Search results for ""Avalon Publishing""

For devotees of Bird by Bird and The Artist's Way, a memoir-driven guide to healing through the craft of writing A cinematic exploration of the writing life by Francesca Lia Block, the bestselling author of the Weetzie Bat series of magical-realism novels, The Thorn Necklace offers visceral insights and healing exercises for the writer who creates as a way to process pain and adversity. Gently guiding the reader down the write-to-heal path, Block offers guideposts of awareness for writers, such as how to find a muse, channeling agony into art, putting chaos into order, ignoring the inner critic, fostering personal perseverance, and thriving as an artist in a troubled world. The author also addresses the intrinsic value of channeling our experiences into the written word and provides compassionate support to the reader for his or her own write-to-heal process.

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Paris, 1911. Picasso, Debussy, and Proust were revolutionizing art, music, and literature. Electricity had transformed the City of Lights. And the Parisian elites were mad about their fancy new cars. The Belle Époque was well underway, yet it was not without incident. That year, Paris was gripped by a violent crime streak that obsessed and frightened its citizens. Before Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger, the Bonnot Gang, led by the coarse Jules Bonnot, captured the minds of a nation with their Robin Hood-esque capers. With guns blazing, the Bonnot Gang robbed banks and wealthy Parisians and killed anyone who got in their way in spectacularly cinematic fashion--all in the name of their particular brand of anarchism.In Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits, John Merriman describes the Bonnot Gang's murderous tear and the Parisian police force's botched efforts to stop them. At the heart of the book are two anarchist idealists who wanted to find an alternative to Bonnot's crimes and the French government's unchecked violence. Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maîtrejean met and fell in love at an anarchist rally, and together ran the radical Parisian newspaper L'Anarchie, which covered the Bonnot Gang with great sympathy. The couple and their anarchist friends occupied a world far apart from the opulent Paris of the Champs-Élysées. Their Paris was a vast city of impoverished workers who lived near bleak canals, cemeteries, and empty lots around smoky factories. Victor and Rirette found hope in radical politics, Bonnot and his gang in crime, but none could escape the full might of the French military. The lovers were arrested and imprisoned for their political views, Bonnot was murdered after an hours-long standoff with the police, and his gang was hunted down and sentenced to death by guillotine or lifelong imprisonment.Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits is a classic tale of lost causes, tragic heroes, and the true costs of justice and revenge.

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Named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon.com and the Washington Post Three years ago, Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges and award-winning cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco set out to take a look at the sacrifice zones, those areas in America that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement. They wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like in places where the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is the searing account of their travels.

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On a hot and dusty December day in 1980, the bodies of four American women- three of them Catholic nuns- were pulled from a hastily dug grave in a field outside San Salvador. They had been murdered two nights before by the US-trained El Salvadoran military. News of the killing shocked the American public and set off a decade of debate over Cold War policy in Latin America. The women themselves became symbols and martyrs, shorn of context and background.In A Radical Faith , journalist Eileen Markey breathes life back into one of these women, Sister Maura Clarke. Who was this woman in the dirt? What led her to this vicious death so far from home? Maura was raised in a tight-knit Irish immigrant community in Queens, New York, during World War II. She became a missionary as a means to a life outside her small, orderly world and by the 1970s was organizing and marching for liberation alongside the poor of Nicaragua and El Salvador.Maura's story offers a window into the evolution of postwar Catholicism: from an inward-looking, protective institution in the 1950s to a community of people grappling with what it meant to live with purpose in a shockingly violent world. At its heart, A Radical Faith is an intimate portrait of one woman's spiritual and political transformation and her courageous devotion to justice.

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The police in America belong to the people,not the other way around. Yet millions of Americans experience their cops as racist, brutal, and trigger-happy: an overly aggressive, militarized enemy of the people. For their part, today's officers feel they are under siege,misunderstood, unfairly criticized, and scapegoated for society's ills. Is there a fix? Former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper believes there is.Policing is in crisis. The last decade has witnessed a vast increase in police aggression, misconduct, and militarization, along with a corresponding reduction in transparency and accountability. It is not just noticeable in African American and other minority communities,where there have been a series of high-profile tragedies,but in towns and cities across the country. Racism,from raw, individualized versions to insidious systemic examples,appears to be on the rise in our police departments. Overall, our police officers have grown more and more alienated from the people they've been hired to serve.In To Protect and Serve , Stamper delivers a revolutionary new model for American law enforcement: the community-based police department. It calls for fundamental changes in the federal government's role in local policing as well as citizen participation in all aspects of police operations: policymaking, program development, crime fighting and service delivery, entry-level and ongoing education and training, oversight of police conduct, and- especially relevant to today's challenges- joint community-police crisis management. Nothing will ever change until the system itself is radically restructured, and here Stamper shows us how.

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In the first week of June 2013, the American people discovered that for a decade, they had abjectly traded their individual privacy for the chimera of national security. The revelation that the federal government has full access to all phone records and the vast trove of presumably private personal data posted on the Internet has brought the threat of a surveillance society to the fore.But the erosion of privacy rights extends far beyond big government. Big business has long played a leading role in the hollowing out of personal freedoms. In this new book, Robert Scheer shows how our most intimate habits, from private correspondence, book pages read, and lists of friends and phone conversations have been seamlessly combined in order to create a detailed map of an individual's social and biological DNA.From wiretapping to lax social media security, from domestic spy drones to sophisticated biometrics, both the United States government and private corporate interests have dangerously undermined the delicate balance between national security and individual sovereignty. Without privacy, Scheer argues, there is neither freedom nor democracy. The freedom to be left alone embodies the most basic of human rights. Yet this freedom has been squandered in the name of national security and consumer convenience.The information revolution has exposed much of the world's population to a boundless world of universally shared information. But it has also stripped both passive and active participants of their every shred of privacy in ways most don't comprehend. No authoritarian regime ever could have hoped to gain the power to control the power and aspirations of their subjects that today's off-the-shelf information technology already provides. The technology of surveillance, Scheer warns, represents an existential threat to the liberation of the human spirit.

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"This is my story, the story of an Arab woman. It is the story of a lost world. It begins in 1917, in Lebanon, when I was seven years old." So opens this haunting memoir by Wadad Makdisi Cortas, who eloquently describes her personal experience of the events that have fractured the Middle East over the past century. Through Cortas' eyes we experience life in Lebanon under the oppressive French mandate, and her desire to forge an Arab identity based on religious tolerance. We learn of her dedication to the education of women, and the difficulties that she overcomes to become the principal of a school in Lebanon. And in final, heartbreaking detail, we watch as her world becomes rent by the Palestine question," Western interference, and civil war. The World I Loved is both an elegy on Lebanon and her people, and the unforgettable story of one woman's journey from hope to sorrow as she bears painful witness to the undoing of her beloved country by sectarian and religious division.

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Ciudad Juárez lies just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. A once-thriving border town, it now resembles a failed state. Infamously known as the place where women disappear, its murder rate exceeds that of Baghdad or Mogadishu. In Murder City , Charles Bowden has written an extraordinary account of what happens when a city disintegrates. Interweaving stories of its inhabitants- a raped beauty queen, a repentant hit man, a journalist fleeing for his life- with a broader meditation on the town's descent into anarchy, Bowden reveals how Juárez's culture of violence will not only worsen but inevitably spread north.

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Why does a disease that killed only a handful of Americans like ebola provoke panic, but the flu-which kills tens of thousands each year-is dismissed with a yawn? Why is an unarmed young black woman who knocks on a stranger's front door to ask for help after her car breaks down perceived to be so threatening that the stranger shoots her dead? In Jumping at Shadows, Sasha Abramsky sets his sights on America's most dangerous epidemic: irrational fear.In this meditation on the paralyzing terror Americans feel when confronted with something they don't understand-from foreigners to tropical viruses to universal health care-Abramsky delivers an eye-opening analysis of our misconceptions about risk and threats, and how our brains interpret them, both at a neurological level and at a conscious one. What emerges is a journey through a political and cultural landscape that is defined by our fears, which are often misplaced. Ultimately, Abramsky shows that our fears can teach us a great deal about our society, exposing our deeply ingrained racism, classism, xenophobia, and susceptibility to the toxic messages of demagogues.

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