Describing home for journalist Gulchehra Hoja is complicated. She's from western China, in the Xinjiang province. But as she tells NPR's Steve Inskeep, she considers the Uyghur region –which was formerly free – her native country. Her new memoir, A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs, navigates the difficult and often painful reality of growing up proud of her heritage but under a Chinese nationalist mindset – and doing work that she says eventually led to her family's arrest.
In the early 11th century, a group of merchants from the Amalfi Coast of Italy received permission from the Caliph of Egypt to rebuild a church and hospital in Jerusalem to care for pilgrims to the Holy Land.
They called themselves The Order of St. John of Jerusalem.
Fast forward almost one thousand years later, and this group still exist. Not only do they still exist, but they have a unique status in the world of international diplomacy.
Learn more about the Knights of Malta and their thousand-year history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Patrick Bringley worked in events planning at The New Yorker – until his older brother got diagnosed with cancer and passed away. That loss led to a reimagining of priorities for Bringley, who decided to seek solace in one of the most beautiful places he could think of: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His new memoir, All the Beauty in the World, retraces his journey to becoming a museum guard and finding refuge in the works of art he saw each day. And as he tells NPR's Scott Simon, he also encountered a lot of joy in watching the people who visited.
Beth Moore was raised in the Southern Baptist Convention. As an adult, she went on to become an evangelist, teaching Bible studies to women in arenas around the world. But as she recounts in her new memoir, All My Knotted-Up Life, she grew up feeling a deep shame – and surviving sexual abuse at home – that reached a breaking point with the surfacing of the Donald Trump "Access Hollywood" tape and the investigation into the SBC. As Moore tells NPR's Ayesha Rascoe, those events led her to eventually leave her denomination.
The critically acclaimed poet Camonghne Felix says that people going through breakups are not often treated with the same grace or generosity as those who've experienced self-harm or sexual assault. But in her new memoir, Dyscalculia, she explores the ways romantic pain and loss requires its own kind of grief – and the amount of honesty that it requires to truly heal from heartbreak. In today's episode, she tells NPR's Juana Summers about how she yearned for a book, written by a Black woman, that immersed itself in that process – and so she ended up having to write her own story.
