Author: Sarah Blake File Type: epub Amazon.com Review Amazon Exclusive Kathryn Stockett Interviews Sarah Blake The Postmistress. Kathryn Stockett I should start by saying that I am honored to be on the same page with youI loved The Postmistress. The book is so complex, it gives you so much to think about and discuss. My first question to you is, how did the book come about? What made you start writing it? Sarah Blake Thanks so much, Kathrynand Id like to lob those kind words right back at you its a tremendous thrill for me to be in conversation with the author of The Postmistress began with a picture that sprang into my head one day, of a woman sorting the mail in the back of a post office, quietly slipping a letter into her pocket instead of delivering it. Immediately, questions flooded forward Whose letter was it? Why on earth would she choose to pocket it? What havoc would be wreaked by not delivering a letter? As I answered those questions, Emma and Will and their love story, and the workings of the small town in which Iris was the center, came to life. One hundred pages into that draft, Frankie Bard arrived on the bus, out of the blue. I had no idea who she was or why she was there, except that one character referred to her as a war correspondent without a war. That was interesting, I thought. By this time I had decided to set the novel in the late thirties, early forties. It was 2001 and I was living in Washington, D.C., after the attacks of 911, and I was very preoccupied with trying to make sense of what was happening around me. Were we in danger? Would we go to war? The parallels between that uncertain time and the time before the United States entered World War II resonated with me, and what was a novel about accident and fate and the overlapping of lives deepened into a novel with war as its backdrop, which asked questions about how we understand ourselves to be in a historical moment and what we do when we are called to it. Kathryn Stockett Your book features three different women. From a logistical standpoint, did you find it hard to pull off the different points of view? I know this is something I spend a lot of time on in my workmaking sure the voices are distinct and also very much true to the different characters. Sarah Blake To be honest, with this novel, the challenge was trying to keep each of these women in line, since each one threatened at some point or another to run away with the story! It took eight years for this story to become the novel you have in your hands, and in large part thats because with the introduction of each character, I found myself going off and following an individual story, traveling further and further from a workable plot. By the time I had finished, I had written three separate novels, one for each of the three womencomplete with love affairs, whole families, other townsand the challenge came not in trying to keep them distinct, but in trying to figure out how to weave their stories together. Kathryn Stockett Who is your favorite character, and why? Sarah Blake Im not sure I can answer that, since there are parts of each of these women I admire, and parts of each of them I dont like. They are all broken in an essential waya way I find incredibly interesting. When a reporter finds she cannot tell a story and a postmaster finds herself unable to pass along a letter, the moments they have arrived at as characters are compelling. Mrs. Cripps was certainly the most fun to writeshe didnt have to carry too much weight in the telling of the story, and she was such a nosy parker it was fun to write her lines. Kathryn Stockett Is there a character in The Postmistress with whom you identify most? (And if you have been having trysts with good-looking soldiers in dark alleyways, please share!) Sarah Blake Oh, there are bits of me in all three women certainly Frankies rage and sorrow, the desire to get the story (something I despaired of often in the eight years of writing) Iriss love of order and Emmas feeling of invisibility, her longing for the sense that someone would watch over her. Kathryn Stockett The most haunting scenes for meand there were manywere those of Frankie on the train with Thomas and of the mother and child on the train platform. How did these scenes come about? Were they difficult to write? Sarah Blake Much of the drive to write the book had to do with my own attempt to write my way toward understanding the sudden, final breaks that crack into our lives, in the form of accidents, death, other irrevocable events. I have two sons, and while it is impossible for me to imagine putting them on a train by themselves, with nothing but paper to send them to safety, it was easy to conjure feelings of despair and heartbreak. The book is full of mothers and sons being torn apart by childbirth, bombs, and visas but the last partingthe mother embracing her boy in the train car with Frankiewas probably the most difficult to write. Its the hardest to comprehend, and yet it happened all the time, saying good-bye, knowingly, possibly forever. Kathryn Stockett What research did you do for historical accuracy? You seem to have really nailed the time period. Sarah Blake Thank you. Im glad it feels credible. I read many books on the history of World War II, pored through Life magazines from 1939 to 1945 for a sense of how much things cost and what they looked like, read Federal Writers Project interviews with all types of people living on Cape Cod in the 1930s, watched movies made in 1940 and 1941 (my favorite is (Photo of Kathryn Stockett Kem Lee) hrFrom Publishers Weekly Weaving together the stories of three very different women loosely tied to each other, debut novelist Blake takes readers back and forth between small town America and war-torn Europe in 1940. Single, 40-year-old postmistress Iris James and young newlywed Emma Trask are both new arrivals to Franklin, Mass., on Cape Cod. While Iris and Emma go about their daily lives, they follow American reporter Frankie Bard on the radio as she delivers powerful and personal accounts from the London Blitz and elsewhere in Europe. While Trask waits for the return of her husbanda volunteer doctor stationed in EnglandJames comes across a letter with valuable information that she chooses to hide. Blake captures two different worldsa naive nation in denial and, across the ocean, a continent wracked with terrorwith a deft sense of character and plot, and a perfect willingness to take on big, complex questions, such as the merits of truth and truth-telling in wartime. (Feb.) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.

Author: Richard Bressler File Type: epub The 13th Century was a fascinating era in world history. Genghis Khan established the largest contiguous land empire in history. The Magna Carta was drafted. Marco Polo travelled through Asia and trade expanded across the Indian Ocean and Baltic Sea, setting the stage for greater expansion in the 15th century. The Native Americans of Cahokia, Mesoamerica and the Chimor State flourished while Mali, Ethiopia and Great Zimbabwe throve in Sub-Saharan Africa. This world history chronicles the important events in this pivotal century, while exploring many of the relevant figures of the era, including King John of England, St. Francis of Assisi, Balban of India and many others.

Author: Sareeta Amrute File Type: pdf In Encoding Race, Encoding Class Sareeta Amrute explores the work and private lives of highly skilled Indian IT coders in Berlin to reveal the oft-obscured realities of the embodied, raced, and classed nature of cognitive labor. In addition to conducting fieldwork and interviews in IT offices as well as analyzing political cartoons, advertisements, and reports on white-collar work, Amrute spent time with a core of twenty programmers before, during, and after their shifts. She shows how they occupy a contradictory position, as they are racialized in Germany as temporary and migrant grunt workers, yet their middle-class aspirations reflect efforts to build a new, global, and economically dominant India. The ways they accept and resist the premises and conditions of their work offer new potentials for alternative visions of living and working in neoliberal economies. Demonstrating how these coders cognitive labor realigns and reimagines race and class, Amrute conceptualizes personhood and migration within global capitalism in new ways.

Author: Johnson Thomaskutty File Type: pdf Are the Thomas references in the Gospel of John, the Thomas compositions, and the early Thomas traditions in northwestern and southern India purely legendary as biblical scholars have assumed or do they preserve unexamined historical traditions intermittently as the Thomas Christians in India have believed? hrDidymus Judas Thomas is one of the most misunderstood characters from the beginning of the New Testament history and interpretation. In this study, Thomaskutty addresses the following questions whether Thomas was merely a doubting Thomas or a genuine Thomas? Can we understand Thomas comprehensively by bringing the New Testament, apocrypha, and historical traditions together? How was Thomas connected to eastern Christianity and how does the Thomas literature supportnot support this connectivity? Can we understand the Thomas traditions related to Judea, Syria, and India with the help of canonical, extra canonical, and traditio-historical documents? Thomaskutty investigates the development of the Thomas literature right from the beginning, examining and questioning the approaches and methodologies that have been employed in interpreting these documents, and analyzes the Thomas literature closely in order to understand the character, his mission involvements, and the possible implications this may have for understanding early Christianity in the east.**ReviewWhat I find most attractive is Thomaskuttys interdisciplinary methodology. It is both revolutionary and refreshing. He examines the four selected texts [The Gospel of Thomas, The Book of Thomas, The Acts of Thomas, and The Infancy Gospel of Thomas] using textual criticism, biblical criticism, narrative criticism, and theological reflections. * James H. Charlesworth, Princeton Theological Seminary, USA * Prof. Thomaskutty offers a comprehensive assessment of the evidence for the Apostle Thomas within the New Testament, in early Christian literature, and in the traditions of the Church, particularly the church in India, which has long venerated the Apostle Thomas as its founder. Thoroughly researched and carefully argued, Prof. Thomaskuttys treatment will be a valuable resource to scholars of the early church and to anyone interested in the development of apostolic traditions outside the western sphere. * Harold W. Attridge, Yale Divinity School, USA * Based on careful reading of all the ancient primary sources and attention to the traditions of India, Prof. Thomaskutty has succeeded in bringing the Apostle Thomas to life, in all his complexity. Anyone interested in the Apostle Thomas `the Twin would do well to start here. * Charles M. Stang, Harvard Divinity School, USA * About the Author Johnson Thomaskutty is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of New Testament Studies at Union Biblical Seminary, Pune, India. He is the author of Dialogue in the Book of Signs A Polyvalent Analysis of John 119-1250 (2015). His forthcoming monograph is entitled Saint Bartholomew the Apostle New Testament, Apocrypha, and Historical Traditions (forthcoming).