Life in Babylon


Book Description

Theresa Santmann found herself in a world far from the farm of her youth in Ellenburg, New York. Despite the fact that she had a husband with ALS, two very young children, and no way to care for her family and pay the mounting bills, she rose to an unusual challenge. She found a four-apartment rental property in Babylon, New York and turned it into an adult home, the Little Flower Residence, where her husband became her first patient. She returned to school for nursing and began a new life that changed the lives of everyone around her. Theresas resourcefulness led her to becoming a registered nurse. She was the first woman in New York State to obtain an FHA-backed loan to build a 160-bed nursing home, with only a womans name on the application. She operated one of the most successful nursing homes on Long Island, invented and patented a unique walker, became an airplane pilot, and so much more. One of her more daring escapades was overcoming a navigational challenge with her disabled husband and two young children on board their thirty-seven-foot boat, Wicky One, from her home in Babylon to Canada. She plotted the course through the waterways; Fire Island inlet, west in the Atlantic Ocean, up the Hudson River, past West Point, and beyond. Soon there was another challenge, the locks that she had never navigated nor witnessed. She managed till finally there it was, Lake Champlain.




Memoirs from Babylon


Book Description

America's unofficial nightmare during the Iraq War was the infamous Triangle of Death, sometimes referred to by Iraqis as the Graveyard of the Americans. While serving in the Triangle, Chaplain Jeff Bryan ministered to a 1,200-man infantry task force, often while patrolling streets, fields, and villages as his unit cleared them in close-quarters combat. During the most violent and controversial phase of the war, Chaplain Bryan brought God to the American warrior. He witnessed life, death, and faith at every level, including a worst-case scenario in which several troops in his unit were ambushed and captured. Memoirs from Babylon is a dramatic account of humanity at its best and worst, a gut-wrenching experience of fear and faith under fire. Chaplain Bryan's story is a unique combination of life, leadership, military history, and God-centered hope in the midst of America's nightmare.




Second Memoir on Babylon


Book Description







The Whore of Babylon, A Memoir


Book Description

Prado's latest novel centers on a mother who embarks on a mission to rescue her daughter from the mean streets of San Francisco. Margot Skinner can't bear to see her 15-year-old daughter, Robyn, dolled up in fishnets and spiked heels while her room devolves into a sty and her truancy and rebelliousness accelerate...Aided by two private investigators and a streetwise nun, Margot scours the notorious Tenderloin district in search of her runaway daughter, who may have fallen into the clutches of a local pimp named Blu Boy....Prado writes in a visceral present tense, elevating her drama with crisp, sensory details, as she skillfully employs the solid pacing and atmosphere of a crime novel....Prado commands a robust vocabulary and tells a searing tale laced with disturbingly candid insight...This taut mix of memoir, novel and crime drama succeeds through vivid writing and soulful revelations.




Beyond Babylon


Book Description

"Describes Argentina's horrific dirty war, the chaotic final years of brutal dictatorship in Somalia, and the modern-day excesses of Italy's right-wing politics through the words of two half-sisters, their mothers, and the elusive father who ties their stories together"--




Farewell, Babylon


Book Description

In "Farewell, Babylon," Naim Kattan takes readers into the heart of exotic mid-19th-century Baghdad's then-teeming Jewish community. Jews had lived in Iraq for 25 centuries, long before the time of Christ or Muhammad, but anti-Semitism and nationalism were on the rise. In this beautifully written memoir, a young boy comes of age and describes his discoveries -- of work, literature, patriotism, the joys of lazy Sundays swimming in the Tigris. He also talks eloquently of his greatest discovery: women and love. This is a story of roots and exile, of thirst for life and life's experiences. However, more than that it is a tribute to a lost world, an ancient Eastern city in which Iraq's Kurds, Bedouins, Sunnis, Shiites, Chaldeans, Catholics, and Jews all lived together in a rough, rewarding sort of harmony.




American Babylon


Book Description

A gripping portrait of black power politics and the struggle for civil rights in postwar Oakland As the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a nationwide tax revolt, California embodied a crucial motif of the postwar United States: the rise of suburbs and the decline of cities, a process in which black and white histories inextricably joined. American Babylon tells this story through Oakland and its nearby suburbs, tracing both the history of civil rights and black power politics as well as the history of suburbanization and home-owner politics. Robert Self shows that racial inequities in both New Deal and Great Society liberalism precipitated local struggles over land, jobs, taxes, and race within postwar metropolitan development. Black power and the tax revolt evolved together, in tension. American Babylon demonstrates that the history of civil rights and black liberation politics in California did not follow a southern model, but represented a long-term struggle for economic rights that began during the World War II years and continued through the rise of the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. This struggle yielded a wide-ranging and profound critique of postwar metropolitan development and its foundation of class and racial segregation. Self traces the roots of the 1978 tax revolt to the 1940s, when home owners, real estate brokers, and the federal government used racial segregation and industrial property taxes to forge a middle-class lifestyle centered on property ownership. Using the East Bay as a starting point, Robert Self gives us a richly detailed, engaging narrative that uniquely integrates the most important racial liberation struggles and class politics of postwar America.