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Running in the Family Author: Michael Ondaatje ISBN-10: 0771098952 ISBN-13: 9780771098956 Published: 1993 Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
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Birds of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives Author: Richard Grimmett ISBN-10: 0691049106 ISBN-13: 9780691049106 Published: 1999-11-08 Publisher: Princeton University Press
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Book Description:
From the snowcapped Himalayas and the Indus valley, to the Ganges delta and the Sri Lankan forests, the Indian subcontinent is home to 13% of the world's species of birds and thousands of birders and ecotourists flock to the area every year. This field guide will be indispensable to those who wish to find and identify the many species of avifauna of the Indian subcontinent and environs.Featuring more than 150 color plates by eminent bird illustrators from Europe and India, it depicts all the known species in the region, ranging from the Himalayan Snowcock in the north to the Sri Lanka Spurfowl in the south. The plates include all relevant identifiable subspecies, as well as ages and sexes. It contains hundreds of range maps and the succinct text on the facing pages covers identification, voice, and distribution. Specially designed for use in the field, it is a compact version of the landmark A Guide to the Birds of India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, hailed on its publication as a "stunning book" that "advanced the cause of Indian birding by 20-30 years." With its modest price, small trim size, and sturdy, weather-resistant binding, this field guide is the one volume that every adventurous traveler to the Indian subcontinent must have.
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Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka Author: Adele Barker ISBN-10: 0807000612 ISBN-13: 9780807000618 Published: 2010-01-01 Publisher: Beacon Press
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Book Description:
A chronicle of life on the resplendent island, combining the immediacy of memoir with the vividness of travelogue and reportage Adele Barker and her son, Noah, settled into the central highlands of Sri Lanka for an eighteen-month sojourn, immersing themselves in the customs, cultures, and landscapes of the island—its elephants, birds, and monkeys; its hot curries and sweet mangoes; the cacophony of its markets; the resonant evening chants from its temples. They hear stories of the island’s colorful past and its twenty-five-year civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil Tigers. When, having returned home to Tucson, Barker awakes on December 26, 2004, to see televised images of the island’s southern shore disappearing into the ocean, she decides she must go back. Traveling from the southernmost coasts to the farthest outposts of the Tamil north, she witnesses the ravages of the tsunami that killed forty-eight thousand Sri Lankans in the space of twenty minutes, and reports from the ground on the triumphs and failures of relief efforts. Combining the immediacy of memoir and the vividness of travelogue with the insight of the best reportage, Not Quite Paradise chronicles life in a place few have ever visited.From the Trade Paperback edition.
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In My Mother's House: Civil War in Sri Lanka (The Ethnography of Political Violence) Author: Sharika Thiranagama ISBN-10: 0812243420 ISBN-13: 9780812243420 Published: 2011-09-21 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
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Book Description:
In May 2009, the Sri Lankan army overwhelmed the last stronghold of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam—better known as the Tamil Tigers—officially bringing an end to nearly three decades of civil war. Although the war has ended, the place of minorities in Sri Lanka remains uncertain, not least because the lengthy conflict drove entire populations from their homes. The figures are jarring: for example, all of the roughly 80,000 Muslims in northern Sri Lanka were expelled from the Tamil Tiger-controlled north, and nearly half of all Sri Lankan Tamils were displaced during the course of the civil war.Sharika Thiranagama's In My Mother's House provides ethnographic insight into two important groups of internally displaced people: northern Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Through detailed engagement with ordinary people struggling to find a home in the world, Thiranagama explores the dynamics within and between these two minority communities, describing how these relations were reshaped by violence, displacement, and authoritarianism. In doing so, she illuminates an often overlooked intraminority relationship and new social forms created through protracted war.In My Mother's House revolves around three major themes: ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement; transformations of familial experience; and the impact of the political violence—carried out by both the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan state—on ordinary lives and public speech. Her rare focus on the effects and responses to LTTE political regulation and violence demonstrates that envisioning a peaceful future for post-conflict Sri Lanka requires taking stock of the new Tamil and Muslim identities forged by the civil war. These identities cannot simply be cast away with the end of the war but must be negotiated anew.
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Bloody Shambles, Vol. 2: From the Defence of Sumatra to the fall of Burma Author: Christopher Shores ISBN-10: 0948817674 ISBN-13: 9780948817670 Published: 1993-06 Publisher: Grub Street Publishing
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Book Description:
This is the story of the Allied air campaign across Australia, Sumatra, Java, the Philippines, Burma and Ceylon during World War II. It documents the Allied underestimation of Japanese ability, and ends with the Japanese at the extremities of their advance.
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Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War Author: Mark Stephen Meadows ISBN-10: 1593762755 ISBN-13: 9781593762759 Published: 2010-04-27 Publisher: Soft Skull Press
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Book Description:
Armed with a map, a motorcycle, an infectious sense of humor, and a dim understanding of Sri Lanka’s war, author, artist, and adventurer Mark Stephen Meadows arrives in the country intending to have, as it were, afternoon tea with terrorists. Figuring that the first step to solving a problem is understanding it, he journeys north into the war zone, interviewing terrorists, generals, and heroin dealers along the way.He discovers an island of beauty and abundance ground down by three decades of war. As he travels north through Colombo, Kandy, and the damaged city of Jaffna, Meadows gives his riveting take on the war. Known for child conscription and drawn-out torture methods, he explains, the Tamil Tigers also invented suicide bombing and were the first to lace together terrorists and financiers into international networks of militant uprising.In Sri Lanka, Meadows discovers a deep view into an ancient culture. Along the way, he learns to trap an elephant, weave rope from coconut husks, and cast out devils, and he actually has tea with a few terrorists. This is the inspiring story of his journey and an enlightening meditation on the interconnectedness of globalization, the media, and modern terrorism.
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Buddhist Precept and Practice: Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon Author: Richard F. Gombrich ISBN-10: 8120807804 ISBN-13: 9788120807808 Published: 2008-01-15 Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
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Book Description:
When this book was first published in 1971, under the title Buddhist Precept and Practice, The Times Literary Supplement Wrote: This is an epoch-making piece of research which must mark a change in direction and appreciation if it is taken seriously and studied in details. Dr. Gombrich is concerned with religious change in belief and practice, not only in modern times but over the two and a half millennia during which Buddhism has flourished. He concludes that Sinhalese Buddhism has been remarkably conservative and rejects the assumption that it degenerated from an original high standard, by questioning whether it ever was as pure as a superficial reading of classical texts might suggest. It would be very difficult to provide a combination of scholarship and sympathy such as that which pervades Dr. Gombrich s book and makes it a landmark in the study of religion. Out of print for many years, the book is now republished corrected but substantially unchanged. Richard Gombrich has been Boden Professor of Sanskrit, Oxford University and Professor Fellow of Balliol College since 1976. He has published 8 books and about 40 articles, mostly on Buddhism. His most recent books are Theravada Buddhism: A social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo and Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka; the latter is intended to do for modern Sinhalese Buddhism in the cities what Precept and Practice did for its traditional manifestation in the countryside.
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Buddhism at Work: Community Development, Social Empowerment and the Sarvodaya Movement Author: George D. Bond ISBN-10: 1565491777 ISBN-13: 9781565491779 Published: 2003-12 Publisher: Kumarian Press
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Book Description:
*Continues the story of the Sarvodaya Movement begun in Joanna Macy’s Dharma and Development*Up-to-date information stems from ten years of scholarly and field research In one of the world’s most inspirational grassroots-development stories, Buddhism at Work outlines the vision and evolution of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement in Sri Lanka, as its members have sought to engage and awaken society with Buddhist and Gandhian ideals.Now an international movement and NGO, Sarvodaya calls for individuals and groups to achieve non-violent social transformation through cooperative work. Its vision and its voice are poised to contribute to the emerging global dialogue on peace, social justice, and community development. Buddhism at Work embraces a new hope for humanity.
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Tamil Tigress: My Story as a Child Soldier in Sri Lanka's Bloody Civil War Author: Niromi de Soyza ISBN-10: 1742375189 ISBN-13: 9781742375182 Published: 2012-05-01 Publisher: Allen & Unwin
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Book Description:
Two days before Christmas in 1987, at the age of 17, Niromi de Soyza found herself in an ambush as part of a small platoon of militant Tamil Tigers fighting government forces in the bloody civil war that was to engulf Sri Lanka for decades. With her was her lifelong friend, Ajanthi, also aged 17. Leaving behind them their shocked middle-class families, the teenagers had become part of the Tamil Tigers' first female contingent. Equipped with little more than a rifle and a cyanide capsule, Niromi's group managed to survive on their wits in the jungle, facing not only the perils of war but starvation, illness, and growing internal tensions among the militant Tigers. And then events erupted in ways that she could no longer bear.How was it that this well-educated, mixed-race, middle-class girl from a respectable family came to be fighting with the Tamil Tigers? Today she lives in Sydney with her husband and children; but Niromi de Soyza is not your ordinary woman and this is her compelling story.
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The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics (The World Readers) Author: ISBN-10: 0822349825 ISBN-13: 9780822349822 Published: 2011-04-13 Publisher: Duke University Press Books
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Book Description:
The Sri Lanka Reader is a sweeping introduction to the epic history of the island nation located just off the southern tip of India. The island’s recorded history of more than two and a half millennia encompasses waves of immigration from the South Asian subcontinent, the formation of Sinhala Buddhist and Tamil Hindu civilizations, the arrival of Arab Muslim traders, and European colonization by the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally the British. Selected texts depict perceptions of the country’s multiple linguistic and religious communities, as well as its political travails after independence in 1948, especially the ethnic violence that recurred from the 1950s until 2009, when the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam were defeated by the Sri Lankan government’s armed forces. This wide-ranging anthology covers the aboriginal Veddhas, the earliest known inhabitants of the island; the Kings of Kandy, Sri Lanka’s last indigenous dynasty; twenty-first-century women who leave the island to work as housemaids in the Middle East; the forty thousand Sri Lankans killed by the tsunami in December 2004; and, through cutting-edge journalism and heart-wrenching poetry, the protracted violence that has scarred the country’s contemporary political history. Along with fifty-four images of paintings, sculptures, and architecture, The Sri Lanka Reader includes more than ninety classic and contemporary texts written by Sri Lankans and foreigners.
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