of social, psychological, and intellectual life. Anthropological dimensions of the subject and its multifarious ways of world-making represent the central challenge among the concerns of the humanities. The role of literature and the arts in the formation of cultural and personal identities, theoretical and political approaches to the relation between self and other, the familiar and the foreign, have become key issues in literary and cultural studies; forms of expressivity and expression and question of mediation as well as new enquiries into ethics have characterized the intellectual energies of the past decade. The aim of Borderlands is to represent a variety of approaches to questions of border crossing and boundary transgression; approaches from different angles and different disciplines, but all converging in their own way on the post-colonial paradigm. Topics discussed include globalization, cartography and ontology, transitional identity, ecocritical sensibility, questions of the application of post-coloniality, gender and sexuality, and attitudes towards space and place. As well as studies of the cinema of the settler colonies, the films of Neil Jordan, and 'Othering' in Canadian sports journalism, there are treatments of the Nigerian novel, South African prison memoirs, and African women's writing. Authors examined include Elizabeth Bowen, Bruce Chatwin, Mohamed Choukri, Nuruddin Farah, Jamaica Kincaid, Pauline Melville, Bharati Mukherjee, Michael Ondaatje, and Leslie Marmon Silko.