Strangers to the City

Author: Michael Casey
Publisher: Paraclete Press
ISBN: 155725950X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 183

Book Description
Michael Casey, a monk and scholar who has been publishing his wise teachings on the Rule of St. Benedict for decades, turns to the particular Benedictine values that he considers most urgent for Christians to incorporate into their lives today. Eloquent and incisive, Casey invites readers to accept that gospel living - seen in the light of the Rule - involves accepting the challenge of being different from the secular culture around us. He encourages readers to set clear goals and objectives, to be honest about the practical ways in which priorities may have to change to meet these goals, and to have the courage to implement these changes both daily and for the future. Casey presents thoughtful reflections on the beliefs and values of asceticism, silence, leisure, reading, chastity, and poverty - putting these traditional Benedictine values into the context of modern life and the spiritual aspirations of people today. Strangers to the City is a book for all who are interested in learning more about the dynamics of spiritual growth from the monastic experience.

Strangers in the City

Author: Li Zhang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804779341
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
With rapid commercialization, a booming urban economy, and the relaxation of state migration policies, over 100 million peasants, known as China’s “floating population,” have streamed into large cities seeking employment and a better life. This massive flow of rural migrants directly challenges Chinese socialist modes of state control. This book traces the profound transformations of space, power relations, and social networks within a mobile population that has broken through the constraints of the government’s household registration system. The author explores this important social change through a detailed ethnographic account of the construction, destruction, and eventual reconstruction of the largest migrant community in Beijing. She focuses on the informal privatization of space and power in this community through analyzing the ways migrant leaders build their power base by controlling housing and market spaces and mobilizing social networks. The author argues that to gain a deeper understanding of recent Chinese social and political transformations, one must examine not only to what extent state power still dominates everyday social life, but also how the aims and methods of late socialist governance change under new social and economic conditions. In revealing the complexities and uncertainties of the shifting power and social relations in post-Mao China, this book challenges the common notion that sees recent changes as an inevitable move toward liberal capitalism and democracy.

City of Strangers

Author: Andrew M. Gardner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801462193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
In City of Strangers, Andrew M. Gardner explores the everyday experiences of workers from India who have migrated to the Kingdom of Bahrain. Like all the petroleum-rich states of the Persian Gulf, Bahrain hosts an extraordinarily large population of transmigrant laborers. Guest workers, who make up nearly half of the country's population, have long labored under a sponsorship system, the kafala, that organizes the flow of migrants from South Asia to the Gulf states and contractually links each laborer to a specific citizen or institution. In order to remain in Bahrain, the worker is almost entirely dependent on his sponsor's goodwill. The nature of this relationship, Gardner contends, often leads to exploitation and sometimes violence. Through extensive observation and interviews Gardner focuses on three groups in Bahrain: the unskilled Indian laborers who make up the most substantial portion of the foreign workforce on the island; the country's entrepreneurial and professional Indian middle class; and Bahraini state and citizenry. He contends that the social segregation and structural violence produced by Bahrain's kafala system result from a strategic arrangement by which the state insulates citizens from the global and neoliberal flows that, paradoxically, are central to the nation's intended path to the future. City of Strangers contributes significantly to our understanding of politics and society among the states of the Arabian Peninsula and of the migrant labor phenomenon that is an increasingly important aspect of globalization.

Cities of Strangers

Author: Miri Rubin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110848123X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
Explores how medieval towns and cities received newcomers, and the process by which these 'strangers' became 'neighbours' between 1000 and 1500.

Strangers to the City

Author: Leonard Plotnicov
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822974045
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
Leonard Plotnicov offers a fascinating study of the urbanization of tribal Africans. His study is based on extensive interviews with residents of Jos, Nigeria over a two-year period. The participants come from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds, and Plotnicov portrays the difficulties associated with assimilation into a Westernized society.

Vilnius

Author: Laimonas Briedis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789955231967
Category : Travelers
Languages : en
Pages : 295

Book Description
Presents the history of the capital city of Lithuania from its 14th century legendary beginnings up to 2009, when Vilnius bears the distinction of European Capital of Culture. This book features quotes from travellers who passed through the city during their own life journeys.

The City of Strangers

Author: Michael Russell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781471257452
Category : Detective and mystery stories
Languages : en
Pages : 567

Book Description
Garda Sergeant Stefan Gillespie is sent to America to bring a killer to justice, but his mission soon becomes part of an increasingly personal struggle. A chance encounter with an old friend draws him deep into a chilling network of conspiracy, espionage and terror. He becomes more involved than he should and discovers that the war that is looming in Europe is already being played out here on the streets, with deadly consequences. In this time when people must make a stand for what they believe in, the stakes for Stefan Gillespie, and everything he holds dear, couldn't be higher.

City of Strangers

Author: Louise Millar
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476760152
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
From the author of Accidents Happen, The Hidden Girl, and The Playdate—called “a supremely accomplished debut thriller by a writer to watch” (Booklist, starred review)—comes a new, heart-pounding novel about a journalist set on discovering the identity of a stranger who has turned her life upside down. When Grace and her childhood sweetheart Mac come home from their honeymoon in Thailand, they’re shocked to find a dead body beside their pile of unopened wedding presents. The police are unable to ID the man, so it is assumed that he was a burglar who died from natural causes. Little do they know that evidence for a rather different story is hidden right beneath their apartment… Three months later, Grace finds a card that, in place of well wishes, bears the message: “That man was Lucian Grabole.” A newspaper reporter fearing for her job, Grace lands on an idea that could answer some questions, and save her career as well. She’ll pitch a story to her boss called “Who was the man in my kitchen?” Soon Grace is trekking across Europe, talking to strangers and piecing together clues as she tries to unravel the mystery of who Lucian Grabole was, and why he met such a macabre end. Suddenly, with two more deaths linked to the case, it becomes clear that Grabole most certainly did not die a natural death. And the answer to the mystery of who the killer is, and why, lies back in Grace’s apartment...

Migrants and Strangers in an African City

Author: Bruce Whitehouse
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253000750
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
In cities throughout Africa, local inhabitants live alongside large populations of "strangers." Bruce Whitehouse explores the condition of strangerhood for residents who have come from the West African Sahel to settle in Brazzaville, Congo. Whitehouse considers how these migrants live simultaneously inside and outside of Congolese society as merchants, as Muslims in a predominantly non-Muslim society, and as parents seeking to instill in their children the customs of their communities of origin. Migrants and Strangers in an African City challenges Pan-Africanist ideas of transnationalism and diaspora in today's globalized world.

Stranger in the Shogun's City

Author: Amy Stanley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501188542
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
*Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography* *Winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award* *Winner of the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography* A “captivating” (The Washington Post) work of history that explores the life of an unconventional woman during the first half of the 19th century in Edo—the city that would become Tokyo—and a portrait of a city on the brink of a momentous encounter with the West. The daughter of a Buddhist priest, Tsuneno was born in a rural Japanese village and was expected to live a traditional life much like her mother’s. But after three divorces—and a temperament much too strong-willed for her family’s approval—she ran away to make a life for herself in one of the largest cities in the world: Edo, a bustling metropolis at its peak. With Tsuneno as our guide, we experience the drama and excitement of Edo just prior to the arrival of American Commodore Perry’s fleet, which transformed Japan. During this pivotal moment in Japanese history, Tsuneno bounces from tenement to tenement, marries a masterless samurai, and eventually enters the service of a famous city magistrate. Tsuneno’s life provides a window into 19th-century Japanese culture—and a rare view of an extraordinary woman who sacrificed her family and her reputation to make a new life for herself, in defiance of social conventions. “A compelling story, traced with meticulous detail and told with exquisite sympathy” (The Wall Street Journal), Stranger in the Shogun’s City is “a vivid, polyphonic portrait of life in 19th-century Japan [that] evokes the Shogun era with panache and insight” (National Review of Books).