Books about Displaced from Amazon.com

Layoffs have become a fact of life in today’s economy; initiated in the mid 1970s, they are now widely expected, and even accepted It doesn’t have to be that way.

In The Disposable American, award-winning reporter Louis Uchitelle offers an eye-opening account of layoffs in America–how they started, their questionable necessity, and their devastating psychological impact on individuals at all income levels. Through portraits of both executives and workers at companies such as Stanley Works, United Airlines, and Citigroup, Uchitelle shows how layoffs are in fact counterproductive, rarely promoting efficiency or profitability in the long term. Recognizing that a global competitive economy makes tightening necessary, Uchitelle offers specific recommendations for government policies that would encourage companies to avoid layoffs and help create jobs, benefiting workers, corporations, and the nation as a whole..
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WWII was the bloodiest and most documented war in all history Yet, with the closing of the 20th century few remaining archives are still opened by witnesses whose voices have not yet been heard. This autobiography is the voice of a German girl of the Nazi period, and growing into adolescence, she describes a 400-mile trek by horse-wagon and on foot to escape the terror of the advancing Soviets. Her narrative offers glimpses of a courageous young girl and takes the reader through the awfulness of war and post-war conditions of homelessness, famine, refugee camps, devastated bombed cities, and the enormous suffering by millions of displaced Germans. The author interweaves her memoir with touching human experiences, moments of painful humor - and a surprise happy ending. The book reveals historic perspectives of WWII not commonly found in school curricula, nor shown in Hollywood docudramas..
Price: $14.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Their haunting images appear on millions of television screens and in newspapers worldwide: Children huddled in refugee camps and exposed to violence in war zones. Children burdened by the emotional and physical scars of violent homes and communities. Children exploited by crass commercialism around the world and around the corner. Too many children are confronting life-threatening risks and experiencing trauma.

Synthesizing insights from psychology and philosophy with his own wide-ranging, first-hand experiences around the world, Dr. James Garbarino takes readers on a personalized journey into the dark side of human experience as it is lived by children. In these highly readable pages, Dr. Garbarino intertwines a discussion of children’s material and spiritual needs with a detailed examination of the clinical knowledge and experiential wisdom required to understand and meet complex developmental needs. Fusing anecdotal observations, empirical evidence, and an ecological perspective, he reveals a path to ensuring the fundamental human rights of all children: the right to safety, to equality, to economic parity, and to a meaningful life.

Dr. Garbarino’s challenge to his readers: If we are to succeed in making a lasting, positive change in the lives of children, we must be willing to rethink the concepts of development, trauma, and resilience. Children and the Dark Side of Human Experience is must-reading for all mental health professionals, educators, researchers, social workers, child advocates, and policymakers – in fact, for anyone who takes an interest in the well-being and future of the world’s children.

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Price: $24.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

What's it like to go from sitting two rows behind George W. Bush in church to explaining ass-less chaps to a two-year-old while wandering through the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco? Robin Dutton-Cookston grew up in a Texas town where the only chaps were found at the annual rodeo, yet she found herself peeing on the pregnancy stick while still unpacking the boxes in her hipster San Francisco apartment. Life in the mama-lane quickly straddled the great divide between red and blue states, and Robin learned to blend new age street smarts and deep-fried southern hospitality when raising her daughter. Take a trip to San Francisco Mamaland and sneak a peek into an odyssey of bumbling motherhood. It all takes place in a city where what passes as ordinary-same-sex mommies and daddies, creative facial piercings, rabid political rallies, and professional families who can't afford to buy a house-evokes gasps of shock and awe from folks back in Texas. On the way Robin covers universal parenting themes common to many mamas and daddies: breastfeeding chaos, naptime battles, life transitions, the quest for a sense of home, and the need teach her California child the subtle difference between east and west Texas barbeque sauce..
Price: $11.36 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, Iran’s film industry, in conforming to the Islamic Republic’s system of modesty, had to ensure that women on-screen were veiled from the view of men. This prevented Iranian filmmakers from making use of the desiring gaze, a staple cinematic system of looking. In Displaced Allegories Negar Mottahedeh shows that post-Revolutionary Iranian filmmakers were forced to create a new visual language for conveying meaning to audiences. She argues that the Iranian film industry found creative ground not in the negation of government regulations but in the camera’s adoption of the modest, averted gaze. In the process, the filmic techniques and cinematic technologies were gendered as feminine and the national cinema was produced as a woman’s cinema.

Mottahedeh asserts that, in response to the prohibitions against the desiring look, a new narrative cinema emerged as the displaced allegory of the constraints on the post-Revolutionary Iranian film industry. Allegorical commentary was not developed in the explicit content of cinematic narratives but through formal innovations. Offering close readings of the work of the nationally popular and internationally renowned Iranian auteurs Bahram Bayza’i, Abbas Kiarostami, and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Mottahedeh illuminates the formal codes and conventions of post-Revolutionary Iranian films. She insists that such analyses of cinema’s visual codes and conventions are crucial to the study of international film. As Mottahedeh points out, the discipline of film studies has traditionally seen film as a medium that communicates globally because of its dependence on a (Hollywood) visual language assumed to be universal and legible across national boundaries. Displaced Allegories demonstrates that visual language is not necessarily universal; it is sometimes deeply informed by national culture and politics..
Price: $21.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in 1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies, and he was a pioneer in Jewish studies, trauma studies, and studies of the Holocaust. At Yale, he was a founder of its Judaic Studies program, as well as of the first major video archive for Holocaust testimonies.Generations of students have benefited from Hartman’s generosity, his penetrating and incisive questioning, the wizardry of his close reading, and his sense that the work of a literary scholar, no less than that of an artist, is a creative act. All these qualities shine forth in this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, uncanny sense of vocation, and development as a literary scholar and cultural critic. He looks back at how his career was influenced by his experience, at the age of nine, of being a refugee from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. He spent the next six years at school in England, where he developed his love of English literature and the English countryside, before leaving to join his mother in America.Hartman treats us to a “biobibliography” of his engagements with the major trends in literary criticism. He covers the exciting period at Yale handled so controversially by the media and gives us vivid portraits, in particular, of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida.All this is set in the context of his gradual self-awareness of what scholarship implies and how his personal displacements strengthened his calling to mediate between European and American literary cultures. Anyone looking for a rich, intelligible account of the last half-century of combative literary studies will want to read Geoffrey Hartman’s unapologetic scholar’s tale..
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