homes and haunts

Provides an account of the author's life growing up in mid-century Brooklyn as the Jewish-Arabic child of an Iraqi father and Syrian mother. Explores his artistic awakening in the context of his Sephardic community. Compares the tension between the Arab and Jewish nations to the tensions in his family and within himself.

Presents nineteenth-century American author Henry David Thoreau's reflections on living alone among nature for two years on Walden Pond in Massachusetts, and includes an introduction, explanatory notes, and an ecological appendix.

Just after her eleventh birthday in 1950 and at the height of the frightening childhood polio epidemic, Susan Richards Shreve was sent to the sanitarium at Warm Springs, Georgia. It was a place famously founded by FDR, "a perfect setting in time and place and strangeness for a hospital of crippled children." There the young Shreve meets Joey Buckley, paralyzed from the waist down and determined to leave Warm Springs able to play football. The dual shocks of first love and separation from her fiercely protective mother propel Shreve careening between bad girl rebellion to overachieving saint. This portrait of the psychic fallout of childhood illness ends with a shocking collision between adolescent drive and genteel institution. During Shreve's stay at Warm Springs, the Salk vaccine was discovered; Shreve is one of the last generation of Americans to have survived childhood polio.--From publisher description.

Excerpts from Thoreau's Walden highlight his belief in the inherent value of living life in harmony with nature.