This is the extraordinary story of a father and a son that arose in the 19th century to spread the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh throughout Iran with indomitable strength and resilience. Varqá the father, a physician and a talented poet, and his gifted adolescent son Rúḥu’lláh, both of penetrating spiritual insight, took the New Gospel with zeal and courage to a generation blind in the most dire fanaticism. Operating in the midst of a country sunk into corruption and bigotry, Varqá and Rúḥu’lláh were able to teach both the rich and the poor, the prince and the commoner, the scholar and the illiterate, the believer and the laic, in freedom or in prison. Their saga ended with their tragic martyrdom in the royal prison of Tehran in 1896 but has continued to live like a legend inspiring Bahá’ís around the world to serve. Varqá’s legacy of service and consecration was continued by Valíyu’lláh Varqá and Dr ‘Alí-Muḥammad Varqá, his son and grandson, respectively, all three of whom were designated as Hands of the Cause of God.
IN Paris, in Rome, in Florence, in Berlin, in Vienna — in fact, over half the face of Europe, from the Pyrenees to the Russian frontier — I am now known as “The Count’s Chauffeur.” An Englishman, as my name, George Ewart denotes, I am of cosmopolitan birth and education, my early youth being spent on the Continent, where my father was agent for a London firm. When I was fourteen, my father, having prospered, came to London, and established himself as an agent in Wood Street, City, representing a great firm of silk manufacturers in Lyons. At twenty I tried City life, but an office with a high stool, a dusty ledger, and sandwich lunches, had no attraction for me. I had always had a turn for mechanics, but was never allowed to adopt engineering as a profession, my father’s one idea being that I should follow in his footsteps — a delusive hope entertained by many a fond parent. Six months of office life sufficed me. One day I went home to Teddington and refused to return again to Wood Street. This resulted in an open quarrel between my father and myself, with the result that a week later I was on my way to Canada. In a year I was back again, and, after some months of semi-starvation in London, I managed to obtain a job in a motor factory. I was then entirely in my element. During two years I learned the mechanism of the various petrol-driven cars until I became classed as an expert driver and engineer. Where I was employed there was manufactured one of the best and most expensive makes of English car, and, being at length placed on the testing staff, it was my duty to take out each new chassis for its trial-run before being delivered to a customer. Upon my certificate each chassis was declared in perfect running order, and then handed over to the body-makers indicated by the purchaser. Being an expert driver, my firm sent me to drive in the Tourist Trophy races in the Isle of Man, and I likewise did the Ardennes Circuit and came in fourth in the Brescia race for the Florio Cup, my successes, of course, adding glory and advertisement to the car I drove. Racing, however, aroused within me, as it does in every motorist, an ardent desire to travel long distances. The testing of those chassis in Regent’s Park, and an occasional run with some wealthy customer out on the Great North road or on the Bath or Brighton roads, became too quiet a life for me. I was now seized by a desire to tour and see Europe. True, in my capacity of tester, I met all classes of men. In the seat beside me have sat Cabinet Ministers, Dukes, Indian Rajahs, Members of Parliament, and merchant princes, customers or prospective purchasers, all of whom chatted with me, mostly displaying their ignorance of the first principles of mechanics. It was all pleasant enough — a merry life and good pay. Yet I hated London, and the height of my ambition was a good car to drive abroad.
Media on the Move provides a critical analysis of the dynamics of the international flow of images and ideas. This comes at a time when the political, economic and technological contexts within which media organisations operate are becoming increasingly global. The surge in transnational traffic in media products has primarily benefited the major corporations such as Disney, AOL, Time Warner and News Corporation. However, as this book argues, new networks have emerged which buck this trend: Brazilian TV is watched in China, Indian films have a huge following in the Arab world and Al Jazeera has become a household name in the West. Combining a theoretical perspective on contra-flow of media with grounded case studies into one up-to-date and accessible volume, Media on the Move provides a much-needed guide to the globalization of media, going beyond the standard Anglo-American view of this evolving phenomenon.
The massive scale and complexity of international migration today tends to obscure the nuanced ways migrant families seek a sense of belonging. In this book, Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg takes readers back and forth between Cameroon and Germany to explore how migrant mothers—through the careful and at times difficult management of relationships—juggle belonging in multiple places at once: their new country, their old country, and the diasporic community that bridges them. Feldman-Savelsberg introduces readers to several Cameroonian mothers, each with her own unique history, concerns, and voice. Through scenes of their lives—at a hometown association’s year-end party, a celebration for a new baby, a visit to the Foreigners’ Office, and many others—as well as the stories they tell one another, Feldman-Savelsberg enlivens our thinking about migrants’ lives and the networks and repertoires that they draw on to find stability and, ultimately, belonging. Placing women’s individual voices within international social contexts, this book unveils new, intimate links between the geographical and the generational as they intersect in the dreams, frustrations, uncertainties, and resolve of strong women holding families together across continents.
Peoples on the Move provides pastors, church planters, and missionaries with the tools they need to walk out their door and learn the unique dynamics of their neighborhoods in order to formulate effective strategies for ministry. The book takes a practical approach and contains many examples of how the research is done as well as how community research translates to ministry strategy. It reads like one is walking the streets with the author as he apprentices a new generation of church planters and missionaries.
When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report: 'Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far'. It is now abundantly clear that Sacks has never stopped going . . . From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As he recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, as well as with a group of patients who would define his life, it becomes clear that Sacks's earnest desire for engagement has occasioned unexpected encounters and travels – sending him through bars and alleys, over oceans, and across continents. With unbridled honesty and humour, Sacks shows us that the same energy that drives his physical passions –bodybuilding, weightlifting, and swimming – also drives his cerebral passions. He writes about his love affairs, both romantic and intellectual, his guilt over leaving his family to come to America, his bond with his schizophrenic brother, and the writers and scientists – Thom Gunn, A. R. Luria, W. H. Auden, Gerald M. Edelman, Francis Crick – who influenced him. On the Move is the story of a brilliantly unconventional physician and writer – and of the man who has illuminated the many ways that the brain makes us human.
"This is the most comprehesive source of information on all the nomadic peoples of the world. Maps help you to locate these nomadic people groups, many of them unevangelized; black and white photographs enable you to visualize them, and people profiles and bibliographic data facilitate research." -- from back cover.
Psychoanalysis on the Move: The Work of Joseph Sandler provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of Sandler's contribution to the development of psychoanalysis. The contributors trace the development of the main themes and achievements of Sandler's work, in particular his focus on combining psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice.
This is a fascinating ethnography about young Khmer women moving to the city to work in the garment factories, in prostitution, and as street sellers. The author makes good use of new theoretical approaches in anthropology that focus on negotiation and creativity in situations of rapid change. The result is not only a welcome new book on post-war Cambodia but an important addition to the literature on women, migration, and labor in Southeast Asia and the world. —Judy Ledgerwood, Northern Illinois University Khmer Women on the Move offers a fascinating ethnography of young Cambodian women who move from the countryside to work in Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh. Female migration and urban employment are rising, triggered by Cambodia’s transition from a closed socialist system to an open market economy. This book challenges the dominant views of these young rural women—that they are controlled by global economic forces and national development policies or trapped by restrictive customs and Cambodia’s tragic history. The author shows instead how these women shape and influence the processes of change taking place in present-day Cambodia. Based on field research among women working in the garment industry, prostitution, and street trading, the book explores the complex interplay between their experiences and actions, gender roles, and the broader historical context. The focus on women involved in different kinds of work allows new insight into women’s mobility, highlighting similarities and differences in working conditions and experiences. Young women’s ability to utilize networks of increasing size and complexity allows them to move into and between geographic and social spaces that extend far beyond the village context. Women’s mobility is further expressed in the flexible patterns of behavior that young rural women display when trying to fulfill their own "modern" aspirations along with their family obligations and cultural ideals.
The field of organizational storytelling research is productive, vibrant and diverse. Over three decades we have come to understand how organizations are not only full of stories but also how stories are actively making, sustaining and changing organizations. This edited collection contributes to this body of work by paying specific attention to stories that are neglected, edited out, unintentionally omitted or deliberately left silent. Despite the fact that such stories are not voiced they have a role to play in organizational analysis. The chapters in this volume variously explore how certain realities become excluded or silenced. The stories that remain below the audible range in organizations offer researchers an access to study political practices which marginalise certain organisational realities whilst promoting others. This volume offers a further contribution by paying heed to silence and the processes of silencing. These silences influence the choice of issues on organisational agendas, the choice of audience(s) to which these discourses are addressed and the ways of addressing them. In exploring these relatively understudied terrains, Untold Stories in Organizations comprises an important contribution to the organizational storytelling space, opening paths for new trajectories in storytelling research.
'Liquid life’ is the kind of life commonly lived in our contemporary, liquid-modern society. Liquid life cannot stay on course, as liquid-modern society cannot keep its shape for long. Liquid life is a precarious life, lived under conditions of constant uncertainty. The most acute and stubborn worries that haunt this liquid life are the fears of being caught napping, of failing to catch up with fast moving events, of overlooking the ‘use by’ dates and being saddled with worthless possessions, of missing the moment calling for a change of tack and being left behind. Liquid life is also shot through by a contradiction: it ought to be a (possibly unending) series of new beginnings, yet precisely for that reason it is full of worries about swift and painless endings, without which new beginnings would be unthinkable. Among the arts of liquid-modern living and the skills needed to practice them, getting rid of things takes precedence over their acquisition. This and other challenges of life in a liquid-modern society are traced and unravelled in the successive chapters of this new book by one of the most brilliant and original social thinkers of our time.
