Kirjahaku

Could you forgive the murderer of your husband? Your mother? Your son?Families of murder victims are often ardent and very public supporters of the death penalty. But the people whose stories appear in this book have chosen instead to forgive their loved ones’ murderers, and many have developed personal relationships with the killers and have even worked to save their lives. They have formed a nationwide group, Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation (MVFR), to oppose the death penalty.MVFR members are often treated as either saints or lunatics, but the truth is that they are neither. They are ordinary people who have responded to an extraordinary and devastating tragedy with courage and faith, choosing reconciliation over retribution, healing over hatred. Believing that the death penalty is a form of social violence that only repeats and perpetuates the violence that claimed their loved one’s lives, they hold out the hope of redemption even for those who have committed the most hideous crimes.Weaving third-person narrative with wrenching first-hand accounts, King presents the stories of ten MVFR members. Each is a heartrending tale of grief, soul searching, and of the challenge to choose forgiveness instead of revenge. These stories, which King sets in the context of the national discussion over the death penalty debate and restorative versus retributive justice, will appeal not only to those who oppose the death penalty, but also to those who strive to understand how people can forgive the seemingly unforgivable.

In a vivid narrative that addresses the flaws in the American legal system, combined with painful accounts of the families of death row inmates, the author challenges readers to question the morality of a punishment that victimizes the families of the condemned.

The landscape of heritage on the African continent is the product of neoliberal economic and social interventions from the 1980s–2000s: the prevalence and influence of heritage NGOs; aid for cultural programmes contingent on government reforms; the use of national heritage policies and projects to signal ready capital; experiments in custodianship and private enterprise that balance conservation with consumerism; and so on. This Element synthesises literature from anthropology, archaeology, history, and geography to describe a significant period of heritage policy and discourse on the African continent – its historical situation, on-the-ground realities, and continuing legacies in the era of sustainable development and climate crises.

The landscape of heritage on the African continent is the product of neoliberal economic and social interventions from the 1980s–2000s: the prevalence and influence of heritage NGOs; aid for cultural programmes contingent on government reforms; the use of national heritage policies and projects to signal ready capital; experiments in custodianship and private enterprise that balance conservation with consumerism; and so on. This Element synthesises literature from anthropology, archaeology, history, and geography to describe a significant period of heritage policy and discourse on the African continent – its historical situation, on-the-ground realities, and continuing legacies in the era of sustainable development and climate crises.

Rachel King wrote the poems in City Walks upon returning to her hometown of Portland, Oregon, after over a dozen years of living away. Their "precise details wired to lively music and memorable images" (Mark Wagenaar) investigate a known place, witness gentrification, acknowledge death, and insist on the possibility of beauty and joy despite it all: "I have rarely been happier than walking miles / around my city, learning its history, / while watching people play out their needs" ("City Walks"). Full of devotion and intensity, these poems "call us to love a little more humbly, a little less selfishly" (Charity Gingerich).

Amber: From Antiquity to Eternity is a history of human engagement with amber across three millennia. The book vividly describes our conceptions, stories, and political and scholarly disputes about amber, as well as issues of national and personal identity, religion, art, literature, music and science. Rachel King rewrites amber’s history for the twenty-first century, tackling thorny ethical and moral questions regarding humanity’s relationship with amber in the past, as well our connection with it today. With Earth facing unprecedented challenges, amber – the natural time capsule, and preserver of key information about the planet’s evolutional history – promises to offer invaluable insights into what comes next.

It's 1967 in Kalapuya, a town on the Central Oregon Coast, and Jackson Ryder decides to build a second story onto his motel. His wife, Marilyn Ryder, doesn't want to take on more debt for an expansion. Their ongoing dispute prompts Marilyn to leave Jackson and stay with her friend Leah Tolman, a bakery owner and advocate for the Beach Bill, the legislation that will make all Oregon beaches public land. While Marilyn becomes an activist, her adolescent son Tim befriends an elderly lighthouse keeper Elliot Yager, who wants the public to stay off his beach. A novel about the pleasures and limits of solitude for five distinct and deeply human characters, centered around the passing of the Oregon Beach Bill-and published in time for the fifty-fifth anniversary of the historic legislation.

This book explores how objects, landscapes, and architecture were at the heart of how people imagined outlaws and disorder in colonial southern Africa. Drawing on evidence from several disciplines, it chronicles how cattle raiders were created, pursued, and controlled, and how modern scholarship strives to reconstruct pasts of disruption and deviance. Through a series of vignettes, Rachel King uses excavated material, rock art, archival texts, and object collections to explore different facets of how disorderly figures were shaped through impressions of places and material culture as much as actual transgression. Addressing themes from mobility to wilderness, historiography to violence, resistance to development, King details the world that raiders made over the last two centuries in southern Africa while also critiquing scholars’ tools for describing this world. Offering inter-disciplinary perspectives on the past in Africa’s southernmost mountains, this book grapples with conceptsrelevant to those interested in rule-breakers and rule-makers, both in Africa and the wider world.

This book explores how objects, landscapes, and architecture were at the heart of how people imagined outlaws and disorder in colonial southern Africa. Drawing on evidence from several disciplines, it chronicles how cattle raiders were created, pursued, and controlled, and how modern scholarship strives to reconstruct pasts of disruption and deviance. Through a series of vignettes, Rachel King uses excavated material, rock art, archival texts, and object collections to explore different facets of how disorderly figures were shaped through impressions of places and material culture as much as actual transgression. Addressing themes from mobility to wilderness, historiography to violence, resistance to development, King details the world that raiders made over the last two centuries in southern Africa while also critiquing scholars’ tools for describing this world. Offering inter-disciplinary perspectives on the past in Africa’s southernmost mountains, this book grapples with conceptsrelevant to those interested in rule-breakers and rule-makers, both in Africa and the wider world.