Showing results for "Refugee" in Biographies & Memoirs

In January 2017, Donald Trump signed an executive order stopping entry to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries and dramatically cutting the number of refugees allowed to resettle in the United States each year. The American people spoke up, with protests, marches, donations, and lawsuits that quickly overturned the order. But the refugee caps remained. In The Displaced, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen, himself a refugee, brings together a host of prominent refugee writers to explore and illuminate the refugee experience.

In the spring of 1983 Terry Tempest Williams learned that her mother was dying of cancer. That same season, The Great Salt Lake began to rise to record heights, threatening the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge and the herons, owls, and snowy egrets that Williams, a poet and naturalist, had come to gauge her life by. One event was nature at its most random, the other a by-product of rogue technology: Terry's mother, and Terry herself, had been exposed to the fallout of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s.

Asylum Denied is the gripping story of political refugee David Ngaruri Kenney's harrowing odyssey through the world of immigration processing in the United States. Kenney, while living in his native Kenya, led a boycott to protest his government's treatment of his fellow farmers. He was subsequently arrested and taken into the forest to be executed. This audiobook, told by Kenney and his lawyer Philip G. Schrag from Kenney's own perspective, tells of his near-murder, imprisonment, and torture in Kenya.

A moving memoir from a woman who made a fortune in a man's world and then gave it all away...soon to be turned into a film In 1962, Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley created a software company when the concept of software barely existed. Freelance Programmers employed women to work on complex projects...

A memoir by one of the original female psychedelic pioneers of the 1960s Shares Rosemary’s early experimentation with psychedelics in the 1950s, her development through the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s, and her involvement, at first exciting but then heartbreaking, with Dr. Timothy...

They are a mass migration of thousands, yet each one travels alone. Solito, Solita (Alone, Alone) is an urgent collection of oral histories that tells - in their own words - the story of young refugees fleeing countries in Central America and traveling for hundreds of miles to seek safety and protection in the United States. Fifteen narrators describe why they fled their homes, what happened on their dangerous journeys through Mexico, how they crossed the borders, and for some, their ongoing struggles to survive in the United States.

In the early 1850s, White American abolitionist Benjamin Drew was commissioned to travel to Canada West (now Ontario) to interview escaped slaves from the United States. At the time the population of Canada West was just short of a million and about 30,000 Black people lived in the colony, most of whom were escaped slaves from south of the border.

Three years ago, award-winning actress Angelina Jolie took on a radically different role as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Here are her memoirs from her journeys to Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Pakistan, Cambodia, and Ecuador, where she lived and worked and gave her heart to those who suffer the world's most shattering violence and victimization. Here are her revelations of joy and warmth amid utter destitution...compelling snapshots of courageous and inspiring people for whom survival is their daily work.

Doaa Al Zamel was once an average Syrian girl growing up in a crowded house in a bustling city near the Jordanian border. But in 2011 her life was upended. Inspired by the events of the Arab Spring, Syrians began to stand up against their own oppressive regime. When the army was sent to take control of Doaa's hometown, strict curfews, power outages, water shortages, air raids, and violence disrupted everyday life.

Born in 1960, Jesus Ruiz Henao grew up poor, but wanted to be rich like the drug dealers he saw growing up in the cocaine-producing region of Colombia’s Valle of the Cauca. To realize his ambition, Ruiz Henao moved to London, United Kingdom, in 1985. There, he and his wife settled in the quiet suburb of Hendon, where he held down mundane but respectable cleaning and bus driving jobs. At least to outward appearances....

'A lyrical, fascinating, important book. More than just a family story, it is an essay on belonging, denying, pretending, self-deception and, at least for the main characters, survival.' Literary Review 'Simon May's remarkable How to Be a Refugee is a memoir of family secrets with a ruminative...

In an era of mass migration in which more than 100 million people are displaced comes this lyrical portrait of Syrian and Iraqi refugees and the belongings they carry. What We Remember Will Be Saved is a book of hope, home, and the stories we hold within us when everything else has been lost. Journalist and scholar Stephanie Saldaña, who lived in Syria before the war, sets out on a journey across nine countries to meet refugees and learn what they salvaged from the ruins when they escaped.

In an Afghan village, a boy learns his letters under a mullah’s stick and dreams of a life free of the Taliban; in Virginia, a cadet learns to read a map and lead a platoon into combat. Years later, on a wind-scoured ridgeline overlooking Zabul Province, helicopters roaring overhead, Afghan interpreter Abdulhaq Sodais and US Army Lieutenant Spencer Sullivan must learn to trust each other if they hope to survive. In 2021, when the US withdraws from Afghanistan, the Taliban reassert their rule, disappearing, torturing, and killing US collaborators, including Abdulhaq’s fellow interpreters.

Hands up! Who wants to be a refugee? I certainly did not! My mother had other ideas. For a fateful moment, the iron fist of oppression eased its grip. This was all she needed. We crossed two borders. The physical barrier was easy. The culture gap was harder to bridge. This story is about human foolishness, selfishness, and frailty. Yet, above all, the enduring courage of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times.

In 1987, Nathaniel Nyok, tormented by thoughts of missing parents and siblings, fled a bloody scene and a burning village in Sudan. At eight, he had just capitulated to an orphan-like life with a new title, A Lost Boy of Sudan, living in a refugee camp for 14 years. As he battled the loss of home and family, he chose education over revenge as the road to freedom, a road that eventually brought him to America, land of freedom and rules, welcomes and prejudices. This story portrays his transition to American culture as a time of both confusion and hope.

"I saw many killed. I almost starved. But I escaped to refugee camps in Thailand and eventually made it to the U.S." Thus begins Leth Oun's poignant and vivid memoir. A survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields—having spent a torturous three years, eight months, and ten days imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge—Oun thrived in America, learning English, becoming a citizen, and working as an officer in the United States Secret Service Uniformed Division. In A Refugee's American Dream, Oun shares hard memories of Cambodia, where his father was executed, and his family enslaved in labor camps.

A River Is Made is a true story of a life carried across borders, wars, and generations, told through the eyes of its author, Fazal Moneer Adil. From Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the UAE to the United States, it traces the journey of an Afghan refugee from war to belonging in America.

The word “refugee” sparks conversation and fuels emotion. There are more than 22 million refugees worldwide and another 65 million who have been forcibly displaced. But who are these people? Images filter into our consciousness via dramatic photographs - but these photos only offer a glimpse into their stories. As a young ER nurse in Boston, Roberta Gately was stopped cold by stark images of big-bellied babies with empty haunting stares in the news. She called the aid organization featured in the news story, and, within two months, she had become a humanitarian aid worker.

There will be pain ahead, and trouble and problems that I won’t be able to fix on my own. But in them all, I know God will be there, calling me to look to him. Inviting me to take the next step toward his open arms. And I will say yes. And yes. And yes. Annahita Parsan was born into a Muslim...

I Did Not Miss the Boat is the coming of age story of an adolescent girl who struggled to help her family & assimilation into a new country while searching for her own identity. From surviving the vast South China Seas, pirate raids, and uninhabited Indonesian islands to surviving high school and family life, Lea Tran did not experience a typical American upbringing.