Born in a rural village in 1940, Wangari Maathai left at a young age to be educated in a school run by Catholic missionaries, and went on to receive her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the United States. Returning to Kenya, she became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in East and Central Africa and to head the department of veterinary medicine at the University of Nairobi. In Unbowed, she recounts the political and personal beliefs that led her, in 1977, to establish the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa, helping to restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages.
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It’s 2:47 a.m. when Dr. Nick Trout takes the phone call that starts another hectic day at the Angell Animal Medical Center. Sage, a ten-year old German shepherd, will die without emergency surgery for a serious stomach condition. Over the next twenty-four hours Dr. Trout fights for Sage’s life, battles disease in the operating room, unravels tricky diagnoses, reassures frantic pet parents, and reflects on the humor, heartache, and inspiration in his life as an animal surgeon. And he wants to take you along for the ride.…
From the front lines of modern medicine, Tell Me Where It Hurts is a fascinating insider portrait of a veterinarian,
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At age twelve, Mende Nazer lost her childhood. It began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, setting fire to the village huts and murdering the adults. The raiders rounded up thirty-one young children, including Mende, who was eventually sold to a wealthy Arab family in Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. So began Mende’s seven dark years of enslavement. Normally, Mende’s story never would have come to light, but when she was sent to work for another master—a diplomat working in London—she made a dramatic break for freedom.
Published to critical acclaim for the honesty and clarity of its prose,
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Carolyn Jourdan, an attorney on Capitol Hill, thought she had it made. But when her mother has a heart attack, she returns home—to the Tennessee mountains, where her father is a country doctor and her mother works as his receptionist. Jourdan offers to fill in for her mother until she gets better. But days turn into weeks as she trades her suits for scrubs. Most important, though, she comes to understand what her caring and patient father means to her close-knit community. With great humor and great tenderness, Heart in the Right Place shows that some of our biggest heroes are the ones living right beside us.
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After Alice Pung’s family fled to Australia from the killing fields of Cambodia, her father chose Alice as her name because he thought their new country was a Wonderland. In this lyrical, bittersweet debut memoir—already an award-winning bestseller when it was published in Australia—Alice grows up straddling two worlds, East and West, her insular family and the Australia outside. With wisdom beyond her years and a keen eye for comedy in everyday life, she writes of the trials of assimilation and cultural misunderstanding, and of the tender but fraught relationships between three generations of women trying to live the Australian dream without losing themselves.
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One month after her wedding day, thirty-three-year-old Cami Walker was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and the life she knew changed forever. Cami was soon in and out of LA’s emergency rooms with alarming frequency as she battled the neurological condition that left her barely able to walk and put enormous stress on her marriage. Each day brought new negative thoughts: I’m going to end up in a wheelchair. Mark’s probably going to leave me. My life is over. Why did this have to happen to me?
Then, as a remedy for her condition,
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