New ebooks at Gleeson Library include a story from Donbas and Crimea and a call for “daily contact with vegetated environments.”
- Nature Is A Human Right: Why We’re Fighting for Green in a Grey World by Ellen Miles (1 user) From the author’s introduction: “To protect present and future generations, we must defend our right to have contact with nature. We can work away in fragments on the ground, scrabbling to save this bit of green space here or create that bit there, or we can fight together to turn the dial globally. Enshrining nature contact in international human rights law is the fastest, farthest-reaching way to do this. By recognizing contact with nature as a human right, we can stop governments and legislators from pursuing expedient policies at the expense of people’s welfare.”
- Grey Bees by Andrey Kurkov; translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk (3 users) From the author’s 2020 foreword to the English translation: “The protagonist of my book, Sergeyich — a disabled pensioner and devoted beekeeper — is one these “people of Donbas.” The winds of fate carry him down to Crimea, where he hopes to arrange a proper holiday for his bees. Sergeyich’s southern sojourn, however, proves to be an ordeal. Try as he might, Sergeyich cannot remain entirely neutral as he observes the constant oppression of the Crimean Tatars by the new authorities. His sympathy for these Muslim people arouses the suspicion of the Russian security service — the notorious FSB — and even more alarmingly endangers his beloved bees.” (First published in Russian in 2018)
Keep your eyes out for another voice from Ukraine, coming in print to the library soon:
Lucky Breaks by Yevgenia Belorusets, translated by Eugene Ostashevsky From the publisher’s website: “Out of the impoverished coal regions of Ukraine known as the Donbass, where Russian secret military intervention coexists with banditry and insurgency, the women of Yevgenia Belorusets’s captivating collection of stories emerge from the ruins of a war, still being waged on and off, ever since the 2014 Revolution of Dignity.” (published March 1, 2022)
For technical assistance in reading Ebooks, read our guide Using Ebooks.
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