News Feed Alliance Book News and Reviews!
http://www.ThePortlandAlliance.org/bookreview
Featured this issue: Burnside Field Lizard and Selected Stories, by Theresa Kennedy-DuPay
Theresa Kennedy-DuPay has a book worth taking a look at...
This is my first book of fiction, Burnside Field Lizard and Selected Stories, published by Oregon Greystone Press. Gigi Little is the skilled Portland graphic design artist who created this lovely image. Tom Hansen graciously helped with the main blurb, and Jessica Glen is my new publicist, along with her good friend and mine,
Amy Temple Harper, who is helping with editing and proofing.
I am extremely grateful to all these great people for coming together and helping with this project. ❤️
To buy my new book, you can click on the active link here to get it for your very own.
It is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and also Powell's...
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/burnside-field-lizard-and-selected-stories-theresa-griffin-kennedy/1129680227?ean=9781532372865
Enjoy the stories. They are gritty and contain graphic content, not suitable for young children or teens.
Some Reviews...
“Compassion and empathy are words that are thrown around a lot these days, especially in the book world, as guiding lights that authors should all aspire to follow. While those qualities are certainly important, on their own they’re just empty signals that show us very little about humanity and ourselves. There’s another quality that I personally feel is more important; honesty. It’s precisely this quality that shines the brightest in Theresa Griffin Kennedy’s story collection Burnside Field Lizard and Selected Stories. These stories contain very real characters with very real damage and yet Kennedy doesn’t flinch or look away from the uncomfortable, or the unpretty. Kennedy doesn’t look for easy answers or to lay blame. She doesn’t focus on the elements that will solely elicit sympathy from readers. She looks unashamedly, unapologetically, almost clinically on their vices as well as bitter resentments and conflicted self-destructive desires. Thankfully, this gives readers the freedom to decide for themselves how they feel about these characters. The cumulative effect is a level of pathos and verisimilitude that is touching and beautifully human. With these stories Theresa Griffin Kennedy has shown herself to be a writer of exceptional talent, clarity and literary maturity.”
—Tom Hansen, author of American Junkie
“Theresa Griffin Kennedy’s small collection, Burnside Field Lizard and Selected Stories, explores the seamy and sordid underbelly of Portland’s dark side. Kennedy’s Portland is wet, dreary, and its inhabitants are broken; these characters are poor, struggling, addicted, angry, defenseless and sometimes mentally ill. Yet, there is a ribbon of the thinnest hope that threads through these stories and sometimes redemption is just hidden on the horizon. Deftly done, Kennedy flexes her storytelling muscle here and lucky for us!”
—Dianah Hughley, Powell’s Books
“Theresa Griffin Kennedy’s gothic tone is matched by her slow suspense in telling these sad, humorous and honest tales.”
—Amy Temple Harper, author of Cramped Uptown
Theresa Griffin-Kennedy is a freelance writer of creative nonfiction, a poet, fiction writer and contributing columnist for The online Portland Alliance Newspaper and for the website GoLocalPDX.
She is a social activist fighting for social change through writing as a social act. Theresa paints abstract with mixed media and is a writing instructor and coach. modern free verse. Learn more.
Online since 2007
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"Climate refugees fleeing an American West turned desert. A German couple trapped in a new European Ice Age. A sensitive young man drafted to fight in the Tar Sands Wars. Rebels persecuted by a dictatorship of the fossil fuel industry. These and other stories explore life in a climate-altered near future: occasionally whimsical, often grim, always deeply human in their response to catastrophe."
http://www.ThePortlandAlliance.org/underwood
Just wanted to announce that my new book will soon be published! I am planning book talks in different parts of the country and will keep you posted when I am scheduled to be in a town near you. My signing pen is at the ready!
The progressive vision of a Teamsters local
During the 1950s and 1960s, labor leaders Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway championed a new kind of labor movement that regarded workers as "total persons" interested in both workplace affairs and the exercise of effective citizenship in their communities.
Working through Teamsters Local 688 and viewing the city of St. Louis as their laboratory, this remarkable interracial duo forged a dynamic political alliance that placed their "citizen members" on the front lines of epic battles for urban revitalization, improved public services, and the advancement of racial and economic justice. Parallel to their political partnership, Gibbons functioned as a top Teamsters Union leader and Calloway as an influential figure in St. Louis's civil rights movement. Their pioneering efforts not only altered St. Louis's social and political landscape but also raised fundamental questions about the fate of the post-industrial city, the meaning of citizenship, and the role of unions in shaping American democracy.
"Fighting for Total Person Unionism is a thoroughly researched, elegantly constructed, and marvelously engaging study of two long-time labor activists. But it’s more than that, really. Through the braided story of Harold Gibbons and Ernest Calloway, Bob Bussel recreates the social vision that animated much of the post-World War II labor movement--and reminds us how much we’ve lost in our age of rampant individualism."--Kevin Boyle, author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age
"Advocates of a powerful vision of what unions could and should do, Ernest Calloway and Harold Gibbons of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters pioneered a “total person unionism” that engaged rank-and-file energies in the workplace and broader community. In this important and highly readable joint biography, Robert Bussel breaks new ground that helps us rethink the politics of postwar labor at the local level."--Eric Arnesen, editor of The Black Worker: Race, Labor, and Civil Rights since Emancipation
"The collaborative work of Calloway and Gibbons provides insight into labor at its post war best, and the path we must reclaim today. Total Person Unionism is a wonderful effort to reclaim that ground not only for historians but for all of us committed to economic justice and democracy today."--Larry Cohen, former president, Communications Workers of America
"Bussel is offering us a unique perspective on the nation's largest union in an era when it was at its peak of influence. He also asserts that the careers of these two men offer important lessons to organized labor today, of tactics and approaches that would help the movement regain its lost relevance."--David Witwer, author of Shadow of the Racketeer: Scandal in Organized Labor
Robert Bussel is a professor of history and director of the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon. He is the author of From Harvard to the Ranks of Labor: Powers Hapgood and the American Working Class.
More info about Bob Bussel's Book at:
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/45gps3ym9780252039492.html#.Ve-3JnrrxpM.facebook
Book Review American History 101
Conspiracy Nation
by Mike Palecek ... art by Allison Healy
"Mike Palecek writes with passion, wit, and always with a strong social conscience."
— Howard Zinn
more at:
http://www.ThePortlandAlliance.org/palecek
An excerpt from Michael Parenti's forthcoming book, PROFIT PATHOLOGY AND OTHER INDECENCIES (March 2015):
"Ruling interests are well served by their superiority in firepower and striking force. Violence is what we are talking about here, not the wild and impulsive type but the persistent and well-organized kind, often conducted by the military or the secret agencies of state. Large scale violence is the instrument of ultimate authority. Violence allows for the conquest of entire lands and the riches they contain. With a strong advantage in violence, the imperialists are able to exploit or exterminate multitudes while expropriating the fruits of their land and labor. These occurrences must be seen as something more than just abnormalities driven by happenstance or human depravity."
---Michael Parenti
From the US to Africa
From Stokely to Kwame
by RON JACOBS
Peniel E. Joseph’s newly published biography of Black liberation activist Stokely Carmichael not only takes its rightful place next to Taylor Branch’s epic trilogy The King Years, but also to one of the most powerful autobiographies by any American: Stokely Carmichael’s own Ready For Revolution. Although Ready for Revolution is more emotionally cathartic, what Joseph’s book lacks in emotion he makes up in detail and research. Together, the two books add uncountable wealth to the story of Stokely Carmichael and US civil rights movement history.
http://stillhomeron.blogspot.com/2014/05/from-stokely-to-kwame.html
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