Small Acts of Freedom


Book Description

In February 2017, Gurmehar Kaur, a nineteen-year-old student, joined a peaceful campaign after violent clashes at a Delhi University college. As part of the campaign, Kaur's post made her the target of an onslaught of social media vitriol. Kaur, the daughter of a war martyr, suddenly became the focal point of a nationalism debate. Facing a trial by social media, Kaur almost retreated into herself. But she was never brought up to be silenced. 'Real bullets killed my father. Your hate bullets are deepening my resolve,' she wrote then. Today, Kaur is doubly determined not to be silent. Small Acts of Freedom is her story. This is the story of three generations of strong, passionate single women in one family, women who have faced the world on their own terms. With an unusual narrative structure that crisscrosses elegantly between the past and the present, spanning seventy years from 1947 to 2017, Small Acts of Freedom is about courage. It's about resilience, strength and love. From her grandmother who came to India from Lahore after Partition to the whirlwind romance between her parents, from her father's state funeral to her harrowing experiences since her days of student activism, Gurmehar Kaur's debut is about the fierceness of love, the power of family, and the little acts that beget big revolutions.




Small Acts of Defiance


Book Description

"In Small Acts of Defiance, Michelle Wright paints a beautifully intimate portrait that celebrates the courage and resilience of the human spirit."— Jane Harper, author of The Survivors A stunning debut WWII novel from award-winning short story writer Michelle Wright, about the small but courageous acts a young woman performs against the growing anti-Jewish measures in Nazi-occupied Paris. “Doing nothing is still a choice. A choice to stand aside and let it happen.” January 1940: After a devastating tragedy, young Australian woman Lucie and her mother Yvonne are forced to leave home and flee to France. There they seek help from the only family they have left, Lucie’s uncle, Gérard. As the Second World War engulfs Europe, the two women find themselves trapped in German-occupied Paris, sharing a cramped apartment with the authoritarian Gérard and his extremist views. Drawing upon her artistic talents, Lucie risks her own safety to engage in small acts of defiance against the occupying Nazi forces and the collaborationist French regime – illustrating pro-resistance tracts and forging identity cards. Faced with the escalating brutality of anti-Jewish measures, and the indifference of so many of her fellow Parisians, Lucie must decide how far she will go to protect her friends and defend the rights of others before it’s too late.




The Freedom to Read


Book Description




Freedom's Daughters


Book Description

Provides portraits and cameos of over sixty women who were influential in the Civil Rights Movement, and argues that the political activity of women has been the driving force in major reform movements throughout history.




The Young and the Restless


Book Description

The 2014 Lok Sabha elections saw the involvement of India's youth like never before. They were debating inside classrooms, sitting for dharnas on the street, having conversations in offices and on social media. The election in 2014 saw 150 million young voters---and the highest number of first-time voters in India. And yet, the average age of our parliamentarians is sixty-three. Our leaders are almost four decades older than the average twenty-five-year-old. In The Young and the Restless, Gurmehar Kaur, student activist and author of Small Acts of Freedom, follows the journeys of eight youth leaders, their aspirations for the country's youth, their aspirations for themselves and, most importantly, their aspirations for the nation. She explores whether their politics only mimics that of the older party leaders or if they have the ideas, passion and motivation of the demographic they represent.




Ugly Freedoms


Book Description

In Ugly Freedoms Elisabeth R. Anker reckons with the complex legacy of freedom offered by liberal American democracy, outlining how the emphasis of individual liberty has always been entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. At the same time, Anker locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, gross, and ineffectual but that provide sources of emancipatory potential. She analyzes both types of ugly freedom at work in a number of texts and locations, from political theory, art, and film to food, toxic dumps, and multispecies interactions. Whether examining how Kara Walker’s sugar sculpture A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby reveals the importance of sugar plantations to liberal thought or how the impoverished neighborhoods in The Wire blunt neoliberalism’s violence, Anker shifts our perspective of freedom by contesting its idealized expressions and expanding the visions for what freedom can look like, who can exercise it, and how to build a world free from domination.




Rebels, Reds, Radicals


Book Description

An engaging introduction to the vibrant history of the political left in Canada




The Four Agreements


Book Description

Bestselling author don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love. • A New York Times bestseller for over 7 years • Over 5.2 million copies sold in the U.S. • Translated into 38 languages worldwide Don Miguel Ruiz’s book is a roadmap to enlightenment and freedom.” — Deepak Chopra, Author, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success “An inspiring book with many great lessons . . .” — Wayne Dyer, Author, Real Magic “In the tradition of Castaneda, Ruiz distills essential Toltec wisdom, expressing with clarity and impeccability what it means for men and women to live as peaceful warriors in the modern world.” — Dan Millman, Author, Way of the Peaceful Warrior




Freedom Evolves


Book Description

Can there be freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Renowned philosopher Daniel Dennett emphatically answers “yes!” Using an array of provocative formulations, Dennett sets out to show how we alone among the animals have evolved minds that give us free will and morality. Weaving a richly detailed narrative, Dennett explains in a series of strikingly original arguments—drawing upon evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, and philosophy—that far from being an enemy of traditional explorations of freedom, morality, and meaning, the evolutionary perspective can be an indispensable ally. In Freedom Evolves, Dennett seeks to place ethics on the foundation it deserves: a realistic, naturalistic, potentially unified vision of our place in nature.




Self-Taught


Book Description

In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Self-Taught traces the historical antecedents to freedpeople's intense desire to become literate and demonstrates how the visions of enslaved African Americans emerged into plans and action once slavery ended. Enslaved people, Williams contends, placed great value in the practical power of literacy, whether it was to enable them to read the Bible for themselves or to keep informed of the abolition movement and later the progress of the Civil War. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Soon overwhelmed by the demands for education, they called on northern missionaries to come to their aid. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.