Paco's Memories


Book Description

Paco's Memories is a collection of four fictional stories told by an elderly Hispanic man. These stories all feature characters of Puerto Rican heritage and are meant to inspire children to do good. Each story has a moral.




Paco's Story


Book Description

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later, he is waiting to die, flies and maggots covering his burnt, shattered body. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. One evening, on the tail of a rainstorm, he limps off the bus and into the small town of Boone, determined to find a real job and a real bed–but no matter how hard he works, nothing muffles the anguish in his mind and body. Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco’s Story–winner of a National Book Award–plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.




Discursive Remembering


Book Description

This book aims at building a bridge between the social and political aspects of remembering and the cognitive and discourse processes driving such activities. By analyzing these cognitive and discursive processes, Bietti explores practices of individual and collective remembering in institutional and private settings in relation to periods of political violence in Argentina. This books begins to fill the conceptual gap between cognitive oriented approaches to remembering that draw conclusions about how memory functions in the mind without a detailed discourse analysis of the communicative interaction in which this process unfolds, and the discourse and pragmatic oriented approaches that are mainly interested in analyzing the rhetorical features of conversational remembering, in some cases disregarding that there are underlying cognitive mechanisms that drive the construction of discourses about past experiences. The empirical analysis shows that individual and collective remembering in relation to periods of political violence in Argentina vary in pragmatic ways due to the fact that these accounts of the past were constructed with reference to the communicative situation. Thus, this book also aims at shedding new light on the current practices of commemoration and remembrance related to periods of political violence in Argentina, in public and private settings.




Ideologies of Forgetting


Book Description

First book to study rape and sexual abuse of Vietnamese women by U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War.




Beads of Memory


Book Description

In the wake of General Franco’s demise, a Cameroonian student, Leinteng Basha, arrives in Madrid. He soon befriends two other African students, Bassey Okoro from Nigeria, and a drifter from Equatorial Guinea, Jesus Ndongo. Together, they navigate as best as they can through the challenges of loneliness, homesickness and especially the indifference, if not outright hostility of their host country. Leinteng keeps a diary in which he details in simple, straightforward but captivating prose, the travails and joys of his days in the Spanish capital. Through the diarist’s sharp eye for detail, the reader is irresistibly drawn into the labyrinth of life as lived by an African student in post-Franco Spain.




Lost Memory of Skin


Book Description

The author of Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone and The Sweet Hereafter returns with a very original, riveting mystery about a young outcast, and a contemporary tale of guilt and redemption. The perfect convergence of writer and subject, Lost Memory of Skin probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and compassion. Suspended in a modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the centre of Russell Banks's uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known in his new identity only as the Kid, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to go near where children might gather. He takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders. Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent. Enter the Professor, a university sociologist of enormous size and intellect who finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research. But when the Professor's past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men's relationship shifts. Banks has long been one of our most acute and insightful novelists. Lost Memory of Skin is a masterful work of fiction that unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical.




The Scar That Binds


Book Description

In The Scar That Binds, Keith Beattie examines the central metaphors of the Vietnam War and their manifestations in American culture and life. Blending history and cultural criticism in a lucid style, this provocative book discusses an ideology of unity that has emerged through widespread rhetorical and cultural references to the war. A critique of this ideology reveals three dominant themes structured in a range of texts: the "wound," "the voice" of the Vietnam veteran, and "home." The analysis of each theme draws on a range of sources, including film, memoir, poetry, written and oral history, journalism, and political speeches.




Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South American Theater


Book Description

In this timely study, Puga compares contemporary Southern Cone playwrights and their aesthetic strategies for subverting ideologies of dictatorship; in the process, she traces the shaping of a resistant identity in memory, its direct expression in testimony, and its indirect elaboration in two different kinds of allegory.




The Maps of Memory


Book Description

In this inspiring sequel to the Pura Belpré Award–winning, “dazzling and insightful” (BCCB) I Lived on Butterfly Hill, thirteen-year-old Celeste Marconi returns home to a very different Chile and makes it her mission to rebuild her community, and find those who are still missing. During Celeste Marconi’s time in Maine, thoughts of the brightly colored cafes and salty air of Valparaíso, Chile, carried her through difficult, homesick days. Now, she’s finally returned home to find the dictatorship has left its mark on her once beautiful and vibrant community. Celeste is determined to help her beloved Butterfly Hill get back to the way it was and to encourage her neighbors to fight to regain what they’ve lost. More than anything, Celeste wishes she could bring back her best friend, Lucilla, who was one of many to disappear during the dictatorship. Celeste tries to piece together what happened, but it all seems too big to fix—until she receives a letter that changes everything. When Celeste sets off on her biggest adventure yet, she’ll uncover more heartbreaking truths of what her country has endured. But every small victory makes a difference, and even if Butterfly Hill can never be what it was, moving forward and healing can make it something even better.




Blood & Spirits


Book Description

Small-town life can be hard for a dead girl... For Veronica Fischer the night to night life of a bloodsucking madam in Middle America is tough enough before she adopts Rachel Gregory, an eight year old ghost. After her house is set on fire, and Rachel disappears, all signs point to foul play. When she finds herself with a hit out on her unlife, and warrants for her arrest, it becomes clear she's going to need help. Now she has to contend with horny zombies, violent spirits, and murderous grave robbers if she's ever going to find Rachel and discover the awful truth of the coming storm. A raucous ride through the dangerous lives of the lecherous undead.