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By Off, Carol2017., General, Random House Canada Call No: Bio O32a Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "The gripping story of a family's desperate attempts to escape Afghan warlords, Taliban oppression, and the persecutions of refugee life, in hopes that both their sons and their daughters could dare to dream of peace and opportunity. And behind the scenes, there are the unflagging efforts of one of Canada's most respected journalists, CBC Radio's Carol Off, working assiduously to help the family achieve freedom and a promising future. In 2002, Carol Off and a CBC TV crew encountered an Afghan man with a story to tell. Asad Aryubwal became key to their documentary on the terrible power of thuggish warlords who were working arm in arm with Americans and NATO troops. When Asad publicly exposed the deeds of one particular warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, it set off a chain of events from which there was no turning back. Asad, his wife, Mobina, and their five children had to flee their home. Their only chance for a peaceful life was to emigrate - yet year after year of agonizing limbo would ensue as they were thwarted by a Byzantine international bureaucracy and the decidedly unwelcoming policies of Stephen Harper's government. One family's journey and fraught attempts to immigrate to a safe place, and what happens when a journalist becomes deeply involved with the people in her story and is unable to leave them behind. Carol Off is the host of CBC Radio's As It Happens, the network's flagship evening radio programme"--Provided by publisher.
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2012., Portfolio/Penguin Call No: Bio F949b Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: In her autobiography, Ping Fu tells her story as she lived it--from child soldier and political prisoner to a CEO and "Inc." magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year.
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By Bui, Thi2017., Adult, Abrams Edition: eBook edition. Summary Note: **ABA Indies Introduce Winter / Spring 2017 Selection****Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Spring 2017 Selection**An intimate and poignant graphic novel portraying one family's journey from war-torn Vietnam, from debut author Thi Bui.This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.At the heart of Bui's story is a universal struggle: While adjusting to life as a first-time mother, she ultimately discovers what it means to be a parent—the endless sacrifices, the unnoticed gestures, and the depths of unspoken love. Despite how impossible it seems to take on the simultaneous roles of both parent and child, Bui pushes through. With haunting, poetic writing and breathtaking art, she examines the strength of family, the importance of identity, and the meaning of home.In what Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls "a book to break your heart and heal it," The Best We Could Do brings to life Thi Bui's journey of understanding, and provides inspiration to all of those who search for a better future while longing for a simpler past.
![The best we could do [eBook] : An Illustrated Memoir.](/Library/images/~imageCT85507.JPG "The best we could do [eBook] : An Illustrated Memoir.")
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By Kurdi, Tima2018., Adult, Simon & Schuster Call No: Bio K95b Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "An intimate and poignant memoir about the family of Alan Kurdi, the young Syrian boy who became the global emblem for the desperate plight of millions of Syrian refugees and of the many extraordinary journeys the Kurdis have taken, spanning countries and continents. Alan Kurdi's body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea on September 2, 2015, and overnight, the political became personal, as the world awoke to the reality of the Syrian refugee crisis. Tima Kurdi first saw the shocking photo of her nephew in her home in Vancouver, Canada. But Tima did not need a photo to understand the truth she and her family had already been living it. In The Boy on the Beach, Tima recounts her idyllic childhood in Syria, where she grew up with her brother Abdullah and other siblings in a tight knit family. A strong willed, independent woman, Tima studied to be a hairdresser and had dreams of seeing the world. At twenty two, she emigrated to Canada, but much of her family remained in Damascus. Life as a single mother and immigrant in a new country wasn't always easy, and Tima recounts with heart wrenching honesty the anguish of being torn between a new home and the world she'd left behind."-- Publisher.
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c2010., General, Doubleday Canada Call No: BLK 305.896 G656C Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: An inspiring story of courage, adaptation and determinaton a year in the life of 11 refugee students entering universities across Canada."Most journalists have stories they never forget. This is mine."When Debi Goodwin travelled to the Dadaab Refugee Camp in 2007 to shoot a documentary on young Somali refugees soon coming to Canada, she did not anticipate the impact the journey would have on her. A year later, in August of 2008, she decided to embark upon a new journey, starting in the overcrowded refugee camps in Kenya, and ending in university campuses across Canada. For a year, she recorded the lives of eleven very lucky refugee students who had received coveted scholarships from Canadian universities, guaranteeing them both a spot in the student body and permanent residency in Canada. We meet them in the overcrowded confines of a Kenyan refugee camp and track them all the way through a year of dramatic and sometimes traumatic adjustments to new life in a foreign country called Canada. This is a snapshot of a refugee's first year in Canada, in particular a snapshot of young men and women lucky and smart enough to earn their passage from refugee camp to Canadian campus.
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2014., Adult, 37 Ink/Atria Call No: 951.93 J33d Edition: First 37 Ink / Atria books hardcover edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "In this rare insider's view into contemporary North Korea, a high-ranking counterintelligence agent describes his life as a former poet laureate to Kim Jong-il and his breathtaking escape to freedom. "The General will now enter the room." Everyone turns to stone. Not moving my head, I direct my eyes to a point halfway up the archway where Kim Jong-il's face will soon appear. As North Korea's State Poet Laureate, Jang Jin-sung led a charmed life. With food provisions (even as the country suffered through its great famine), a travel pass, access to strictly censored information, and audiences with Kim Jong-il himself, his life in Pyongyang seemed safe and secure. But this privileged existence was about to be shattered. When a strictly forbidden magazine he lent to a friend goes missing, Jang Jin-sung must flee for his life. Never before has a member of the elite described the inner workings of this totalitarian state and its propaganda machine. An astonishing expose; told through the heart-stopping story of Jang Jin-sung's escape to South Korea, Dear Leader is a rare and unprecedented insight into the world's most secretive and repressive regime"--Provided by publisher.
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2004., Leméac Call No: QWF FR Fic Lei Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Linda Leith's memoir, Marrying Hungary, is the moving story of the daughter of Irish Communist parents who, after a peripatetic childhood, falls in love and marries a Hungarian refugee. It is a glimpse into a life spent among foreigners, a tale of identity and eventual independence. And it reveals what few memoirs reveal: what brings a couple together, what marriage means to an ambitious and accomplished woman, and why sometimes even a good marriage eventually fails.
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2014., General Store Publishing House Call No: 305.409 G595f Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Author Sima Goelœs Fleeing the Hijab: A Jewish Womanœs Escape from Iran is a vivid portrait of a dangerous journey made by two teenaged women through the Iranian desert to Pakistan, where, as homeless refugees, they struggled desperately to find some way to escape to the West. This true story needs to be heard and remembered. It was the last straw! The Ayatollah Khomeini had decreed that all women in Iran must wear the hijab, whether they were Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or Bahá'í. Thirteen-year-old Sima had gone out into the streets of Shiraz to demonstrate for freedom from the Shahœs oppressive rule, and now that he had fled the country, this was the result: a new regime, and much more dangerous oppression. The changes Ayatollah Khomeiniœs regime forced on the population were totally incompatible with Simaœs ambitions and sense of personal freedom. Blacklisted by her school, unable to continue her studies, mourning the loss of innocent family members and friends murdered by the new regime, and forced to wear the hijab, she realized she had to leave her beloved birthplace and find a country where she could be free to follow her dreams.
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Ã2018., Crown Call No: BLK Bio W243g Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety -- perpetually hungry, imprisoned, and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, ultimately, graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old. In this memoir, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of "victim" and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks.
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2018., Adult, Freehand Books Call No: Bio R114h Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Homes tells the story of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, a young boy whose family moved from Iraq to Syria just before the start of the Syrian civil war. It recounts what it was like living in Syria during this time -- the normal things like video games, sleepovers, and family jarringly juxtaposed with car bombings, massacres, and the constant threat of what could happen next. In 2014 the family finally found safety in immigrating to Edmonton, Canada, and the book also recounts both the gratefulness and the loneliness of the family's immigration experience."--
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2018., Adult, Freehand Books Connect to this eBook title Summary Note: In 2010, the al Rabeeah family left their home in Iraq in hope of a safer life. They moved to Homs, in Syria – just before the Syrian civil war broke out. Abu Bakr, one of eight children, was ten years old when the violence began on the streets around him: car bombings, attacks on his mosque and school, firebombs late at night. Homes tells of the strange juxtapositions of growing up in a war zone: horrific, unimaginable events punctuated by normalcy – soccer, cousins, video games, friends. Homes is the remarkable true story of how a young boy emerged from a war zone – and found safety in Canada – with a passion for sharing his story and telling the world what is truly happening in Syria. As told to her by Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, writer Winnie Yeung has crafted a heartbreaking, hopeful, and urgently necessary book that provides a window into understanding Syria.
![Homes [eBook] : a refugee story](/Library/images/~imageCT100197.JPG "Homes [eBook] : a refugee story")
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-- Land bridge.2023., Adult, Alchemy Call No: NEW Bio T811l Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: In 1980, Y-Dang Troeung and her family were among the last of the 60,000 refugees from Cambodia that then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to relocate to Canada. As the final arrivals, their landing was widely documented in newspapers, with photographs of the PM shaking Y-Dang's father's hand, reaching out to pat baby Y-Dang's head. Forty years later, in her brilliant, astonishing book, Y-Dang returns to this moment, and to many others before and after, to explore the tension between that public narrative of happy "arrival," and the multiple, often hidden truths of what happened to the people in her family. In precise, beautiful prose accompanied by moving black-and-white visuals, Y-Dang weaves back and forth in time to tell stories about her parents and two brothers who lived through the Cambodian genocide, about the lives of her grandparents and extended family, about her own childhood in the refugee camps and in rural Ontario, and eventually about her young son's illness and her own diagnosis with a terminal disease. Through it all, Y-Dang looks with bracing clarity at refugee existence, refusal of gratitude, becoming a scholar, and love.
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2016., HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Call No: Bio P286l Edition: First edition. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "A gripping, inspiring, and eye-opening memoir of fortitude and survival--of a twelve-year-old boy's traumatic flight from Afghanistan to the West--that puts a face to one of the most shocking and devastating humanitarian crises of our time."To risk my life had to mean something. Otherwise what was it all for?"In 2006, after his father was killed, Gulwali Passarlay was caught between the Taliban who wanted to recruit him, and the Americans who wanted to use him. To protect her son, Gulwali's mother sent him away. The search for safety would lead the twelve-year-old across eight countries, from the mountains of eastern Afghanistan through Iran and Europe to Britain. Over the course of twelve harrowing months, Gulwali endured imprisonment, hunger, cruelty, brutality, loneliness, and terror--and nearly drowned crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Eventually granted asylum in England, Gulwali was sent to a good school, learned English, won a place at a top university, and was chosen to help carry the Olympic Torch in the 2012 London Games.In The Lightless Sky, Gulwali recalls his remarkable experience and offers a firsthand look at one of the most pressing issues of our time: the modern refugee crisis--the worst displacement of millions of men, women, and children in generations. Few, like Gulwali, make it to a country that offers the chance of freedom and opportunity. A celebration of courage and determination, The Lightless Sky is a poignant account of an exceptional human being who is today an ardent advocate of democracy--and a reminder of our responsibilities to those caught in terrifying and often deadly circumstances beyond their control"--
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[2015], 2014., Adult, Alfred A. Knopf Call No: Bio A798s Edition: 1st ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "In January 1991, when civil war came to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, two-thirds of the city's population fled. Among them was eight-year-old Asad Abdullahi. His mother murdered by a militia, his father somewhere in hiding, he was swept alone into the great wartime migration that scattered the Somali people throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the world. This book tells Asad's story, from a childhood living in a bewildering number of places to an adulthood of financial and romantic success. Jonny Steinberg was born in South Africa. He is the author of Three Letter Plague, as well as Midlands and The Number. He teaches African Studies and Criminology at Oxford University"--Provided by publisher.
