Uncle Henry and Benjamin visit Phyllis for Christmas. Phyllis is happy, but soon finds out that the real reason for the visit is related to the finding of the Devil's Scepter the summer before. With the help of her grandfather Philip Clark and the Chicago police, they race to stop a demon from entering the world using the old Chicago underground rail system.
Phyllis Clark just finished her junior year of high school, and more than anything else she wants to become a private detective like her grandfather. In hopes of changing her mind, her parents send her to visit her uncle who works for the California historical commission. Phyllis, her uncle and his handsome young assistant find an old pirate map which eventually leads them to the devil's scepter. The scepter is also sought by an artifacts dealer, and a demon, each of whom are more than willing to kill for them.
Meg Miller discovers a dead body in Darrow House just a few hours before the annual homes tour. It could be someone she knows. Of course, she's a suspect. She's the only other person in the house. But, why would a retired librarian, community volunteer, and widow strangle a prominent socialite? Detective Penny Crawford intends to get to the bottom of the crime, even if she has to interview Meg several times. Meg doesn't mind. She's willing to do surveillance, bake a batch of cranberry scones, or hide in a closet to help solve the murder. However, there's a bigger menace to the community, and Meg suspects it's centered in the mega-church at the edge of town. Will she be jailed as the murderer, hailed as the hero, or captured by the evil members of an organized crime ring? Follow Meg as she begins a series of adventures challenging her to embrace the technology of her cell phone, check out social media, and cozy up to local law enforcement.
You Strike a Woman, You Strike a Rock / Wathint' Abafazi, Wathint' Imbokotho is a bristling example of protest theatre making during the height of apartheid. Created in ensemble fashion in 1986 by director Phyllis Klotz in collaboration with performers Thobeka Maqhutyana, Nomvula Qosha and Poppy Tsira, this play stands as a contemporary South African classic. The play focuses on three central characters: Sdudla, Mambhele and Mampompo living and working in a Cape Town township trying to eke out a living in a racially, socially and economically unequal world. There are few work opportunities and there is a great deal of red tape to be self-sufficient. Men are glaringly absent from this world – working as cheap migrant labour in urban areas. Women have to undertake great risk to see their husbands and to try keep a semblance of family cohesiveness. Helicopters fly above and state security police surveil the area. The play shows how these women work miracles to ensure the survival and wellbeing of their families at all cost. Following the famous 1956 slogan of the South African woman's march against apartheid laws, this latest publication in 2021 is a testament to the contemporariness of this play. Its themes around gender activism and the need for gender parity remains as true today as it did fifty years ago. Fresh and full of life, this is an important historical document and will be a landmark play for high schools and students of theatre.
An honor killing is the cold-blooded murder of girls and women simply because they are female. Being born female in a shame-and-honor culture is, potentially, a capital crime; every girl has to keep proving that she is not dishonoring her family; even so, an innocent girl can be falsely accused and killed on the spot.Dr. Phyllis Chesler has been studying the nature of honor killings for the last fifteen years. During that time she has published four studies at Middle East Quarterly and is working on a fifth. While this barbaric custom is tribal in origin, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam have not tried to abolish it as a crime against God or humanity.Honor killings are also a family conspiracy, one in which women (mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers, mothers-in law), as well as men (fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, grandfathers) play a role. Those girls and women who manage to escape must live in hiding for the rest of their lives as their families will never stop coming after them.A girl's fertility and reproductive capacity is "owned" by her family, not by the girl herself. If a girl is even seen as "damaged goods," her fam¬ily-of-origin will be responsible for her care for the rest of her life. This is a killing offense. Her virginity belongs to her family and is a token of their honor. If she is not a virgin, the shame belongs to her family and they must cleanse themselves of it with blood; her blood. Most Westerners refuse to understand that this crime is not like western-style domestic violence and requires different approaches in terms of prevention, intervention, and prosecution.Honor killings (or femicide) is part of a shame-and-honor tribal culture as is gender apartheid. It is a human rights violation and cannot be justified in the name of cultural relativism, tolerance, anti-racism, diversity, or political correctness. As long as tribal groups continue to deny, minimize, or obfuscate the problem, and Western government and police officials accept their inaccurate versions of reality, women will continue to be killed for honor in the West.The battle for women's rights is central to the battle for Europe and for Western values. It is a necessary part of true democracy, along with freedom of religion, tolerance for homosexuals, and freedom of dissent. Here, then, is exactly where the greatest battle of the twenty-first century is joined.
Peter Jones is tricked into living in a place disguised as a cloud. He and twelve other children have been promised lives as super humans, and they do develop some amazing powers.Pete convinces his friends that the strange place is not really what it seems. However, they are trapped because they must take daily treatments to survive.Pete has overwhelming urges to help people on Earth even after he learns that it might destroy him. Some of his friends help him survive his forbidden trips. They also try to find out what is really going on before it is too late.Phyllis Roth Lewis was a teacher and writer. She earned degrees from Sterling College in Sterling, Kansas, and Texas Women's University in Denton, Texas. She passed away in 2009.Phyllis first published Trapped on a Cloud in 2000.
Margaret, you need a man in your life they said. You have to get out more they said. You've got to add some excitement to your life they said. So she added Clarke Ingram to her life -- her very own superman they called him, sight unseen. Then she abruptly disappeared.So what should her friends do now? After all it was on their advice she sought changes to her simple, uncluttered life. Is Clarke Ingram really a dream catch as Margaret had described him or is he a controller preying on unsuspecting older women?When they finally hear from her, it's only to learn of her involvement in one catastrophe after another. A near death in a swimming pool accident. A suspicious bus accident in South America. The disappearance of several more people. The forced care of two innocent children. Murder. Drugs. Ransom. Events none of them had ever thought would be a part of their lives.Margaret is caught in a labyrinth that only draws her deeper and deeper into a complicated chaos. All her friends can do is to jump in and help her find a way to come home -- no matter what.
Two women are murdered a decade apart in the same area of the prairies. No witnesses. No motives. A skid mark at the scene of one, the only clue.Mystery, romance and family are intertwined in this tale of greed, need and heartbreak set in the vast prairie region of southern Saskatchewan. It's the '60s. Corporations are buying farmland. Some farmers sell and find instant wealth. Some farmers don't sell and still prosper. Some farmers don't sell and die in the struggle to survive. Is love enough? A bitter old woman says no. A young man is determined to prove her wrong. Maisie, Glen and an innocent child are caught in the conflict.
Although it may shock you, I was conceived on a drafting board. It happened on a rainy day in the office of my architect, Monsieur Ernest Devolz, in the city of Fribourg in Switzerland. I appeared in the peaceful and prosperous year of 1912, in a chic faubourg outside the ramparts of a medieval town on Lake Neuch tel. Wealthy Parisian tourists sojourned in the hotel across from me, spending their days at their beach cabins and their evenings at the Casino-Theatre. The first automobiles passed in front of my gate on Avenue de la Gare and a Zeppelin dirigible floated silently over my rooftop. Savoring the warmth of that early summer in 1914, we were unaware that we were living in the calm before the storm of the Great War. Suddenly, the whole world was plunged into an abyss of death and destruction. Our newly-drafted soldiers took communion in the church, their rifles at their sides and to the sound of drums and bugles, marched off to defend our borders. How could a small, neutral country like ours, surrounded by nations at war, defend itself? Did those blaring air raid sirens mean a bomb was about to land on my roof...? Phyllis Pritchett de Martini brings a 110-year-old villa to life by giving it a voice of its own. The villa reveals its history through two wars, earthquakes, tornadoes, and three generations of the Swiss family who built it and the American family who bought it, abandoned and in disrepair, and restored it. The untimely death of the American husband puts his widow in a precarious position. With no income, should she sell the villa and return to the United States with her young son or continue with the restoration and invent a way to support her family. The spacious villa finds a new life as a Bed & Breakfast, an extension of an American university, a venue for Master Class opera, art classes, and a TV soap opera. The villa's amusing perspective of the human condition will delight readers as it passes through the industrial and digital revolutions, ending with the Corona Virus. Memoirs of a Mansion, in its authentic geographical setting in French-speaking Switzerland, shines a laser beam on a lesser-known area of Europe. Young adults who think history is boring will love this novel way of presenting it. Funny, factual, and wise, Memoirs of a Mansion is a thoroughly enjoyable read.
“My own use of the camera began in 1954 as I started to think about what a new building in New York – the Seagram building – could be. While in Rome during Easter, through the lens of a camera I had hardly used, I began to observe the quality of buildings: how they sat on the land, their articulation, and how architectural details related to a building as a whole.” – Phyllis Lambert This curiosity is a constant in the work of Phyllis Lambert, who has devoted her career to studying and engaging with the changing conditions of urban landscapes. In this collection of personal photographs taken over several decades during her daily routines, her travels, or at work, obser- vation turns into a quest to understand and reveal what might otherwise remain overlooked.
LETTERS TO A YOUNG FEMINIST is a visionary message from a leading feminist to the next generation of feminists. Phyllis Chesler discusses basic aspects of feminism, explains feminism’s relevance in a world that has taken it for granted and derided it, and helps the next generation reclaim feminism for itself. Chesler examines sisterhood, sex, families, motherhood, work, feminist heroism, and the economics of power, providing guidance to the generation to come.
Based on the real life of Bridget Mary Larkin, aka Tipperary Mary. We journey back to Ireland, to follow the story of a young girl, growing up without her father, who dies before she is born. At the age of 15, she finds the body of her stepfather, a man with a history of mental illness, who has hanged himself in the family home, leaving behind his natural daughter (Bridget's half-sister, Philomena). Following the death of her mother, Bridget finds love with a local lad, Bill. But when her brother - now head of the household - discovers the relationship, he stops it, threatening Bill - then beating and raping Bridget. Bill is forced to flee to England, while Bridget endures a terrible life at home at the hands of her brother. Finally, after giving birth to her brother's child at a single mother's institution, she has her child removed for adoption and she flees to England in search of Bill and a new life. She eventually tracks him down - and they fall into each other's arms. However, Bill is now married with a child of his own. They begin an affair, and she adopts his surname - but Bill, wracked with guilt, returns to his wife. Now pregnant with Bill's child, Bridget's drinking becomes worse. As her life spirals out of control - her daughter, Phyllis (named after her beloved young half-sister Philomena) is born. Bridget holds onto the child she has had with the love her life for as long as she can - but is finally forced to let her go. Will they ever meet again...?
