The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company – Sasha Anawalt
The Joffrey Ballet is a comprehensive history of the quintessential American dance troupe and a textured portrait of Robert Joffrey, the creative maverick who led and inspired it.
Broadly researched, richly anecdotal, and elegantly written, The Joffrey Ballet probes the complex relationship that exists between a culture and its artists through the prism of this company’s story.
The Language of Baklava: A Memoir – Diana Abu-Jaber
From the acclaimed author of Crescent, called “radiant, wise, and passionate” by the Chicago Tribune, here is a vibrant, humorous memoir of growing up with a gregarious Jordanian father who loved to cook.
Diana Abu-Jaber weaves the story of her life in upstate New York and in Jordan around vividly remembered meals: everything from Lake Ontario shish kabob cookouts with her Arab-American cousins to goat stew feasts under a Bedouin tent in the desert. These sensuously evoked meals in turn illuminate the two cultures of Diana’s childhood—American and Jordanian—and the richness and difficulty of straddling both. They also bring her wonderfully eccentric family to life, most memorably her imperious American grandmother and her impractical, hotheaded, displaced immigrant father, who, like many an immigrant before him, cooked to remember the place he came from and to pass that connection on to his children.
Roll Out The Champagne, Singapore! – Catherine Lim
30 stories about ordinary Singaporeans at their best and worst, their joys and griefs and angers, their dreams fulfilled or lost. They are tales about the awesome human condition and the even more awesome human spirit, interweaved with the author’s vignettes of her nearly 50 years in Singapore, such as how she came from Malaysia to live in Singapore and her run-in with then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong.
Stories include:
The Storyteller’s Daughter: One Woman’s Return to Her Lost Homeland – Saira Shah
The vivid, often startling memoir of a young woman shaped by two dramatically disparate worlds. Saira Shah is the English-born daughter of an Afghan aristocrat, inspired by his dazzling stories to rediscover the now lost life their forebears presided over for nine hundred years within sight of the minarets and lush gardens of Kabul and the snow-topped mountains of the Hindu Kush. Part sophisticated, sensitive Western liberal, part fearless, passionate Afghan, falling in love with her ancestral myth-chasing Afghanistan-Shah becomes, at twenty-one, a correspondent at the front of the war between the Soviets and the Afghan resistance. Then, imprisoning herself in a burqa, she risks her life to film Beneath the Veil, her acclaimed record of the devastation of women’s lives by the Taliban. Discovering her extended family, discovering a world of intense family ritual, of community, of male primacy, of arranged marriages, and finding at last the now war-ravaged family seat, she discovers as well what she wants and what she rejects of her extraordinary heritage.
Tsunami Kids: Our Journey from Survival to Success – Paul Forkan, Rob Forkan
On December 26, 2004, Rob, Paul, Matty, and Rosie Forkan, ages 8-17, lost their parents in the tsunami that devastated Sri Lanka. They faced a 124 mile trek to get home to safety. The ingenuity, and resilience they displayed was the result of their unusual upbringing.
Taken out of school, they received an unconventional education, carrying out voluntary work for charities in India alongside their parents. Since the tsunami, Rob and Paul have created a multinational brand, Gandy’s Flip Flops, based in the front room of their rented home, and set up Orphans for Orphans, a charitable organization that uses 10% of the profits to support children deprived of education, nutrition, and medication. This is a heartbreaking yet uplifting journey, told by two inspirational survivors.
