In these fourteen stories, Dubus depicts ordinary men and women confronting injury and loneliness, the lack of love and the terror of actually having it. Out of his characters' struggles and small failures--and their unexpected moments of redemption--Dubus creates fiction that bears comparison to the short story's greatest creators--Chekhov, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor. "A master of the short story...It's good to have Andre Dubus back. More than ever, he is an object of hope."--Philadelphia Inquirer"Dubus's detailed creation of three-dimensional characters is propelled by his ability to turn a quiet but perfect phrase...[This] kind of writing raises gooseflesh of admiration."--San Francisco Chronicle

    The comic persona he invented, a modern citydweller whose zaniest flights of free association are tinged with anxiety, is as hilarious now as when he first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker—and his troubled side is even more striking. Here, The Library of America presents the best and most extensive Thurber collection ever assembled.Only a book of this scope can do justice to Thurber’s extraordinary career and to the many unexpected turns of his comic genius. Here are the acknowledged masterpieces: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “The Catbird Seat,” the anti-war parable The Last Flower, the brilliantly satirical Fables for Our Time, the children’s classic The 13 Clocks, and My Life and Hard Times, which Russell Baker calls “possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written.” Here too are the best pieces from The Owl in the Attic, Let Your Mind Alone!, My World—And Welcome To It, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals. From his other famous collections are included such favorites as “The Pet Department,” “The Black Magic of Barney Haller,” "Nine Needles,’ “the Macbeth Murder Mystery,” and “File and Forget,” revealing an astonishingly diverse mix of literary parodies, eccentric portraits, stories of domestic warfare and inner terror, reminiscences both tender and farcical, extravagant feats of wordplay, freewheeling burlesques of popular culture (from detective novels to self-help fads), and exasperated protests against the mechanized impersonality of the modern world.Thurber’s wonderful drawings—spontaneous creations of which he once said, “I don’t think any drawing ever took me more than three minutes”—are here in profusion, with their population of husbands, wives, dogs, seals, and various species of Thurber’s own invention. His first great cartoon collection, The Seal in the Bedroom, is presented complete, along with such celebrated sequences like “The Masculine Approach” and “The War Between Men and Women,” and his devastatingly straightforward illustrated versions of once-canonical poems such as “Barbara Frietchie” and “Excelsior.”Rounding out this volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, his memoir of New Yorker publisher Harold Ross, and a number of pieces, previously uncollected by Thurber, including some early work never before reprinted.

    Archaeologists, Roberts writes, have been puzzling over the Anasazi for more than a century, trying to determine the environmental and cultural stresses that caused their society to collapse 700 years ago. He guides us through controversies in the historical record, among them the haunting question of whether the Anasazi committed acts of cannibalism. Roberts’s book is full of up-to-date thinking on the culture of the ancient people who lived in the harsh desert country of the Southwest.

    This book features the most extensive collection of Mary Engelbreit's work ever published, and it represents nearly 40 years of Mary's art. The new paperback version features a revised preface.

    Finding pleasure in the customs and characters of small-town life, in The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth he writes with affection about the town elders, seen by those in the outside world as misfits and losers. “They taught me what to value, what to ignore, what to embrace, and what to resist.” In his trek through the heartland, Holm covers a satisfyingly wide emotional terrain, from scandalous affairs in the 1950s to his aunt’s touching attempts to transcend poverty with perfume and movie-star airs.

    It sheds new light on Garcia's childhood in San Francisco, the formation of his musical identity, the Dead's road to rock stardom, and his final, crushing addiction to heroin.At once an evocative chronicle of Garcia's public and private journey and a fascinating look at why his music and his lifestyle had such a tremendous impact on so many, Dark Star is the full, behind-the-scenes story of the making of all icon, and the price of fame.

    And now Doyle Redmond, a thirty-five-year-old nowhere writer, has crossed the line between imagination and real, live trouble. On the lam is his soon-to-be-ex-wife's Volvo, he's running a family errand back in his boyhood home of West Table, Missouri -- the bloody heart of the red-dirt Ozarks. The law wants his big brother Smoke on a felony warrant, and Doyle's supposed to talk him into giving up. But Smoke is hunkered down in the hills with his partner, Big Annie, and hernineteen-year-old-daughter, Niagra, making other plans: they're about to harvest a profitable patch of homegrown marijuana.

    This groundbreaking work includes the most accurate account ever written of the 1863 Lawrence, Kansas massacre (the greatest atrocity of the Civil War), when Quantrill and 450 raiders torched the Unionist town and executed roughly 200 unarmed, unresisting men and teenage boys. It also details the postwar outlaw careers of those who rode with him — Frank and Jesse James, and Cole Younger. No other history so fully penetrates the myth of a cardboard-cutout psychopath to expose Quantrill in all his brutality and human complexity.

    At nineteen he met Clyde Barrow in a Texas prison, and the two men together founded what would later be known as the Barrow gang. Running with Bonnie and Clyde is the story of Fults's experiences in the Texas criminal underworld between the years 1925 and 1935 and the gripping account of his involvement with the Barrow gang, particularly its notorious duo, Bonnie and Clyde.Fults's "ten fast years" were both dramatic and violent. As an adolescent he escaped numerous juvenile institutions and jails, was shot by an Oklahoma police officer, and was brutalized by prison guards. With Clyde, following their fateful meeting in 1930, he robbed a bank to finance a prison raid. After the ambush of Bonnie and Clyde, in 1934, he joined forces with Raymond Hamilton; together the two robbed more banks and eluded countless posses before Hamilton's capture and 1935 execution. One of the few survivors among numerous associates who ended up shot, stabbed, beaten to death, or executed, Fults was later able to reform himself, believing that the only reason he was spared was to reveal the darkest aspects of his past-and in so doing expose the circumstances that propel youth into crime.Author John Neal Phillips tells Fults's story in vivid and at times raw detail, recounting bank robberies, killings, and prison escapes, friendships, love affairs, and marriages. Dialogues based on actual conversations amongst the participants enhance the narrative's authenticity. Whereas in books and mms, Fults, Parker, Barrow, and Hamilton have been romanticized or depicted as one-dimensional, depraved characters, Running with Bonnie and Clyde shows them as real people, products of social, political, and economic forces that directed them into a life of crime and bound them to it for eternity.Although basing his account primarily on Fults's testimony, Phillips substantiates that viewpoint with references to scores of eyewitness interviews, police files and court documents, and contemporary news accounts. An important contribution to criminal and social history, Running with Bonnie and Clyde will be fascinating reading for scholars and general readers alike.

    This brilliantly insightful, morally devastating book tells us why he believed, how he lost faith, and what his deceptions cost five of the war's witnesses and McNamara himself.In The Living and the Dead, Paul Hendrickson juxtaposes McNamara's story with those of a wounded Marine, an Army nurse, a Vietnamese refugee, a Quaker who burned himself to death to protest the war, and an enraged artist who tried to kill the man he saw as the war's architect. The result is a book whose exhaustive research and imaginative power turn history into an act of reckoning, damning and profoundly sympathetic, impossible to put down and impossible to forget."A masterpiece. . . . [Hendrickson] has a gift with language that most writers can only dream about. " --Philadelphia Inquirer"Approaches Shakespearian tragedy." --The New York Times Book Review

    Senator from Massachusetts for two decades, was an ardent abolitionist; a founder of the Republican Party; chairman of the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1861 to 1871; chief of the Radical Republicans during the Civil War and Reconstruction; Lincoln's friend and, later, Grant's nemesis; as well as an advocate for universal equality, international peace, women's suffrage, and educational and prison reform. This edition combines for the first time Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War and Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man into one monumental biography that brings into brilliant focus the character and impact of one of the most controversial and enduring forces in American history.

    Patterson, Arthur Morgan, and James Cox—who explored those new possibilities. They did much to create the American 20th century that is now yielding to the rise of the electronic technologies and global marketplace. 75 photographs.

    The lore and the legends, the lawmen and the bad men, the rise of the cattle barons and the tragic demise of the Plains Indians, the pioneers and the forty-niners, Little Big Horn and the Alamo, Calamity Jane and Crazy Horse -- from the Alleghenies to the Rockies the events that shaped the West and the people who tamed it are featured in this vivid anecdotal history, which draws upon firsthand testimony and contemporary documents to provide a compelling and comprehensive account of a land as it became a nation.

    Posing as a pirate, he disguised his identity and his mission perfectly. The beautiful Dominique Charbonneau agreed to help unmask the ruthless rogue in order to win her brother's freedom. But when emotional currents began to rock the ship, she is forced to make an impossible decision--for saving her brother means sacrificing a glorious love she might never know again.

    Joseph and the dreams of America of someone who had been born is Russia. In Kansas City, he was a grocer, at least until he swore off the grocery business. He was given to swearing off things--coffee, tobacco, alcohol, all neckties that were not yellow in color. Presumably he had also sworn off swearing, although he was a collector of curses, such as May you have an injury that is not covered by workman's compensation. Although he had a strong vision of the sort of person he wanted his son to be, his explicit advice about how to behave didn't go beyond an almost lackadaisical You might as well be a mensch. Somehow, though, Abe Trillin's messages got through clearly.The author's unerring sense of the American character is everywhere apparent in this quietly powerful memoir, Messages from My Father.

    Whether you’re looking for traditional menus of teas and delicate accoutrements or you want to host a unique party filled with unforgettable personal touches, Country Tea Parties teems with creative, eminently doable ideas to fit any occasion. Fill your house with fragrant rose petals and invite some friends over to cozy up around a fresh warm pot.

    Portraits by acclaimed photographer Mary Ellen Mark join an urgent introduction by Andrew Cuomo, Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development, H.U.D. and founder of H.E.L.P. (Housing Enterprise for the Less Privileged). Noted child psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dr. Robert Coles offers a thoughtful preface about the painful effects of homelessness on a child's soul. In the tradition of classic works of advocacy like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, this book speaks to our national moral conscience and offers an optimistic message that both personal and social change is possible. introduction by Andrew Cuomo ; preface by Robert Coles ; interviews reported by Victoria Kohn.

    Beginning with the original Texas Pig Stand of 1921, this evocative compendium cruises through 40 years of drive in culture, tracing the history of roadside restaurant architecture and the people who created it. Engagingly illustrated with historical photographs and a rich assortment of related ephemera, from menus to matchbox covers, Car Hops and Curb Service chronicles a unique chapter of popular culture for anyone who sipped a malt, hung a tray, or cruised a drive in parking lot—or wished they had.

    And whilst widely-believed events pertaining to the victories and defeats of the South can be found widely throughout biographies, literature, TV and film, they are often far from accurate, or omit the truth altogether. One such gap between fact and fiction can be exemplified in the perception of the Confederacy’s president, Jefferson Davis. Many of his personal correspondences offer us an insight into the fundamental issues he suffered whilst forging relationships with his generals, for which the South’s move for independence undoubtedly suffered. Similarly, a cold, hard look at Stonewall Jackson soon exposes him as far less than the demigod that others would have us believe. Also misunderstood was the extent of the war west of the Appalachians. Largely ignored by historians until recently, the lack of appreciation for its scale does not make the level of its destruction any less real. William C. Davis’ collection of essays, written over twenty years, unveils the truth from underneath the façade of the history books and explores the impact of dispelling those myths on our understanding of the entire Confederate story. Praise for William C. Davis “A wonderful book, written by a man with full command of, and great love for, his subject. Davis grasps the war in its totality, decently and respectfully. He does not so much demolish myths as clarify and nuance them.” —Washington Times “Celebrated author William C. Davis here offers us stimulating essays full of provocative opinions. Will provoke plenty of healthy debate.” —Blue & Gray Magazine “A fine analysis of the way in which myth-making can distort history.” — Kirkus Reviews William C. Davis is an American historian and former Professor of History who specialises in the Civil War and Southern States. A prolific writer, he has written or edited more than forty works on the subject and is four-time winner of the Jefferson Davis Award.

    On the run for a crime he didn't commit, Luke knows his past holds too many demons for a future in Honor's arms. Now, he has to survive rustlers and bounty hunters, as well as the agony of loving a woman he has no right to desire. Original.

    Bruce Kuklick's new book begins with the story of the initial adventure of these determined investigators--a twelve-year dig near the Biblical Babylon, at Nippur, conducted at intervals from 1888 through 1900 and bankrolled by the Babylonian Exploration Fund. To unearth tens of thousands of cuneiform tablets, the leaders of this venture faced harsh living conditions in the desert and an academic war of each against all that was quickly begun at the site itself. As their knowledge increased, they risked their personal religious beliefs in the search for historical truth. Kuklick discusses their tribulations to illuminate two other contemporary developments: first, the maturation of the American university, particularly in contrast to its German counterpart; and second, the influence of religious-secular conflict on the ways in which Western scholarship appropriated or appreciated other cultures.The Nippur expedition spawned unseemly (and entertaining) fights among the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Yale, Harvard, and Chicago for leadership in the study of the ancient Near East--not to mention disagreements with their own developing museums and an international scandal called the Hilprecht controversy. More significant than these quarrels was the concern for the meaning of history displayed in this period of Near Eastern scholarship. The field was linked to Biblical criticism and Judeo-Christian interests, and many of the orientalists originally possessed strong religious commitments--which some put aside as they struggled for objectivity. As recent critics have shown, orientalism was an example of the West's ability to appropriate the other for its own purposes. However, Kuklick's study demonstrates that the censure of orientalism hinges on modes of argumentation that scholars of the ancient Near East helped to legitimate, and at no small cost to themselves.

    

    The cookbooks are contributed by junior leagues, community organizations, popular restaurants, noted chefs, and just plain good cooks. From best-selling favorites to small community treasures, each contributing cookbook is featured in a catalog section that provides a description and ordering information -- a bonanza for anyone who collects cookbooks.Beautiful photographs, interesting facts, original illustrations and delicious recipes capture the special flavor of each state.

    What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets. Introduced by Sherman Alexie, who has taken a film option on the novel, this important novel is published in paperback for the first time.

    Assembled in two volumes, Volume 1: From Colonial Times to Reconstruction and Volume 2: From Reconstruction to the Present, these writings discuss important and controversial events, personalities, movements, and ideas from the nation's history. Each volume presents more than eighty original sources in which men and women of various classes and professions express their opinions on the issues of their times. The writings are arranged in a pro/ con format, creating a running historical debate on specific topics within each era. Opposing Viewpoints[Registered] in American History offers students the opportunity to interpret history for themselves by studying original documents on the debates that forged our present social, political, and economic structures.

    New World historiography, epic poetry, theater, the novel, and the essay form are among the areas covered in this comprehensive and authoritative treatment.

    From Aunt Jemima Pancakes to ethnic Barbie dolls, corporate America peddles racial and gender stereotypes, packaging and selling them to us as breakfast food or toys for our kids.Moving from the realm of child's play through the academy and the justice system, Ann duCille draws on icons of popular culture to demonstrate that it isn't just race and gender that matter in America but race and gender as reducible to skin color, body structure, and other visible signs of difference. She reveals that Mattel, Inc., uses stereotypes of gender, race, and cultural difference to mark--and market--its Barbie dolls as female, white, black, Asian, and Hispanic. The popularity of these dolls suggests the degree to which we have internalized dominant definitions of self and other.In a similar move, Skin Trade interrogates the popular discourse surrounding the trial of O. J. Simpson, arguing that much of the mainstream coverage of the case was a racially coded message equally dependent on stereotypes. Focusing on Newsweek and Time in particular, duCille shows how the former All-American was depicted as un-American. She explores other collusions and collisions among race, gender, and capital as well. Especially concerned with superficial distinctions perpetuated within the academic community, the author argues that the academy indulges in its own skin trade in which both race and gender are hot properties.By turns biting, humorous, and hopeful, Skin Trade is always riveting, full of strange connections and unexpected insights.

    The book argues that the wartime and immediate postwar experiences of the 1940s transformed and redirected the policies and government institutions of the New Deal. In a work that makes significant contributions to the study of U.S. politics and history, Bartholomew Sparrow proposes a new model of the state and of state-building. The author applies this model, which derives from the resource dependence perspective, to the historical record of four areas of public policy: social security, labor-management relations, public finance, and military procurement.This book is the first to use recently available archival materials documenting the consequences of World War II for the programs and political agendas of the welfare state. It is also the first to apply the resource dependency perspective to the U.S. federal government as a complex organization. The book will lead readers to reevaluate the impact of international factors on American political development, to reappraise the role of the New Deal in shaping the postwar federal government, and to reconsider the application of organizational theory to American government.From the Outside In will be of particular interest to political scientists, political sociologists, and historians. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in the comprehensive effects of the Second World War on domestic policies and U.S. government itself.Originally published in 1996.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.