Mama Lola


Book Description

Vodou is among the most misunderstood and maligned of the world's religions. "Mama Lola" shatters the stereotypes by offering an intimate portrait of Vodou in everyday life. Drawing on a decade-long friendship with Mama Lola, a Vodou priestess, Brown tells tales spanning five generations of Vodou healers in Mama Lola's family. 46 illustrations.




Mama Lola


Book Description

Karen McCarthy Brown's classic book shatters stereotypes of Vodou by offering an intimate portrait of African-based religion in everyday life. She explores the importance of women's religious practices along with related themes of family and of social change. Weaving several of her own voices--analytic, descriptive, and personal--with the voices of her subjects in alternate chapters of traditional ethnography and ethnographic fiction, Brown presents herself as a character in Mama Lola's world and allows the reader to evaluate her interactions there. Startlingly original, Brown's work endures as an important experiment in ethnography as a social art form rooted in human relationships. A new preface, epilogue, bibliography, and a collection of family photographs tell the story of the effect of the book's publication on Mama Lola's life.




Lola Bensky


Book Description

Lola Bensky is a nineteen-year-old rock journalist who irons her hair straight and asks a lot of questions. A high-school dropout, she's not sure how she got the job – but she's been sent by her Australian newspaper right to the heart of the London music scene at the most exciting time in music history: 1967. Lola spends her days planning diets and interviewing rock stars. In London, Mick Jagger makes her a cup of tea, Jimi Hendrix (possibly) propositions her and Cher borrows her false eyelashes. At the Monterey International Pop Festival, Lola props up Brian Jones and talks to Janis Joplin about sex. In Los Angeles, she discusses being overweight with Mama Cass and tries to pluck up the courage to ask Cher to return those false eyelashes. Lola has an irrepressible curiosity, but she begins to wonder whether the questions she asks these extraordinary young musicians are really a substitute for questions about her parents' calamitous past that can't be asked or answered. As Lola moves on through marriage, motherhood, psychoanalysis and a close relationship with an unexpected pair of detectives, she discovers the question of what it means to be human is the hardest one for anyone – including herself – to answer. Drawing on her own experiences as a young journalist, the bestselling author of Too Many Men has created an unforgettable character in the unconventional and courageous Lola. Genuinely funny and deeply moving, Lola Bensky shows why Lily Brett is one of our most distinctive and internationally acclaimed authors. 'Brett delivers an entertaining story that is also full of heart.' Australian Bookseller and Publisher 'A touching look at a woman's quest for self-understanding.' Who Weekly 'Funny, warm and insightful.' Herald Sun 'For Brett, resolution has come through creative remembering and retelling, and by constructing a fine comic novel from an unspeakable tragedy.' Australian Book Review 'A witty novel you'll struggle to put down.' Grazia 'A book that will entertain legions of readers.' Courier Mail 'An entertaining story that is also full of heart.' Bookseller+Publisher 'Lily Brett's heroines exude curiosity and Lola Bensky is no exception.' Sun-Herald 'Brett's sixth book hooks you in, not just because of her characteristic wit, but because she was a rock journalist herself back in the day.' Melbourne Times Weekly 'Lola Bensky will thrill [Brett's] fans: finally a book based on her extraordinary experiences as a reporter for Australia's first music magazine, Go-Set, during the most exciting era in pop music history.' Australian Jewish News




Lola at the Library


Book Description

Lola has a big smile on her face. Why? Because it's Tuesday--and on Tuesdays, Lola and her mommy go to the library. Join Lola in this cozy celebration of books and the people who love them.




Religion and the New Immigrants


Book Description

New immigrants_those arriving since the Immigration Reform Act of 1965_have forever altered American culture and have been profoundly altered in turn. Although the religious congregations they form are often a nexus of their negotiation between the old and new, they have received little scholarly attention. Religion and the New Immigrants fills this gap. Growing out of the carefully designed Religion, Ethnicity and the New Immigration Research project, Religion and the New Immigrants combines in-depth studies of thirteen congregations in the Houston area with seven thematic essays looking across their diversity. The congregations range from Vietnamese Buddhist to Greek Orthodox, a Zoroastrian center to a multi-ethnic Assembly of God, presenting an astonishing array of ethnicity and religious practice. Common research questions and the common location of the congregations give the volume a unique comparative focus. Religion and the New Immigrants is an essential reference for scholars of immigration, ethnicity, and American religion.




Lola Goes to Work


Book Description

Lola, the Yorkshire terrier, learns to be a therapy dog and then enjoys visits to schools, hospitals, and centers for elderly people.




You Are the Mother of All Mothers


Book Description

Every loss mama deserves to be reminded she is the mother of all mothers.




The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives


Book Description

Coming soon to Netflix When Baba Segi awoke with a bellyache for the sixth day in a row, he knew it was time to do something drastic about his fourth wife's childlessness. To the dismay of her ambitious mother, Bolanle marries into a polygamous family, where she is the fourth wife of a rich, rotund patriarch, Baba Segi. She is a graduate and therefore a great prize, but even graduates must produce children and her husband's persistent bellyache is a sign that things are not as they should be. She only wants to escape to a quiet life, but the others disapprove of the newest, youngest, cleverest addition to the family. Treated with respect by her husband, she is viewed with suspicion by her seniors - who fear she may unlock their well-guarded secret. Through the voices of Baba Segi and his four wives, Lola Shoneyin weaves a vibrant story of love, secrets and a family like every other - happy and unhappy, truthful and not, sometimes kind, sometimes competitive, always bound by blood, and the past.




I Am Not Sleepy and I Will Not Go to Bed


Book Description

In the follow-up to I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato, Charlie helps Lola get ready for bed, despite the tigers, whales, and other animals that serve as obstacles.




Take Back What the Devil Stole


Book Description

Ms. Donna Haskins is an African American woman who wrestles with structural inequity in the streets of Boston by inhabiting an alternate dimension she refers to as the “spirit realm.” In this other place, she is prepared by the Holy Spirit to challenge the restrictions placed upon Black female bodies in the United States. Growing into her spiritual gifts of astral flight and time travel, Donna meets the spirits of enslaved Africans, conducts spiritual warfare against sexual predators, and tends to the souls of murdered Black children whose ghosts haunt the inner city. Take Back What the Devil Stole centers Donna’s encounters with the supernatural to offer a powerful narrative of how one woman seeks to reclaim her power from a lifetime of social violence. Both ethnographic and personal, Onaje X. O. Woodbine’s portrait of her spiritual life sheds new light on the complexities of Black women’s religious participation and the lived religion of the dispossessed. Woodbine explores Donna’s religious creativity and her sense of multireligious belonging as she blends together Catholic, Afro-Caribbean, and Black Baptist traditions. Through the gripping story of one local prophet, this book offers a deeply original account of the religious experiences of Black women in contemporary America: their bodies, their haunted landscapes, and their spiritual worlds.