Author: Vesna Goldsworthy File Type: epub Exceptional. If there has been a more honest, calm, and profoundly moving memoir written in the last few years, then Ive missed it.Times Literary SupplementHow would you make sense of your life if you thought it might end tomorrow? In this captivating and best-selling memoir, Vesna Goldsworthy tells the story of herself, her family, and her early life in her lost country. There follows marriage, a move to England, and a successful media and academic career, then a cancer diagnosis and its unresolved consequences. A profoundly moving, comic, and original account by a stunning literary talent.**ReviewExceptional. If there has been a more honest, calm and profoundly moving memoir written in the last few years, then Ive missed it.--Times Literary Supplement Funny, painful, and brilliant - Fantastically well written - I hope that it will soon take its place among the Lolitas of Tehran and the Booksellers of Kabul Tim Judah, Observer Exceptional. If there has been a more honest, calm and profoundly moving memoir written in the last few years, then Ive missed it Andrew Taylor, TLS Three qualities make Vesna Goldsworthys memoir stand apart - her honesty, he skill as a writer and the fascinating circumstances of her life. Her ability to find unexpected, subtle connections in the pattern of her own life elevates this absorbing memoir into something extraordinary Josh Lacey, Guardian Engrossing - the work of a fiercely honest and cultivated intelligence Paul Bailey, Sunday Times About the Author VESNA GOLDSWORTHY left Yugoslavia in 1986, a month before her twenty-fifth birthday, to marry an Englishman she had met at the Karl Marx Institute in Bulgaria two years previously. She was a poet and radio presenter in Belgrade and has worked in publishing and for the BBC World Service in England. She is currently Senior Lecturer in English at Kingston University and Head of Kingstons Centre for Suburban Studies, which she founded in 2003. She lives in West London with her husband and young son.

Author: Ian F. Haney Lopez File Type: pdf Lily white. White knights. The white dove of peace. White lie, white list, white magic. Our language and our culture are suffused, often subconsciously, with positive images of whiteness. Whiteness is so inextricably linked with the status quo that few whites, when asked, even identify themselves as such. And yet when asked what they would have to be paid to live as a black person, whites give figures running into the millions of dollars per year, suggesting just how valuable whiteness is in American society.Exploring the social, and specifically legal origins, of white racial identity, Ian F. Haney Lopez here examines cases in Americas past that have been instrumental in forming contemporary conceptions of race, law, and whiteness. In 1790, Congress limited naturalization to white persons. This racial prerequisite for citizenship remained in force for over a century and a half, enduring until 1952. In a series of important cases, including two heard by the United States Supreme Court, judges around the country decided and defined who was white enough to become American.White by Law traces the reasoning employed by the courts in their efforts to justify the whiteness of some and the non- whiteness of others. Did light skin make a Japanese person white? Were Syrians white because they hailed geographically from the birthplace of Christ? Haney Lopez reveals the criteria that were used, often arbitrarily, to determine whiteness, and thus citizenship skin color, facial features, national origin, language, culture, ancestry, scientific opinion, and, most importantly, popular opinion. Having defined the social and legal origins of whiteness, White by Law turns its attention to white identity today and concludes by calling upon whites to acknowledge and renounce their privileged racial identity.From Publishers WeeklyIn this study, narrowly academic yet intriguing, Lopez, who teaches law at the University of Wisconsin, examines early-20th-century cases in which courts sought to determine who qualified as white for the purposes of citizenship and naturalization. His conclusion whiteness is a complex, falsely homogenizing term. For example, he shows how courts issued contradictory decisions regarding the whiteness of groups such as Syrians, Armenians and Asian Indians some followed scientific evidence, while most ultimately relied on common knowledge, thus finding many reasons?including culture and political sophistication?to reject foreigners who might be Caucasian. This leads the author to argue, a bit thinly, that whites must pursue a self-deconstructive race consciousness to pursue racial justice. Thus, whites must recognize the racial aspects of their privileged identity and daily engage in choosing against Whiteness one example would be to resist racist slurs, even to the point of claiming a nonwhite racial identity when hearing them. 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalWords carry social connotations. Some, like lily white, have positive connotations. With this sense of whiteness as his thesis, Lopez (law, Univ. of Wisconsin) writes of the laws recognition of a white racial identity. He focuses on a series of cases, from 1878 to 1944, known as the racial prerequisite cases. In those cases, state and federal courts sought to define characteristics of whiteness necessary to qualify an immigrant for naturalization as a U.S. citizen. Lopez concludes that the basis of todays racial inequality is to be found in the privileged status accorded to white Americans because of this legally sanctioned white racial identity. Sure to be controversial, this book will find a deserved place in academic libraries. The general reader might be advised to turn to Andrew Hackers Two Nations (LJ 31592), John Hope Franklins The Color Line (LJ 3193), and Cornel Wests Race Matters (LJ 31593).?Jerry E. Stephens, U.S. Court of Appeals Lib., Oklahoma City 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.