After the Earthquake
By: Dr. Paul Farmer
On January 12, 2010 a massive earthquake laid waste to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Within three days, Dr. Paul Farmer arrived in the Haitian capital, along with a team of volunteers, to lend his services to the injured.
In this vivid narrative, Farmer describes the incredible suffering--and resilience--that he encountered in Haiti. Having worked in the country for nearly thirty years, he skillfully explores the social issues that made Haiti so vulnerable to the earthquake--the very issues that make it an "unnatural disaster." Complementing his account are stories from other doctors, volunteers, and earthquake survivors.
Haiti After the Earthquake will both inform and inspire readers to stand with the Haitian people against the profound economic and social injustices that formed the fault line for this disaster.
An Invention
By: H.G. Wells
"I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment—a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone."
A dreamer obsessed with traveling through time builds himself a time machine and, much to his surprise, travels over 800,000 years into the future. The world has been transformed with a society living in apparent harmony and bliss, but as the Traveler stays in this world of the future he discovers a hidden barbaric and depraved subterranean class. Wells’s translucent commentary on the capitalist society was an instant bestseller and launched the time-travel genre.
By: Samir El-Youssef
I could no longer resign myself to the idea that the past was unreal.
The nameless narrator of this startling novella believed himself to be under no illuson: a Palestinian refugee, he had escaped the deadly tumult of Lebanon—the roving militias and endlessly complicated religious violence—by having long ago fled to London. He knew he could never go back.
But then one day an old friend who had also escaped calls him and asks to meet at the airport on a stop-over on his way back to Lebanon. For the narrator, it summons up everything he thought he had suppressed, both the yearning to go home and the secret reason he can't.
Thus the reunion with his old friend becomes, for the narrator, a disturbing confrnotation. And as they plunge into diverging memories—his friend's frighteningly unreal, his own even more frighteningly too real—The Illusion of Return becomes a revealing and moving study of extremism and its brutalizing effect not only on nations but on the intimate lives of the individuals it touches.
