It is a stunning work: a complex tapestry of family tensions, baseball, politics and religion, by turns hilariously funny and agonizingly sad. Highly inventive formally, the novel is mainly narrated by Kincaid Chance, the youngest son in a family of four boys and identical twin girls, the children of Hugh Chance, a discouraged minor-league ballplayer whose once-promising career was curtained by an industrial accident, and his wife Laura, an increasingly fanatical Seventh-Day Adventist. The plot traces the working-out of the family's fate from the beginning of the Eisenhower years through the traumas of Vietnam.

    Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe's greatest philosopher, is on the brink of suicidal despair, unable to find a cure for the headaches and other ailments that plague him. When he agrees to treat Nietzsche with his experimental "talking cure", Breuer never expects that he, too, will find solace in their sessions. Only through facing his own inner demons can the gifted healer begin to help his patient.In When Nietzsche Wept, Irvin Yalom blends fact and fiction, atmosphere and suspense to unfold an unforgettable story about the redemptive power of friendship.

    These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style.These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.

    . . . His sentences are exquisitely constructed, suggesting the cyclic rhythms of his agrarian world."--New York Times Book Review.

    For speaking a few innocuous words in French to a white woman, Armstrong is killed. And the precariously balanced world and its determined people--white and black--are changed, then and forever, by the horror of poverty, the legacy of justice, and the singular gift of love's power to heal.

    Tarantino has won awards and accolades around the world, earned a devoted following among critics, actors, and audiences, and paved the way for a new generation of young filmmakers. Tarantino's directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, hit the screen with a freshness and brutal edge that left critics and audiences stunned. The story of a heist gone wrong, the film weaves a taut and menacing path, laced with bursts of absurd and unexpected humor, as an eccentric cast of urban outlaws attempts to identify the rat in their midst. The film established the groundbreaking aesthetic -- smart-ass, hard-edged, and ultravoilent -- that made Tarantino one of the most sought-after directors in the nation. As Newsweek wrote, "Reservoir Dogs leaves little doubt that you are in the presence of major league talent."

    In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.Contains:Car Crash While HitchhikingTwo MenOut on BailDundunWorkEmergencyDirty WeddingThe Other ManHappy HourSteady Hands at Seattle GeneralBeverly Home'

    At the heart of this story is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as Bone, a bastard child who observes the world around her with a mercilessly keen perspective. When her stepfather Daddy Glen, "cold as death, mean as a snake," becomes increasingly more vicious toward her, Bone finds herself caught in a family triangle that tests the loyalty of her mother, Anney—and leads to a final, harrowing encounter from which there can be no turning back.

    Galvin describes the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and the few people who do not possess but are themselves possessed by this terrain. In so doing he reveals an experience that is part of our heritage and mythology. For Lyle, Ray, Clara, and App, the struggle to survive on an independent family ranch is a series of blameless failures and unacclaimed successes that illuminate the Western character. The Meadow evokes a sense of place that can be achieved only by someone who knows it intimately.

    Read by the author.

    His beat is a rough New Jersey neighborhood where the drug murders blur together, until the day Victor Dunham — a twenty-year-old with a steady job and a clean record — confesses to a shooting outside a fast-food joint. It doesn't take long for Rocco's attention to turn to Victor's brother, a street-corner crack dealer named Strike who seems a more likely suspect for the crime. At once an intense mystery, and a revealing study of two men on opposite sides of an unwinnable war, Clockers is a stunningly well-rendered chronicle of modern life on the streets.

    It chronicles these events in a connected narrative, from the onset of the illness to reflections in the years after the death. The book is, most of all, a series of acts of understanding. The poems are impelled by a passion to know, and a freedom to follow wherever the truth may lead. The book goes into area of feeling and experience rarely entered in poetry.The ebullient language, the startling, far-reaching images, the sense of extraordinary connectedness seize us immediately. Sharon Olds transforms a harsh reality with truthfulness, with beauty, with humor--and without bitterness.The deep pain in The Father arises from a death, and from understanding a life. But there is joy as well. In the end, we discover we have been reading not a grim accounting but an inspiriting tragedy, transcending the personal. The radiance and daring that have always distinguished Sharon Old's work find here their most powerful expression.

    Named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, nominated for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award, and given the Lambda Award.

    . . a young woman who . . . rose from the dead to become, in ten driven years, the best - the most exciting and influential, the most ruthlessly original poet of her generation." -- John UpdikeOf the many American poets who reached her zenith in the last few decades, perhaps none looms so large as the legendary Sylvia Plath. Consummately crafted, Plath's poetry is stormy but luminous, sharp but poignant. This unique, compelling and intriguing recording has been heralded as "a significant tribute to and record of the lyric art that Sylvia Plath left to the literary heritage of America." (Booklist)Contents:The Ghost's LeavetakingNovember GraveyardOn the Plethora of DryadsThe Moon Was a Fat Woman OnceNocturneChild's Park StonesThe Earthenware HeadOn the Difficulty of Conjuring up a DryadGreen Rock--Winthrop BayOn the Decline of OraclesThe GoringOuijaThe Beggars of Benidorm MarketSculptorThe Disquieting MusesSpinsterParliament Hill FieldsThe StonesCandlesMushroomsBerck-plageThe Surgeon at 2 A.M.

    It was a "big country needing big men and women to live in it". This volume presents eight of L'Amour's ever-popular short stories - history that lives forever.©2014 Louis L'Amour and Jon Tuska (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

    With subjects ranging from the writer’s own “migrant childhood” to the need to protect what remains of the great western wilderness (which Stegner dubs “the geography of hope”) to poignant profiles of western writers such as John Steinbeck and Norman Maclean, this collection is a riveting testament to the power of place. At the same time it communicates vividly the sensibility and range of this most gifted of American writers, historians, and environmentalists.

    Whatever Tomorrow Brings begins with the Donovan family stepping off a clipper ship for a holiday from their missionary post in Hawaii. Tragedy meets them instead, and twenty-year-old Kaitlin must hold her family together in an unfamiliar land. The second part of the saga, As Time Goes By, turns to another branch of the family, the Taylors. Young Jeff Taylor has waited five years for a chance to apologize to Bobbie Bradford in person. Can their friendship be restored after his heartbreaking betrayal so long ago? Historically accurate and brimming with positive values, this series entertains readers with uplifting stories of life and love, faith and courage in the boomtown West.

    The storyline follows five teenagers (each a member of a different high school cliques) as they spend a Saturday in detention together and come to realize that they are all deeper than their respective stereotypes.

    Especially moving are his descriptions of his children, his wrenching account of the 1986 automobile accident that cost him his leg, and of the ensuing struggle for his spiritual and physical survival. Broken Vessels is a book that, in its scope and sympathy, its grace and courage, never fails to startle with the sudden impact of quiet truths, passionately felt and powerfully expressed.

    Across the border Mexico beckons—beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With two companions, he sets off on an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

    Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? Isn't the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected? In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many different, unexpected gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, and Hemingway's A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's Cannibalism in the Cars, a story that reveals a darker side to his humor (That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to...a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy). From Melville come the juxtaposed tales The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, of which Oates says, Only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction. From Flannery O'Connor we find A Late Encounter With the Enemy, and from John Cheever, The Death of Justina, one of Cheever's own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master. This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.

    The author of eight books of poetry and one collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, she has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction. She was named the next U.S. poet laureate in August 2003. Her most recent book is The Seven Ages. Louise Glück teaches at Williams College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

    Thus, Jimmy Huntington learns early how to survive on the land. Huntington is only seven when his mother dies, and he must care for his younger siblings. A courageous and inspiring man, Huntington hunts wolves, fights bears, survives close calls too numerous to mention, and becomes a championship sled-dog racer.

    We meet Arlene, Hanff's high-flying friend who's social life (and wardrobe) put Hanff's one-and-one-half room apartment and simple writer's life in perspective. We walk through Nina's garden, 16 stories up and witness famous New York rites of passage from the hysteria of St. Patrick's Day to Shakespeare's Garden and the neighbors who saved it, to block parties, with their 'sizzling Italian sausages and shish kebab and flossy plates of pate and brie,' all told in Hanff's inimitable style. We join Hanff as she flies to London to realize a lifetime dream at the Ambassador Theatre: opening night for the play, '84, Charing Cross Road.' And we witness the elegant Arlene as she meets and falls in love with a New York City cop.

    Tiny Lambert struggles to find security and happiness when her high school years are marred after her stepfather rapes her.

    Set in a diner where the food isn't very good and the ambience veers between heaven and hell, this bestselling novel from the author of Mama Day and The Women of Brewster Place is a feast for the senses and the spirit.

    An indictment of the American educational system criticizes the fact that the system has discarded the traditional goals of transmitting knowledge and fostering cognitive skills in favor of building self-esteem and promoting social harmony.

    Her daughter Fanny's stories of this busy place are a friendly and funny introduction to the delights of real restaurant life, and her recipes show how easy and inexpensive it is to make good food with basic ingredients and simple techniques. Opening up the magic world of cooking to children, Alice Waters describes, in the words of seven-year-old Fanny, the path food travels from the garden to the kitchen to the table. Teaching kids where food really comes from not just from the market but from farms and people who care about the earth, Fanny at Chez Panisse has lessons on the importance of eating with your hands, of garlic and of composting and recycling. It is also a delightful beginner's cookbook with 46 recipes that will tempt children into the desire to cook and eat with whole hearts, alert minds and all the senses. From banana milkshakes and green apple sherbet to cherry tomato pasta and black beans and sour cream, as well as spaghetti and meatballs, french fries and pizza, there is something here for every child to prepare and enjoy.

    But while he was gone on his travels, looking for God, Kate couldn't help herself, and began fiddling for her three children. For the love of music, Kate is willing to defy anyone who tries to stop her. From generation to generation, the gift and love of music cannot be stopped, and no Malone is immune from its spell.

    His famous boxes, with their ineffably perfect choice of elements -- the stuffed birds, the buttons and toys, the fragments of old theatrical posters, the poignant allusions to the worlds of the nineteenth-century ballet and opera -- are some of the most recognizable signatures in all of twentieth-century art.From this extended selection of his diaries and other written material, Cornell emerges as a deeply dedicated and conscious artist, though one whose personality was every bit as unusual as many had perceived. Cornell used his diaries as he used his boxes, to capture and preserve his passing feelings, his momentary urges, and his anguished hesitations. He was an incessant and brilliant recorder of his thoughts as he considered his art or traveled to New York to haunt the antiquarian bookstores and shops where he collected material for his boxes.We see here his deep immersion in French symbolist poetry and his intense interest in his surrealist contemporaries. We see also his plangent yearning for les sylphides, the fairies of the ballet world who seemed to be reincarnated for him in the form of waitresses, dancers, actresses, and shop girls in his own world. Cornell corresponded with an astonishing range of people including Parker Tyler, Marianne Moore, Tony Curtis, Robert Motherwell, and Susan Sontag. His letters were often sent in the form of collages, and several of them are reproduced in this book.

    While he has garnered acclaim as a novelist, Bellow's shorter works prove equally strong. Primarily set in a sepia-toned Chicago, characters (mostly men) deal with family issues, desires, memories, and failings--often arriving at humorous if not comic situations. In the process, these quirky and wholly real characters examine human nature. The narrative is straightforward, with deftly handled shifts in time, and the prose is concise, sometimes pithy, with equal parts humor and grace. In "Looking for Mr. Green," Bellow describes a relief worker sized up by tenants: "They must have realized that he was not a college boy employed afternoons by a bill collector, trying foxily to pass for a relief clerk, recognized that he was an older man who knew himself what need was, who had more than an average seasoning in hardship. It was evident enough if you looked at the marks under his eyes and at the sides of his mouth." This collection should appeal both to those familiar with Bellow's work and to those seeking an introduction. --Michael Ferch

    The remarkable novels presented here in this Library of America volume combine brilliant satire with a lingering affection for the men and women, who, as Lewis wrote of Babbitt, "want "to seize something more than motor cars and a house before it's too late.""Main Street (1920), Lewis's first triumph, was a phenomenal event in American publishing and cultural history. Lewis's idealistic, imaginative heroine, Carol Kennicott, longs "to get [her] hands on one of those prairie towns and make it beautiful," but when her doctor husband brings her to Gopher Prairie, she finds that the romance of the American frontier has dwindled to the drab reality of the American Middle West. Carol first struggles against and then flees the social tyrannies and cultural emptiness of Gopher Prairie, only to submit at last to the conventions of village life. The great romantic satire of its decade, Main Street is a wry, sad, funny account of a woman who attempts to challenge the hypocrisy and narrow-mindedness of her community."I know of no American novel that more accurately presents the real America," wrote H.L. Mencken when Babbitt appeared in 1922. "As an old professor of Babbittry I welcome him as an almost perfect specimen. Every American city swarms with his brothers. He is America incarnate, exuberant and exquisite."In the character of George F. Babbitt, the boisterous, vulgar, worried, gadget-loving real estate man from Zenith, Lewis fashioned a new and enduring figure in American literature—the total conformist. Babbitt is a "joiner," who thinks and feels with the crowd. Lewis surrounds him with a gallery of familiar American types—small businessman, Rotarians, Elks, boosters, supporters of evangelical Christianity. In biting satirical scenes of club lunches, after-dinner speeches, trade association conventions, fishing trips and Sunday School committees, Lewis reproduces the noisy restlessness of American commercial culture.In 1930 Sinclair Lewis was the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, largely for his achievement in Babbitt. These early novels not only define a crucial period in American history—from America's "coming of age" just before World War I to the dizzying boom of the twenties—they also continue to astonish us with essential truths about the country we live in today.

    Ben’s one-time best friend, Peter Aaron, begins to retrospectively investigate the transformation that led Ben from his enviable stable life, to one of a recluse. Both were once intelligent, yet struggling novelists until Ben’s near-death experience falling from a fire escape triggers a tumble in which he becomes withdrawn and disturbed, living alone and building bombs in a far-off cabin. That is, until he mysteriously disappears, leaving behind only a manuscript titled Leviathan, pages rustling in the wind.

    Richard Shelton first came to southeastern Arizona in the 1950s as a soldier stationed at Fort Huachuca. He soon fell in love with the region and upon his discharge found a job as a schoolteacher in nearby Bisbee. Now a university professor and respected poet living in Tucson, still in love with the Southwestern deserts, Shelton sets off for Bisbee on a not-uncommon day trip. Along the way, he reflects on the history of the area, on the beauty of the landscape, and on his own life. Couched within the narrative of his journey are passages revealing Shelton's deep familiarity with the region's natural and human history. Whether conveying the mystique of tarantulas or describing the mountain-studded topography, he brings a poet's eye to this seemingly desolate country. His observations on human habitation touch on Tombstone, "the town too tough to die," on ghost towns that perhaps weren't as tough, and on Bisbee itself, a once prosperous mining town now an outpost for the arts and a destination for tourists. What he finds there is both a broad view of his past and a glimpse of that city's possible future.Going Back to Bisbee explores a part of America with which many readers may not be familiar. A rich store of information embedded in splendid prose, it shows that there are more than miles on the road to Bisbee.

    Seasons is a lavish volume that ambles through the year with beauty and simplicity.

    In an age of conformity and innocence, the 19-year-old is tired of conventional virtue. Resisting her easy life, she yearns for meaning and beauty, profundity and mystery. Impulsive and adventurous, she attends a midnight meeting of the Klan, and then repelled, hurls herself into the civil rights movement.Half-conscious of her unmet needs and desires, she vacillates between the world of her family and that of her dreams, flirting with danger, pressing against the edge -- with disturbing and tragic consequences."To say that Ellen Gilchrist can write is to say that Placido Domingo can sing. All you need to do is listen." (The Washington Post)

    Widely regarded as one of the country's most important Native American poets, Ortiz has led a thirty-year career marked by a fascination with language—and by a love of his people. This omnibus of three previous works offers old and new readers an appreciation of the fruits of his dedication.Going for the Rain (1976) expresses closeness to a specific Native American way of life and its philosophy and is structured in the narrative form of a journey on the road of life. A Good Journey (1977), an evocation of Ortiz's constant awareness of his heritage, draws on the oral tradition of his Pueblo culture. Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land (1980)—revised for this volume—has its origins in his work as a laborer in the uranium industry and is intended as a political observation and statement about that industry's effects on Native American lands and lives. In an introduction written for this volume, Ortiz tells of his boyhood in Acoma Pueblo, his early love for language, his education, and his exposure to the wider world. He traces his development as a writer, recalling his attraction to the Beats and his growing political awareness, especially a consciousness of his and other people's social struggle. "Native American writers must have an individual and communally unified commitment to their art and its relationship to their indigenous culture and people," writes Ortiz. "Through our poetry, prose, and other written works that evoke love, respect, and responsibility, Native Americans may be able to help the United States of America to go beyond survival."

    Photos. National TV and radio coverage."

    James Hillman--controversial renegade Jungian psychologist, the man Robert Bly has called "the most lively and original psychologist we've had in America since William James"--joins with Michael Ventura--cutting-edge columnist for the L.A. Weekly--to shatter many of our current beliefs about our lives, the psyche, and society. Unrestrained, freewheeling, and brilliant, these two intellectual wild men take chances, break rules, and run red lights to strike at the very core of our shibboleths and perceptions.

    Photographs and text by Larry Sultan. Edited by Eric Himmel. Designed by Katy Homans, with Sayre Coombs.

    Myung Mi Kim's language is pure and commanding and brings us to a place of grieving we have needed to acknowledge" (Kathleen Fraser). In "Under Flag," winner of the 1991 Multicultural Publishers Book Award, Myung Mi Kim writes in a stark, unflinching voice that alternately drives to the core of painful subject matter and backs off to let beauty speak for itself: "Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they're told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching..." ("Body As One As History"). The cumulative effect is, according to Ammiel Alcalay, "a poetics which resists being neutralized or categorized."

    But when the gang is finally brought to justice and Mary bolts, Ethan can't seem to get the feisty reporter out of his dreams.Overjoyed to be back in New York with the story of a lifetime, Mary comes face-to-face with the gang's cunning leader who has escaped federal custody. Now Mary can only hope that the man who once attempted to save her will try again.Previously Titled: Wild Sweet EcstasyREVIEWS:"Goodman has a real flair…Witty dialogue, first-rate narrative prose, and clever plotting." ~Publishers WeeklyTHE DENNEHY SISTERS SERIES, in series order:Only My LoveMy Heart's DesireForever in My HeartAlways in My DreamsOnly in My ArmsTHE MARSHALL BROTHERS SERIES in order:Her Defiant HeartHis Heart's RevengeTHE THORNE BROTHERS TRILOGY, in series order:My Steadfast HeartMy Reckless HeartWith All My Heart

    It's a pedestrian's world, where the streets are clean, the employees are friendly, and the trains run on time. All of its elements are themed, presented in a consistent architectural, decorative, horticultural, musical, even olfactory tone, with rides, shows, restaurants, scenery, and costumed characters coordinated to tell a consistent set of stories. It is beguiling and exasperating, a place of ambivalence and ambiguity. In Vinyl Leaves Professor Fjellman analyzes each ride and theater show of Walt Disney World and discusses the history, political economy, technical infrastructure, and urban planning of the area as well as its relationship with Metropolitan Orlando and the state of Florida.Vinyl Leaves argues that Disney, in pursuit of its own economic interests, acts as the muse for the allied transnational corporations that sponsor it as well as for the world of late capitalism, where the commodity form has colonized much of human life. With brilliant technological legerdemain, Disney puts visitors into cinematically structured stories in which pieces of American and world culture become ideological tokens in arguments in favor of commodification and techno-corporate control. Culture is construed as spirit, colonialism and entrepreneurial violence as exotic zaniness, and the Other as child.Exhaustion and cognitive overload lead visitors into the bliss of Commodity Zen—the characteristic state of postmodern life. While we were watching for Orwell, Huxley rode into town, bringing soma, cable, and charge cards—and wearing mouse ears. This book is the story of our commodity fairyland.

    Widely acclaimed as the country’s foremost philosopher, the first of its psychologists, and a champion of religious pluralism, his influence on American thought is as strong now as it has ever been.James’s emphasis on the creative power of faith, will, and action, his opening up of philosophy to the fresh air of ordinary experience, his fascination with alternative forms of belief and states of consciousness, and his impatience with dogmas of any kind all make him a defender of individual experience and earn him a place beside Emerson and Whitman as an exponent of American democratic culture.Psychology: Briefer Course (1892) is far more than a shortened version of his monumental Principles of Psychology. It significantly revises parts of the earlier work and adds important new materials. (Students liked to call the longer book “James” and the shorter one “Jimmy.”) James’s new psychology moved away from discussions of the soul, morality, and logic, and focused instead on instinct, will, and the importance of action and habit. Passages comparing human consciousness to “a wonderful stream” inspired the “stream of consciousness” in the future work of Joyce, Woolf, and Gertrude Stein, a student of James’s at Harvard.The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897) advances the argument that each of us has the right to believe in hypotheses that are not susceptible to proof, and that such beliefs might actually change the world. The conversational style of theses essays reflects their origin in public lectures, as well as James’s conviction that truth can be discovered as much in the course of everyday life as in the activities of science or of philosophical speculation.Talks to Teachers and to Students (1899), also drawn from lectures, helped transform the emerging science of education. Here James applies his new psychology to classroom theory and conduct, especially for the primary grades. This immensely influential book has never gone out of print. It emphasizes the role in learning of instinct, play, and habit, along with the importance of engaging the voluntary interests of students. James’s warm and sympathetic nature informs his treatment of children, who can best be taught by those who respect the child’s autonomy and who avoid what he calls “hammering in.”“Human Immortality” (1897) defends the possibility of life after death; eight more of James’s most important essays round out this volume devoted to a writer called by John Dewey, “almost a Columbus of the inner world.”

    The fifteen pieces collected here range from the history of the Salman Rushdie affair to the dream of Atlantis, from the turf wars among ethnographic filmmakers to the unlikely romance between poetry and espionage, from the pilgrims in Plymouth to the students in Tiananmen Square. Above all, Weinberger's concern is poetry––whether written in medieval Baghdad or by Mexicans in Japan––and the perennially underground yet global network through which it travels. With his modernist sensibility and internationalist perspective, Weinberger's inventive prose transports old myths and texts to the strange realities of contemporary life.

    But a lot's happened since then, and he's in the mood to discuss it all, in the inimitable style that's made him the most popular social commentator to tickle people AND tick them off. From being PC to watching MTV, from rednecks to black militants, from singing the praises of the South to sounding off on the problems of just about everywhere else, nothing and nobody escapes when Grizzard shoots from the lip...and hits the "nekkid" truth every time.

    Arranged chronologically and containing many pieces restored to the form in which Twain intended them to appear, the volumes show with unprecedented clarity the literary evolution of Mark Twain over six decades of his career.The nearly two hundred separate items in this volume cover the years from 1852 to 1890. As a riverboat pilot, Confederate irregular, silver miner, frontier journalist, and publisher, Twain witnessed the tragicomic beginning of the Civil War in Missouri, the frenzied opening of the West, and the feverish corruption, avarice, and ambition of the Reconstruction era. He wrote about political bosses, jumping frogs, robber barons, cats, women’s suffrage, temperance, petrified men, the bicycle, the Franco-Prussian War, the telephone, the income tax, the insanity defense, injudicious swearing, and the advisability of political candidates preemptively telling the worst about themselves before others get around to it.Among the stories included here are “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which won him instant fame when published in 1865, “Cannibalism in the Cars,” “The Invalid’s Story,” and the charming “A Cat’s Tale,” written for his daughters’ private amusement. This volume also presents several of his famous and successful speeches and toasts, such as “Woman—God Bless Her,” “The Babies,” and “Advice to Youth.” Such writings brought Twain immense success on the public lecture and banquet circuit, as did his controversial “Whittier Birthday Speech,” which portrayed Boston’s most revered men of letters as a band of desperadoes.“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand,” he once wrote. A master of deadpan hilarity, a storyteller who fashioned an exuberant style rooted in the idiom of his western origins, and an enemy of injustice who used scathing invective and subtle satire to expose the “humbug” of his time, Twain, like Franklin, Whitman, and Lincoln, helped shape the American language into a unique democratic idiom that was to be heard around the world.The publishing history of every story, sketch, and speech in this volume has been thoroughly researched, and in each instance the most authoritative text has been reproduced. This collection also includes an extensive chronology of Twain’s life, helpful notes on the people and events referred to in his works, and a guide to the texts.

    Explored are the many tales of an ancient race said to have lived in the Arctic regions, such as Thule and Hyperborea. Progressing onward, the book looks at modern polar legends: including the survival of Hitler, German bases in Antarctica, UFOs, the hollow earth, and the hidden kingdoms of Agartha and Shambhala. Chapters include: Prologue in Hyperborea; The Golden Age; The Imperishable Sacred Land; The Northern Lights; The Arctic Homeland; The Aryan Myth; The Thule Society; The Black Order; The Hidden Lands; Agartha and the Polaires; Shambhala; The Hole at the Pole; Antarctica; Arcadia Regained; The Symbolic Pole; Polar and Solar Traditions; The Spiritual Pole; The Catastrophists; The Uniformitarians; Polar Wandering; more.

    A user-friendly format supplies all the information you need to compare, select, and prepare foods - so that you know you are buying the best for you and your family.Every food entry provides:• Latest Findings on the links between foods & disease prevention• Nutritional Profiles showing calories, carbohydrates, protein, fats, fiber, and key vitamins & minerals• Comprehensive Listings of different types and varieties• Shopping Tips for choosing the freshest foods - and when/where they're available• Best Storage Methods to preserve taste and nutritional value• Cooking & Preparation Tips for retaining a food's nutrients• Creative Serving Suggestions that include delicious new ideas along with healthier ways to prepare traditional dishesColor photographs, charts, cooking glossary, complete nutritional directory, and hundreds of tips, shortcuts & food facts.

    Less fortunate than these few were West Coasters such as Sonny Criss, Harold Land, Curtis Counce, Carl Perkins, Lennie Niehaus, Roy Porter, Teddy Edwards, Gerald Wilson, and those others whose careers languished without achieving either a later revival or even an early brief taste of fame. Certainly some West Coast jazz players have been awarded a central place in jazz history, but invariably they have been those who, like Charles Mingus or Eric Dolphy, left California for Manhattan. Those who stayed behind were, for the most part, left behind. The time has come for a critical re-evaluation of this body of work. With more than forty years of perspective--since modern jazz came to California-we can perhaps now begin to make sense of the rich array of music presented there during those glory years. But to do so, we need to start almost from scratch. We need to throw away the stereotypes of West Coast jazz, reject the simplifications, catchphrases, and pigeonholings that have only confused the issue. So many discussions of the music have begun by asking, "What was West Coast jazz?"--as if some simple definition would answer all our questions. And when no simple answer emerged--how could it when the same critics asking the question could hardly agree on a definition of jazz itself?--this failure was brandished as grounds for dismissing the whole subject. My approach is different. I start with the music itself, the musicians themselves, the geography and social situation, the clubs and the culture. I tried to learn what they have to tell us, rather than regurgitate the dubious critical consensus of the last generation. Was West Coast jazz the last regional style or merely a marketing fad? Was there really ever any such thing as West Coast jazz? If so, was it better or worse than East Coast jazz? Such questions are not without merit, but they provide a poor start for a serious historical inquiry. I ask readers hoping for quick and easy answers to approach this work with an open mind and a modicum of patience. Generalizations will emerge; broader considerations will become increasingly clear; but only as we approach the close of this complex story, after we have let the music emerge in all its richness and diversity. By starting with some theory of West Coast jazz, we run the risk of seeing only what fits into our theory. Too many accounts of the music have fallen into just this trap. Instead, we need to see things with fresh eyes, hear the music again with fresh ears.

    James Dean: Little Boy Lost, by Hyams, Joe with Jay Hyams

     La Brava, Cat Chaser, and Split Images received rave reviews and make it clear why this New York Times bestselling author has been hailed coast to coast as the hottest thriller writer of our time.

    

    These sometimes overlooked presences are wonderfully alive in this collection of lyric poems, which first appeared in 1992. Now back in print, "Hotel Lautreamont" underscores Ashbery's ability to be both tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal. As David Herd observed in "New Statesman and Society," this is "a poetry fully and startlingly engaged with the way things happen."

    Geiss is the most dedicated fourth-grade teacher imaginable. She goes to extraordinary lengths to make sure her students are presented with every opportunity—showing them slides from her summer vacations during Geography, reading to them from the classics of children’s literature after lunch, and providing them with the kinds of learning rewards that they will truly respond to—bite-sized nuggets of human flesh. Because Ms. Geiss’ students are pint-sized zombies, and the main tool of her peculiar version of the teaching trade is her trusty Remington .30-06 rifle. Ms. Geiss is firm but fair, and keeps a disciplined classroom. She has far more trouble from the adults shambling through what’s left of town than she does from her students, though a well-bulldozed killing field and the gasoline-filled moat encircling the school usually keeps the worst of the undead marauders at bay. But even the hardest working educators let their guard down sometimes, and after the Tribulations, just one mistake can mean school’s out forever. Bestselling, acclaimed author Dan Simmons’ story “This Year’s Class Picture” is a zombie tale that could itself be described as best in class, honored by the Stoker, Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards.

    Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made" (The New Republic), Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now, with exactly one hundred volumes to choose from, there is a perfect gift for everyone.

    Equilibrium between these worlds is achieved only through human feeling, through language. Samaras examines the commonality of experience in diverse international settings—from Byzantium to the cathedrals of technology in the modern cities of America. His language extols the primary delight and purpose of poetry: the music and inventiveness of language, wholly new and transformed, language that is both ancient and modern. Through an intensely personal and visual approach, these poems reveal our lives to us for time to come.  Nicholas Samaras was born in Foxton, Cambridgeshire, England, in 1954. He was raised there and in Woburn, Massachusetts, and later settled in New York. Samaras received his undergraduate degree from Hellenic College, Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1978 and a Masters of Fine Arts in 1985 from Columbia University. He is currently working on his Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Denver. His poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, Poetry, and American Scholar. Among his honors and awards are a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1986, a Taylor Fellowship for study abroad in 1981-82, and a prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1983.

    In this groundbreaking book, Michele Weiner-Davis gives straightforward, effective advice on preventing divorce and how couples can stay together instead of coming apart.Using case histories to illustrate her marriage-enriching, divorce-preventing techniques, which can be used even if only one partner participates, Weiner-Davis shows readers: * How to leave the past behind and set attainable goals * Strategies for identifying problem-solving behavior that works—and how to make changes last * "Uncommon-sense" methods for breaking unproductive patterns Inspirational and accessible, Divorce Busting shows readers in pain that working it out is better than getting out.

    The Field Guide brings together 600 commentaries on specific symbols by over 100 archaeologists, researchers, and Native American informants. Covers the northern states of Mexico to Utah and from California to Colorado.

    This huge oratorio of a novel unfolds over seven days in the life of Joubert Jones, an aspiring playwright making ends meet tending bar at his Aunt Eloise's Night Lounge. A Rabelaisian cast of characters and a Shakespearean range of voices crowd the pages of this book, an infinitely rich and suggestive tapestry of Black-American life and identity.

    Her subjects are various––poetics, the imagination, politics, spirituality, other writers––and her approach independent minded and richly complex. Here in a single volume are recent essays exploring new ground broken by Levertov in the past decade as well as the finest and most useful prose pieces from The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave (1981). This is a book to read and reread. With their combination of sensitivity and practicality, the New Selected Essays will prove enormously helpful to the writer and reader of poetry. As Kirkus Reviews remarked about her prose: "This is humanism in its true sense––her attitude as evidenced (not described) by her writing is such that the reader cannot help but experience life, at least temporarily, with more intensity, joy, and imagination."

    40,000 first printing.

    Who Built America? is about working Americans -- artisans, servants, slaves, farm families, laborers, women working in the home, factory hands, and office clerks -- who played crucial roles in shaping modern America: what they thought, what they did, and what happened to them.The central focus of this two-volume history of the United States is the changing nature of the work that built, sustained, and transformed American society over the course of almost four centuries. It depicts the ways working people affected and were affected by the economic, social, cultural, and political processes that together make up the national experience. The result is a path-breaking integration of the history of community, family, gender roles, race, and ethnicity into the more familiar history of U.S. politics and economic development.Volume One takes the reader through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the great railroad strike of 1877. Volume Two continues the story from the expansion of industrial capitalism during the Gilded Age and the rise of movements of opposition, through the decades of world war, depression, and industrial unionism, to the dramatic growth of U.S. military and economic power in the postwar era and the continuing struggle over the meaning of America in the contemporary era.

    Drawing on a number of current literary theories (but avoiding most of their jargon), Attebery makes a case for fantasy as a significant movement within postmodern literature rather than as a simple exercise of nostalgia. Attebury examines recent and classic fantasies by Ursula K. Le Guin, John Crowley, J.R.R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, and Gene Wolfe, among others. In both its popular and postmodern incarnations, fantasic fiction exhibits a remarkable capacity for reinventing narrative concentions. Attebery shows how plots, characters, settings, storytelling frameworks, gender divisions, and references to cultural texts such as history and science are all called into question the moment the marvelous is admited into a story.

    But how do we save these recipes from obscurity when they are not handed down by grandparents? In Back to Square One Goldstein aims to get us back in touch with our food heritage. Illustrated.

    He loves her more, while she shoves him aside and devotes her attention to their son.

    Eleven-year-old Clara's life is enriched by her friendship with the vibrant Nettie, whose family is so different from her own, but then a serious brain condition threatens to change Nettie forever.

    It's a quirky cultural history, social satire with a twist. Here are letters of congratulation-to newly elected Ronald Reagan ("This is my dream come true!") and letters of outrage-to Pepsi ("Take the Madonna commercial off the air!"). Letters filled with fresh ideas-proposing to Swanson a "Fit for a President Microwave Dinner" series, including the Jimmy Carter Camp David Accord Style Fried Chicken and Grits. And letters of advice-how Coca-Cola should handle the "pubic hair in the can of Coke" reference during the Thomas hearings.And the best part: the replies.CITIZEN LAZLO! Over 100 new letters. We missed you. 61,000 copies in print.

    Contributors to the text include William Burroughs and Timothy Leary.

    Together the two give solid definition to a body of poetic work that must be accounted among the finest in English of our time. Of James Merrill, the critic Harold Bloom has said, "He is indisputably a verse artist comparable to Milton, Tennyson and Pope. Surely he will be remembered as the Mozart of American poetry, classical rather than mannerist or baroque, master of the changing light or perfection that consoles."

    " Grace Paley is a poet of great whimsy and wisdom. She is a teller of proverbs, she is funny and poignant, a writer of great power and great delicacy. She is one of our finest - and most original - poets. I love reading her" -Gerald Stern.

    Thoreau, Lewis Hyde gathers thirteen of Thoreau's finest short prose works and, for the first time in 150 years, presents them fully annotated and arranged in the order of their composition. This definitive edition includes Thoreau's most famous essays, "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking," along with lesser-known masterpieces such as "Wild Apples," "The Last Days of John Brown," and an account of his 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin, an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror.Hyde diverges from the long-standing and dubious editorial custom of separating Thoreau's politics from his interest in nature, a division that has always obscured the ways in which the two are constantly entwined. "Natural History of Massachusetts" begins not with fish and birds but with a dismissal of the political world, and "Slavery in Massachusetts" ends with a meditation on the water lilies blooming on the Concord River.Thoreau's ideal reader was expected to be well versed in Greek and Latin, poetry and travel narrative, and politically engaged in current affairs. Hyde's detailed annotations clarify many of Thoreau's references and re-create the contemporary context wherein the nation's westward expansion was bringing to a head the racial tensions that would result in the Civil War.

    In this collection of his speeches, opinions, and letters, Richard Posner reveals the fullness of Holmes' achievements as judge, historian, philosopher, and master of English style. Thematically arranged, the volume covers a rich variety of subjects from aging and death to themes in politics, personalities, and law. Posner's substantial introduction firmly places this wealth of material in its proper biographical and historical context."A first-rate prose stylist, [Holmes] was perhaps the most quotable of all judges, as this ably edited volume shows."—Washington Post Book World"Brilliantly edited, lucidly organized, and equipped with a compelling introduction by Judge Posner, [this book] is one of the finest single-volume samplers of any author's work I have seen. . . . Posner has fully captured the acrid tang of him in this masterly anthology."—Terry Teachout, National Review"Excellent. . . . A worthwhile contribution to current American political/legal discussions."—Library Journal"The best source for the reader who wants a first serious acquaintance with Holmes."—Thomas C. Grey, New York Review of Books

    This place can exist for everyone in her own home with a little imaginative decorating.

    Here is the final book in the hilarious and often moving saga of the slightly bent working-classs American family, the Loops.

    In addition to analyzing his major texts, these chapters provide insight on Hemingway's relationship with gender history, journalism, fame, and the political climate of the 1930s. Contributors include both the most distinguished established figures and brilliant newcomers, all chosen with regard to the clarity and readability of their prose.

    Rozin traces each food as she tells how they were transported to the Old World, integrated there into existing cuisines, and then returned to America. (To be published March '92.)

    America's inglorious exit from Vietnam, the increasingly desperate actions of counterculture protest groups, the rise of repressive CIA operations, the commodification of the American way—all this and more is captured here in Brossard's inimitable style.That style discards realism in favor of a free-form fiction that mixes French surrealism and theatrical absurdity with Beat improvisation and performance art confrontation. Brossard's avalanche of language is outrageous. A kind of verbal delirium possesses the text, which on one level may be the collective fantasy lives of a countercultural group in Paris; on another, the psychotic outpourings of a woman named Decca Aldridge; on yet another, a script by impresario Socks Peelmunder for a guerrilla theater performance; and on the final level, the gamy underside of America's subconscious—a terrifying lava flow of provincial prejudices, racial fears, political paranoia, and sexist attitudes all speaking in tongues in a desperate attempt to bolt the door against the return of the repressed. Not since Naked Lunch has the American dream been assaulted with such ferocious verbal energy. "Great but messy fun awaits the nimble and not-too-fastidious reader of what is undoubtedly—along with Robert Coover's The Public Burning and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow—one of the last mad epics of the West. . . . Very much of its moment, the last thrashing throes of the Cold War mentality at its irrational peak, the book doesn't 'date' but instead appears at exactly the right time for that period to be shudderingly memorialized, an object lesson for the New World Order. It would be a shame to miss it." (Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune 7-19-92) "Brossard is genuinely a subversive of the official order in a way only a handful of American writers in this century have been. He has never bothered with the reproduction of reality in his novels, but through absurdity, vulgarity and the literary effort of speaking in dozens of tongues, he has captured the surreal, secret history of the past forty years in America. Just open your ears and Brossard will pour the voices in." (Michael Perkins 1-11-93) "Flotsam and jetsam of pop culture, snatches of his other books, goony puns, ruminations on art and literature and the 'utter . . . impossibility of a really progressive opposition in America,' stylized writing seminar prose jammed up to gritty noir realism . . . it's all . . . together in a principled disorder." (New York Press June 10-16 92) "The heavy profanity here will offend some readers, but the picaresque brilliance reminiscent of Pynchon, Bukowski, and Joyce will delight many others. Highly recommended." (Library Journal 2-15-92)

    Many writers have argued that it represented the turning point of the Civil War, after which Confederate fortunes moved inexorably toward defeat. Successive generations of historians have not exhausted the topic of leadership at Gettysburg, especially with regard to the first day of the battle. Often overshadowed by more famous events on the second and third days, the initial phase of the contest nevertheless offers the most interesting problems of leadership.In this collection of essays, the contributors examine several controversial aspects of leadership on that opening day including Lee's strategy and tactics, the conduct of Confederate corps commanders Richard S. Ewell and A.P. Hill, Oliver Otis Howard's role on the Union side, and a series of notable debacles among Lee's brigadiers. Drawing on a range of sources, the authors combine interpretation and fresh evidence that should challenge readers to reconsider their understanding of the vents of July 1, 1863.

    John Baeder's passionate interest in diners, his paintings of them and his anecdotal recollections of diner food, diner lore, and diner people capture a uniquely American roadside institution.

    DeVries' book covers arms, the introduction of armor, gunpowder, the use of fortifications, and naval weaponry, and does so while showing how medieval military technology is connected in broader ways to medieval society.

    Their tiny weatherbeaten house, nestled in a bend of Choteau Creek on the rolling South Dakota prairie, is where he grew up, and this moving reminiscence recreates with warmth and candor a childhood poor in material goods but overflowing with spiritual wealth. "Much has been written," says the author, "by and about Native American people who are active in political and social movements, and much has been said about the appalling conditions of reservation life. This book is about the common, quiet people who never make the headlines or find their names in print. They are the backbone of the reservations, the ones who pass on the values that make Native American what they are. This story of my grandparents reminds us that there is a spirit in people which enables them to rise above the potential devastation of poverty and racism into a life marked by humor and laughter, one that radiates love and kindness."

    1992 1st edition hardcover

    Includes historical details about each outfit.

    But until now, the ten days prior to that event have remained in relative obscurity. In Before Antietem, John Michael Priest offers the first book-length, tactical exploration of the Maryland campaign and the Battles of South Mountain, describing the decisive events leading up to the famous battle and elevating them from mere footnote status to a matter of military record. Chronicling Robert E. Lee's turnabout from defensive maneuvres to full scale Confederate invasion into Maryland, Priest demonstrates how this tactical change brought about a series of engagements near Sharpsburg, Maryland that came to be known as The Battle of South Mountain in which the Federal and Confederate forces struggled fiercely over Union territory. It was here that George B. McClellan, the new Northern commander, led his Army of the Potomac to its first victory over Lee in a furious action that produced one of the war's few successful bayonet charges. Written from the perspective of the front line combatants (and civilian observers), the book recounts the Confederate invasion and the Federal pursuit into Sharpsburg that set the stage for Antietam. From September 5-15, a total of twenty-five skirmishes and three pitched battles were fought. Priest provides graphic descriptions of the terrible conditions surrounding these events and so thoroughly enters into the common soldier's viewpoint that military history quickly gives way to gritty realism. He vividly shows that, had Robert E. Lee not been bested at the gaps along South Mountain, there would have been no Antietam. Lee's decision to make a stand along Antietam Creek was a point of pride--he had never been whipped before and would not return to Virginia defeated. That decision was a fateful one, since the sparring and fighting drove him into an untenable position that became his downfall. Priest's revealing narrative establishes that, at this stage of the Civil War, the Federal cavalry was better equipped and just as well trained as the Confederate cavalry thereby settling a point of debate among historians. Scholars and Civil War buffs alike will applaud the efforts of John Michael Priest in bringing us the means to view those devastating encounters from a true military perspective.

    Whether describing a Union soldier's theft of her Christmas cakes, the discovery of a human foot in her garden, or the death of her daughter, her story of the Civil War at home is compelling and disturbing. Her tremendous determination and unyielding spirit is a testimony to a woman's will to preserve her family.

    In middle age, with three grown children, she began to study painting and photography, set up a portrait studio on New York's Fifth Avenue, and became one of the finest and best-known portraitists and photographic artists of her day. 116 illustrations.

    . . that I swear . . . there is not in the world a better nation." Yet wave after wave of European arrivals sought to wipe those nations from the earth.By what right did one race seize the land belonging to another and subjugate its people? Distinguished jurist and Native rights advocate Thomas Berger surveys the history of the Americas since their "discovery" by Europeans and examines how the colonizing powers wrestled with the moral issues. Accounts of the slaughter and disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples throughout North, Central, and South America reveal a searing pattern of almost unimaginable duplicity and inhumanity. Five centuries later, Native Americans still embrace ancient values and cultural ways. Berger recounts this tenacious struggle to defy the odds and re-emerge as distinct cultures.

    There has always been a profound interest in the subject, and specifically of Blacks' participation in and reactions to the war and the war's outcome. Almost 200,000 African-American soldiers fought for the Union in the Civil War. Although most were illiterate ex-slaves, several thousand were well educated, free black men from the northern states. The 129 letters in this collection were written by black soldiers in the Union army during the Civil War to black and abolitionist newspapers. They provide a unique expression of the black voice that was meant for a public forum. The letters tell of the men's experiences, their fears, and their hopes. They describe in detail their army days--the excitement of combat and the drudgery of digging trenches. Some letters give vivid descriptions of battle; others protest racism; still others call eloquently for civil rights. Many describe their conviction that they are fighting not only to free the slaves but to earn equal rights as citizens. These letters give an extraordinary picture of the war and also reveal the bright expectations, hopes, and ultimately the demands that black soldiers had for the future--for themselves and for their race. As first-person documents of the Civil War, the letters are strong statements of the American dream of justice and equality, and of the human spirit.

    citizen, father of three, spy. Murdered in October 1984 in the privacy of his California home by agents of an important American ally. Who, exactly, was Henry Liu, and why was he killed? Fires of the Dragon takes as its starting point the death of Henry Liu, but it is more than one man's story. Liu's life - and death - is the window through which renowned investigative reporter David E. Kaplan unveils, for the first time ever, a dramatic and disturbing tale of international intrigue. Since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when Mao Tse-tung's Communist forces swept to victory and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang (KMT) fled to the island of Taiwan, the Communists and the KMT have waged a brutal battle for control of the world's most populous people. As Kaplan reveals, this war has been exported to more than a dozen countries - and nowhere has this struggle proved more intense than in the United States. In this remarkable expose, Kaplan unmasks forty years of espionage and dirty tricks directed against America by its Taiwanese ally. Among the book's many revelations are how KMT spies infiltrated the State Department and FBI, sabotaged the nation's foreign policy, and recruited the Mafia to steal America's nuclear bombs. While U.S. officials turned a blind eye, Taiwan's agents wreaked havoc in America, terrorizing its Chinese students and emigres and making a mockery of the U.S. Constitution. Henry Liu's life provides a compelling framework for the telling of this story. Born in a small Chinese village, Liu endured firsthand the devastation of the civil war. At seventeen, his father murdered and his family stripped of all its possessions, he joined the KMT Army in its humiliating flight to Taiwan. After eighteen years in exile, disillusioned with the KMT, he moved to the United States to create a new life. But like millions of other Overseas Chinese, Liu remained torn between his loyalties to China, Taiwan, and his new home abroad.

    In this unique multilingual picture book, readers are encouraged to open their front door and experience the differences and similarities between housing structures around the world. As they read about the different dwellings, children will also learn how to write and say "This is my house" in 17 languages. Full color.

    The collection includes Gilbert Stuart, Albert Bierstadt, Charles Bird King, John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Winslow Homer, and Georgia O'Keeffe. First released in 1992 and updated in 2008, this third edition contains a supplement detailing acquisitions in the last ten years by America’s most famous modern painters, such as Roy Lichtenstein, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, and Alma Thomas. This award-winning volume, lavishly illustrated, presents short essays by the art historian William Kloss on a selection of more than 100 works and extended essays on the collection itself by the art historians John Wilmerding, Doreen Bolger, and David Park Curry as well as a catalog compiled by the White House Office of the Curator.The collection of fine art at the White House belongs to the nation but, like the house itself, serves a domestic, even personal, purpose, for each first family. The collection began with mostly presidential portraits, commissioned or purchased by Congress, or donated by presidential families. In the era before photography, some early presidents invited painters to set up studios in the White House to record significant events. In the late nineteenth century a few landscape paintings were acquired for the White House, but not until the Kennedy administration was the collection formally and permanently established. Since that time it has grown exponentially, under the guidance of a professional curatorial staff and it now includes more than 500 works of chiefly American art, selected for their value as historical documents and their importance in reflecting the nation’s values and achievements.Visitors to the White House see only a small selection from the collection on the walls at any one time. With this authoritative catalog, now completely up to date, all Americans can appreciate this distinctive collection that honors the nation’s rich artistic and political heritage.Journalist Hugh Sidey wrote, "The White House is its own canvas, never completed nor meat to be, but a changing portrait of America . . . our book is an eclectic assembly, including paintings, drawings, and sculpture, another chapter in the great American story that will be displayed and sheltered within the White House; a constant reminder to all who walk therein of where we have been and where we are going."

    But, with all that time on the water, there was nothing more exciting or more compelling than the really BIG fish--the giants of the sea. Blue fin tuna are (even today) still sometimes pursued with harpoons! There's the story of a swordfish that was hooked at 10:30 in the morning and played until 11:30 that night--only to...! Tales of Swordfish and Tuna will dazzle and thrill any fishing heart.

    An exceptional chronicle of the birth of roadside architecture, the development of gasoline pumps, corporate trademarks, and gas station memorabilia.

    Lucy Stone was a Massachusetts newspaper editor, abolitionist, and charismatic orator for the women's rights movement in the last half of the nineteenth century. She was deeply involved in almost every reform issue of her time. Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, Horace Greeley, and Louisa May Alcott counted themselves among her friends. Through her public speaking and her newspaper, the Woman's Journal, Stone became the most widely admired woman's rights spokeswoman of her era. In the nineteenth century, Lucy Stone was a household name. Kerr begins with Stone's early roots in a poor family in western Massachusetts. She eventually graduated from Oberlin College and then became a full-time public speaker for an anti-slavery society and for women's rights. Despite Stone's strident anti-marriage ideology, she eventually wed Henry Brown Blackwell, and had her first child at the age of thirty-nine. Although Kerr tells us about Stone's public accomplishments, she emphasizes Stone's personal struggle for autonomy. "Lucy Stone (Only)" was Stone's trademark signature following her marriage. Her refusal to surrender her birth name was one example of her determination to retain her individuality in an era where a woman's right to a separate identity ended with marriage. Of equal importance is Kerr's discussion of Stone's relationship with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as her revisionist treatment of the schism which eventually divided Stone from Stanton and Anthony. Stone urged legislators not to ignore the need for women's suffrage as they rushed to enfranchise black males. Stanton and Anthony dwelt only on the need for women's suffrage, at the expense of black suffrage. Women's historians, the general reader, and historians of the family will appreciate the story of Stone's attempt to balance the conflicting demands of career and family.

    It demonstrates that by the standard of the value of knowledge, modern Western Civilization is both the most advanced civilization in the history of the world and also can and should be adopted as one’s own civilization by everyone everywhere, irrespective of his race or ethnicity. These are the sections of the essay: • The Nature of Western Civilization • The Universalizability of Western Civilization • The Standard for Judging a Civilization: the Objective Superiority of Western Civilization • The New Racism • The Devaluation of Knowledge • Western Civilization and the State of Education The essay's standard for judging civilizations is their ability to acquire and apply knowledge. The greater that ability, the higher is the civilization. It is by this standard that modern Western Civilization must be judged the highest form of civilization in the history of mankind. The essay shows, moreover, that Western Civilization is open to everyone, i.e., to people of all races and ethnicities and that the superiority or inferiority of any given culture or civilization is strictly a matter of ideas and values, not racial membership. On this basis, it argues, for example that even descendants of American Indians should agree with the proposition that Columbus discovered America. Because if they are educated and thus have made the fundamental ideas and values of Western Civilization their own, they will regard Columbus as having opened up the Western Hemisphere to what are now their ideas and values, which previously resided only in Europe. In other words, they will identify with the civilization and culture of the modern world, not with the primitive civilization and culture, indeed, the outright savagery, of their ancestors. Today’s educational and intellectual establishments believe that civilization and culture are racially determined and that Western Civilization is the civilization only of white men. Blacks, Orientals, Hispanics, and others somehow racially secrete, as it were, their own civilizations. And because all races are equally good, all civilizations and cultures are equally good, including civilization and savagery, according to the establishment view. This is racism of the same kind as practiced by 19th century Europeans, when they observed the marked cultural inferiority of peoples of non-European descent. They assumed that cultural inferiority implied racial inferiority. Today’s racists retain the same mistaken linkage between culture and race, only work it from the starting point of race rather than culture. In the process, they conclude modern civilization and savagery are of equal value. The essay shows that this approach constitutes a total devaluation of knowledge and that when widely introduced into the educational system is a formula for the destruction of civilization.

    Intensely lyrical and rageful, his stories concern African-Americans caught in the vortex of history and haunted by their own demons.

    Groundhog DayScreenplay by Danny RubinDrafts:Second Revisions by Harold Ramis, January 02, 1992122 pagesThird Revisions by Harold Ramis, January 30, 1992130 pagesComedy, Fantasy, Romance A weatherman finds himself inexplicably living the same day over and over again.

    He and many others who have played the game over the last 50 years form the foundation of Nelson George's Elevating the Game. . . . George] has brought his own love of basketball to this folksy yet scholarly study. . . . He] examines the sport's origin . . . and charts its evolution from a kind of indoor football to an American passion. Basketball has been called life in short pants, and Mr. George recounts how, for the first black players in a game once reserved for whites, the phrase was no idle bromide. The author tells how black players from colleges around the nation advanced the game, sometimes in cities where people were opposed to the integration of basketball. Understanding the way in which black cultural expressions often knit together, Mr. George even likens basketball to jazz and to the nervous, insistent rhythms of rap. It all makes for a rich and welcome addition to sports literature."-New York Times Book Review. Nelson George is a former columnist for Billboard and the Village Voice. His most recent book, Hip Hop America, was a finalist in the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Awards.

    Among the aspects of Powhatan life that Helen Rountree describes in vivid detail are hunting and agriculture, territorial claims, warfare and treatment of prisoners, physical appearance and dress, construction of houses and towns, education of youths, initiation rites, family and social structure and customs, the nature of rulers, medicine, religion, and even village games, music, and dance.Rountree’s is the first book-length treatment of this fascinating culture, which included one of the most complex political organizations in native North American and which figured prominently in early American history.