Fascinating, with some stories weighted entirely differently, the original texts reveal Carver to be a more humane writer than he is usually credited with being.

    As 50-year-old Mo tries to reach out to his increasingly tuned-out son Trey (who himself has become an unwed teenaged father), he realizes that the burden of grief and anger he carries over his own estranged father has everything to do with the struggles he encounters with his son. Part road novel, part character study, and part social critique, and written in compulsively readable prose, Before I Forget is the work of a major new voice in American fiction. Pitts knows inside and out the difficulties facing black men as they grapple with the complexities of their roles as fathers.

    In Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey, more than 175 reproductions include samples from Gorey's books, illustrations produced for other writers, theatrical sets and costume designs, and a wealth of individual pieces, many never before published. Sketches, typewritten manuscripts, doodles, and musings join the generous selection of finished works.

    Frederick Seidel is, in the words of the critic Adam Kirsch, “the best American poet writing today.”

    A lonely woman reflects on her failed marriage and the single act of violence, years buried, that brought about its destruction. In these eight beautifully written, achingly poignant, and occasionally heartbreaking stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again.In "Good Girl," a depressed widower is forced to decide between the love of a good woman and the love of his own deeply flawed son. In another part of town and another time, thirteen-year-old Ellen, the central figure of "Theory of Realty," is discovering the menaces of being "at that age": too old for the dolls of her girlhood, too young to understand the weaknesses of the adults who surround her. The linked stories "Parts" and "Proof of God" offer distinct but equally correct versions of a brutal crime--one from the perspective of the victim's mother, one from the killer's.

    In this essay based on a popular lecture, Foundation for Economic Education President Lawrence W. Reed debunks this conventional view and traces the central role that poor government policy played in fostering this legendary catastrophe. Lawrence W. ("Larry") Reed became president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 2008. Prior to becoming FEE's president, he served for twenty years as president of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan. He also taught economics full-time from 1977 to 1984 at Northwood University in Michigan and chaired its Department of Economics from 1982 to 1984. A champion for liberty, Reed has authored over 1,000 newspaper columns and articles, dozens of articles in magazines and journals in the United States and abroad. The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is the premier source for understanding the humane values of a free society, and the economic, legal, and ethical principles that make it possible. At FEE, you’ll be connected with people worldwide who share those values and are inspired by the dynamic ideas of free association, free markets, and a diverse civil society. Explore freedom’s limitless possibilities through seminars, classroom resources, social media, and daily content at FEE.org. Learn how your creativity and initiative can result in a prosperous and flourishing life for yourself and the global community. Whether you are just beginning to explore entrepreneurship, economics, or creating value for others or are mentoring others on their journeys, FEE has everything you need. FEE is supported by voluntary, tax-deductible contributions from individuals, foundations, and businesses who believe that it is vital to cultivate a deep appreciation in every generation for individual liberty, personal character, and a free economy. Supporters  receive a subscription to FEE's flagship magazine, the Freeman, also available at FEE.org.

    They know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century. Through the complex inner lives of working-class characters, Bonnie Jo Campbell illustrates the desperation of post-industrial America, where wildlife, jobs, and whole ways of life go extinct and the people have no choice but to live off what is left behind. .

    In her debut collection of fifteen short stories, Amina Cain makes ordinary worlds strange and spare and beautiful. A woman carves invisible images onto ice, a pair of black wings appears in front of a house, and a restless teacher sits in a gallery of miniature rooms. As Miranda Mellis describes, "The revelatory pleasure and hope [in these stories] emanate from an artistry driven by ethical desire." "I highly recommend reading I Go To Some Hollow," says Bhanu Kapil, "because of what it teaches you about love, and the relationship between love and writing." I GO TO SOME HOLLOW is published as part of the TrenchArt: Tracer Series, with an Introduction by Bhanu Kapil and collaborative visual art by Ken Erhlich and Susan Simpson.

    For the first time ever, readers will plumb the fascinating depths of this immense archive from the earliest photographs collected in the late 19th century to the cutting-edge work of today. Both iconic and never-before-seen images from virtually every corner of the globe, every species of wildlife, and amazing human achievements in exploration, adventure, science, and more are showcased and placed in historic, artistic, technical, and journalistic context.Following this lavish visual journey, readers will be awed by a behind-the-scenes profile of the entire collection, its size, its richly diverse character, and its special collections, ranging from delicate and beautiful Autochromes to the famous Alexander Graham Bell collection to the amazing stratosphere collection. Fine artwork and imaginative illustrations are also featured.Finally, a listing of photographers whose work is represented stands as a fitting tribute to those without whose tireless and brilliant efforts the Collection would not exist.

    Formed in Burlington, Vermont, this determined foursome of high-IQ misfits developed their uniquely telepathic chemistry playing that college town's club scene. Vermont's best-kept secret rose to national prominence in the nineties, when they became the most obvious heirs to the Grateful Dead's legacy as onstage improvisers and touring Pied Pipers. With a raft of self-imposed challenges, Phish mapped out much new territory, as well. Wildly eclectic, endlessly resourceful, and ever unpredictable, Phish were at the forefront of the jam-band movement, an organic alternative to the mainstream status quo that caught the ears and imagination of millions. Drawing upon nearly 15 years of exclusive interviews with the members of Phish and those in their employ, veteran music journalist Parke Puterbaugh delivers an insightful and authoritative biography of this beloved band and their quixotic career. Phish: The Biography thoroughly traces the quartet's history from their formative years to their spectacular success as a prolific touring phenomenon. Puterbaugh examines the colorful chemistry - the unique mix of personalities, backgrounds and talents - that inspired the members of Phish to push their four-way experiment to the limit. He documents their rigorous work ethic, boundless creativity, and all of the resulting innovations, including a series of one-band festivals that served as the blueprint for Bonnaroo and a slew of latter-day rock festivals. Moreover, he details how Phish distilled classical discipline, jazz improvisation, and rock instrumentation and attitude into an intoxicating brew that kept hordes of fans coming back show after show, encouraging them to digest and debate every note and nuance. The book also candidly addresses the bumps in the road that followed Phish's ascent to popularity, as rock's hardest-working band also became one of its hardest-partying entities. Mounting excesses and internal dissent led to a two-year hiatus, a dramatic breakup, and a well-documented drug bust and courageous recovery from addiction for guitarist Trey Anastasio. The tale concludes with Phish's triumphant reunion in 2009, marking one of the greatest comebacks in music history. An intimate and fascinating portrait, Phish: The Biography is the definitive story of these Vermont jamband legends.

    They are accompanied by the uplifting words of Barack Obama and commemorate the movement and the moment that have changed our history. It's a celebration of the power of inspiration. It's a celebration of how far we have come and how determined we are to look ahead. It's a celebration of pride, hope and joy personally felt and publically shared.Most of all it's a celebration of the 44th president - a new president and a new chapter in the American story.

    “I was doing something that I thought could have some impact someday. In many ways, it’s really these photographs that kept me going creatively.” —Dennis Hopper During the 1960s, Dennis Hopper carried a camera everywhere—on film sets and locations, at parties, in diners, bars and galleries, driving on freeways and walking on political marches. He photographed movie idols, pop stars, writers, artists, girlfriends, and complete strangers. Along the way he captured some of the most intriguing moments of his generation with a keen and intuitive eye. A reluctant icon at the epicenter of that decade’s cultural upheaval, Hopper documented the likes of Tina Turner in the studio, Andy Warhol at his first West Coast show, Paul Newman on set, and Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. In many ways this work is photography as film, a poignant narrative expressed through a series of stark images–early shots of Tijuana bullfights, LA happenings and urban street scenes show an experimental freedom that would translate into the vivid cinematic imagery of Easy Rider and beyond. From a selection of photographs compiled by Hopper and gallerist Tony Shafrazi—more than a third of them previously unpublished—this extensive volume distills the essence of Hopper's brilliantly prodigious photographic career. Also included are introductory essays by Shafrazi and legendary West Coast art pioneer Walter Hopps, and an extensive biography by journalist Jessica Hundley. With excerpts from Victor Bockris’s interviews of Hopper’s famous subjects, friends, and family, this volume is an unprecedented exploration of the life and mind of one of America’s most fascinating personalities.

    We then follow Frank, ever laconic and observant, through Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, witnessing his fortune’s rise and his family’s fragmentation. With finely honed prose and an eye that captures the most subtle nuances of the human condition—all its pathos and beauty and strangeness—Ford transforms this ordinary man’s life into a riveting, moving parable of life in America today.

    In these dazzling works Cheever laid bare the failings and foibles of not just the ascendant postwar elite but also the fallen Yankee aristocrats who stubbornly— and often grotesquely and hilariously—cling to their shabby gentility as the last vestige of former glory. Complete Novels gathers: the riotous family saga The Wapshot Chronicle (winner of the National Book Award) and its sequel The Wapshot Scandal (winner of the William Dean Howells Medal); the dark suburban drama Bullet Park (“a magnificent work of fiction,” John Gardner remarked in The New York Times Book Review); the prison novel Falconer, a radical departure that met with both critical and popular acclaim; and the lyrical ecological fable Oh What a Paradise It Seems. A companion volume, Collected Stories and Other Writings, is the largest edition of Cheever’s stories ever.

    successes & failures during the half century following the victory over Nazi Germany. It also considers how a political tradition in Washington feeds on external danger, real & imagined, & succeeds in inflaming U.S. foreign policy.

    His timing was compelling. Printed during a period of regional, ideological, and political divisions, written by a poet intimately concerned with the idea of a United States as “essentially the greatest poem,” this new edition was Whitman’s last best hope for national salvation. Now available in a facsimile edition, Leaves of Grass, 1860 faithfully reproduces Whitman’s attempt to create a “Great construction of the New Bible” to save the nation on the eve of civil war and, for the first time, frames the book in historical rather than literary terms.In his third edition, Whitman added 146 new poems to the 32 that comprised the second edition, reorganized the book into a bible of American civic religion that could be cited chapter and verse, and included erotic poetry intended to bind the nation in organic harmony. This 150th anniversary edition includes a facsimile reproduction of the original 1860 volume, a thought-provoking introduction by antebellum historian and Whitman scholar Jason Stacy that situates Whitman in nineteenth-century America, and annotations that provide detailed historical context for Whitman’s poems.A profoundly rich product of a period when America faced its greatest peril, this third edition finds the poet transforming himself into a prophet of spiritual democracy and the Whitman we celebrate today—boisterous, barbaric, and benevolent. Reprinting it now continues the poet’s goal of proclaiming for “the whole of America for each / individual, without exception . . . uncompromising liberty and equality.”

     I. Terror and the Uncanny From Poe to the Pulps 768 pp. II. Terror and the Uncanny From the 1940s to Now 744 pp. Featuring: Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Robert W. Chambers, Kate Chopin, Lafcadio Hearn, F. Marion Crawford, Ambrose Bierce, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, John Collier, Tennessee Williams, John Cheever, Jack Finney, Shirley Jackson, Paul Bowles, Ray Bradbury, Charles Beaumont, Vladimir Nabokov, Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Crowley, Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Michael Chabon, Steven Millhauser, Brian Evenson, Kelly Link, and dozens more. "An encompassing and essential voyage to the dark side of the moon of American literature and a stupendous, spellbinding reading experience waiting to be had." - Jonathan Lethem

    To make matters worse, Mack then learns that the Diamondhead missiles were sold illegally by French industrialist and infamous politician Henri Foche. Mack suspects that Foche will succeed in his campaign to become the next French President, and fears that his election will result in the spread of international terrorism.In addition, Mack has a gravely ill son whose life can only be saved by an experimental and unaffordable foreign medical procedure. So when the town’s shipbuilding magnate asks Mack to help assassinate Henri Foche, Mack finds himself agreeing. His reward is a chance at survival for both his son and his hometown.

    He was an authority on rock & roll, blues, jazz, punk, avant-garde, and world music -- often discovering new artists and trends years (even decades) before they hit the mainstream. Now, noted music writer Anthony DeCurtis has compiled the best pieces from Palmer's oeuvre and presents them here, in one compelling volume.A member of the elite group of the defining rock critics who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, Palmer possessed a vision so complete that, as DeCurtis writes, "it's almost as if, if you read Bob, you didn't need to read anyone else." Blues & Chaos features some of his most memorable pieces, including gripping stories about John Lennon, Led Zeppelin, Moroccan trance music, Miles Davis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Philip Glass, and Muddy Waters.Wonderfully entertaining, infused with passion, and deeply inspiring, Blues & Chaos is a must for music fans everywhere.Flirtations with chaos / by Anthony DeCurtis --The big picture : "The opinions expressed are dangerously subjective." --The blues : "A post-Heisenberg-uncertainty-principle mojo hand" --Jazz : "A kinetic kaleidoscope" --The originators : "Where the hell did this man come from?" --Soul and R&B : "It had to come from somewhere, and the church is where it all came from" --Classic rock : "Musically, we weren't afraid to go in any direction whatsoever" --John Lennon and Yoko Ono : "Now the music's coming through me again" --Punk rock and beyond : "Fear and nothing" --World music : "The world is changing and so is our music" --Morocco : "We fell through each other, weightless, into the sky" --On the edge : "Listen, as if a new world had suddenly opened up" --Sonic guitar maelstrom : "All hail the overdriven amp."

    Together with the Bill of Rights and the Civil War amendments, these documents constitute what James Madison called our political scriptures and have come to define us as a people. Now a Pulitzer Prize winning historian serves as a guide to these texts, providing historical contexts and offering interpretive commentary.In an introductory essay written for the general reader, Jack N. Rakove provides a narrative political account of how these documents came to be written. In his commentary on the Declaration of Independence, Rakove sets the historical context for a fuller appreciation of the important preamble and the list of charges leveled against the Crown. When he glosses the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the subsequent amendments, Rakove once again provides helpful historical background, targets language that has proven particularly difficult or controversial, and cites leading Supreme Court cases. A chronology of events provides a framework for understanding the road to Philadelphia. The general reader will not find a better, more helpful guide to our founding documents than Jack N. Rakove.

    I am west of the West," and in this book, Mark Arax spends four years travelling up and down the Golden State to explore its singular place in the world. This is California beyond the cliches. This is California as only a native son, deep in the dust, could draw it.Compelling, lyrical, and ominous, his new collection finds a different drama rising out of each confounding landscape. "The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman" has been praised as a "stunningly intimate" portrait of one immigrant family from Oaxaca, through harrowing border crossings and brutal raisin harvests. Down the road in the "Home Front," right-wing Christians and Jews form a strange pact that tries to silence debate on the War on Terror, and a conflicted father loses not one but two sons in Iraq. "The Last Okie in Lamont," the inspiration for the town in the Grapes of Wrath, has but one Okie left, who tells Arax his life story as he drives to a funeral to bury one more Dust Bowl migrant. "The Highlands of Humboldt" is a journey to marijuana growing capital of the U.S., where the old hippies are battling the new hippies over "pollution pot" and the local bank collects a mountain of cash each day, much of it redolent of cannabis. Arax pieces together the murder-suicide at the heart of a rotisserie chicken empire in "The Legend of Zankou," a story included in the Best American Crime Reporting 2009. And, in the end, he provides a moving epilogue to the murder of his own father, a crime in the California heartland finally solved after thirty years.In the finest tradition of Joan Didion, Arax combines journalism, essay, and memoir to capture social upheaval as well as the sense of being rooted in a community. Piece by piece, the stories become a whole, a stunning panorama of California, and America, in a new century.

    They might be strawberries or terriers, but they're the drunken coworkers, troubled classmates, and vindictive roommates that haunt everybody.

    Through vintage photographs, postcards, and other ephemera, Palm Springs Holiday recalls the Palm Springs area from the 1910s through the 1960s, where people vacationed in the desert, dined, danced, and lounged poolside. Features vintage images of the Coachella Valley and shots of the area’s famous hotels and gambling dens.

    

    And yet, as Richard T. Hughes reveals in this powerful book, the biblical vision of the "kingdom of God" stands at odds with the values and actions of an American empire that sanctions war instead of peace, promotes dominance and oppression instead of reconciliation, and exalts wealth and power instead of justice for the poor and needy. With extensive analysis of both Christian scripture and American history from the founding of the republic to the present day, Christian America and the Kingdom of God illuminates the devastating irony of a "Christian America" that so often behaves in unchristian ways.

    Tongue, word, thought, and intellect all conspire in a free language love of living history, divination, sex, solitude and amusement. She is America's only real rock n' roll schoolteacher. Lessons layered with profundity and protracted parallels. Where old world religion, Gertrude Stein and Oreo cookies co-exist in an actual and mystic world of wonder." --Thurston Moore, Sonic Youth"If Rebecca Brown's talent for prose were any tighter, it would be a lyric -- to a pop standard. An homage -- a menage -- to America, exposing what's laid bare in a comic tragic redux. I laughed till it hurt." --Van Dyke Parks, Composer/Arranger"Anyone who can get from the Eucharist, to a Necco Wafer, to the goo beween the Oreo wafers, to the Inquisition, to the goo between the legs of excited young women is a distant sibling of mine. She can dash and she can drift and she is not much interested in the really bad parts that might qualify as confession. She likes the float of quotidian living and I like to read the words upon which she floats." -- Dave Hickey, author of Air GuitarThe impulse to tell our worst to a bunch of strangers has been fueling American self-hood for 300 years: there's a direct line from the Puritan confession narrative to today's lurid, inescapable exhibitionism. But whose stories are we telling?This collection of mordant, poignant, and playful essays shows Rebecca Brown at the height of her imaginative and intuitive powers. A wry, incisive social and literary critique is couched in a gonzo mix of pop culture, autobiography, fiction, literary history, misremembered movie plots, and fantasy that plays with the notion of what it is to be “American.” Fantastical connections and unlikely meetings span the course of America’s cultural history in a manic remix, featuring appearances by Brian Wilson, Gertrude Stein, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Invisible Man, the Abligensian Crusade, John Wayne, Felix Mendelssohn, JFK, Shane, and God.Rebecca Brown’s books include: The Gifts of the Body, The Last Time I Saw You, The Haunted House, Terrible Girls, and The End of Youth.

    He is also drawn to the mystery and unexpected beauty found in abandoned architecture. Here Vanden Brink captures and illuminates in stunning black and white images abandoned structures such as mills, bridges, grain elevators, churches, and storefronts-structures that once were important and useful. With text by historic preservation expert Howard Mansfield, this collection of photos grants permanence to places that may soon vanish forever.

    Pink-haired Hilda and oddball loner Benji are not your typical teenagers. Instead of going to parties or hanging out at the mall, they comb the city streets and suburban culs-de-sac of Los Angeles for sites of celebrity murder and suicide. Bound by their interest in the macabre, Hilda and Benji neglect their schoolwork and their social lives in favor of prowling the most notorious crime scenes in Hollywood history and collecting odd mementos of celebrity death. Hilda and Benji's morbid pastime takes an unexpected turn when they meet Hank, the elderly, reclusive tenant of a dilapidated Echo Park apartment where a silent movie star once stabbed himself to death with a pair of scissors. Hilda feels a strange connection with Hank and comes to care deeply for her paranoid new friend as they watch old movies together and chat the sweltering afternoons away. But when Hank's downstairs neighbor Jake, a handsome screenwriter, inserts himself into the equation and begins to hint at Hank's terrible secrets, Hilda must decide what it is she's come to Echo Park searching for . . . and whether her fascination with death is worth missing out on life.

    Hate destroys everything. Don't let it destroy you..."For decades, ultra-liberal Windfield College has been a thorn in the side of Northern Virginia's hidebound elite. When a teaching position unexpectedly becomes available, the school hires a former male graduate - now a transsexual woman named Nickie Farrell - as an assistant professor of English. Hoping to find peace, Nickie keeps her secret under wraps until ambitious lesbian student reporter Cinda Vanderhart outs her. And Cinda has noticed something else: both Nickie and a young townie waiter named Collie Skinner have a genetic quirk which causes their eyes to be different colors. Convinced that the similarity is no coincidence, Cinda begins an investigation to discover the connection between them. Meanwhile, in a death-bed confession as she succumbs to years of brutality at the hands of her disgraced cop husband, Collie's mother Luanne reveals that his birth resulted from an illicit affair she had with a long-vanished Windfield college senior named Nick Farrington. Shattered by his mother's death, Collie turns for comfort to Robin Thompson, a gentle-hearted Christian co-worker at the upper-crust Foxton Arms restaurant. As Nickie is stalked by a pair of homicidal sociopaths, Robin finds herself entangled not only in Cinda's investigative machinations but also a murderous plot by former U.S Ambassador and tycoon Eamon Douglass to eradicate the hated college with a suicide detonation of a Cesium 137 dirty bomb. Lives and secrets hang in the balance until everything comes to a head on the morning of Windfield's annual spring picnic: April Fools Day. Filled with richly-drawn characters and building to a stunning climax, SHE'S MY DAD is a story about the destructiveness of hate, the power of love, and the redemptive triumph of good over evil. Like her title character Nickie Farrell, Iolanthe Woulff is a transsexual woman. A fifty-nine-year-old Princeton-educated English major, she lives in Palm Springs, CA, where for several years she wrote a column in a local magazine about the challenges of gender transition. As the eldest child of author Herman Wouk, storytelling has always been dear to Ms. Woulff's heart. Her hope is that besides providing a suspenseful read, SHE'S MY DAD will help to dispel some of the widespread misconceptions about transsexual people.

    Bush, politics stopped at the water's edge--that is, that partisanship had no place in national security. In Arsenal of Democracy, historian Julian E. Zelizer shows this to be demonstrably false: partisan fighting has always shaped American foreign policy and the issue of national security has always been part of our domestic conflicts. Based on original archival findings, Arsenal of Democracy offers new insights into nearly every major national security issue since the beginning of the cold war: from FDR's masterful management of World War II to the partisanship that scarred John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, from Ronald Reagan's fight against Communism to George W. Bush's controversial War on Terror. A definitive account of the complex interaction between domestic politics and foreign affairs over the last six decades, Arsenal of Democracy is essential reading for anyone interested in the politics of national security.

    A man traveling down Highway 90 West gets trapped alone overnight inside a Cracker Barrel restaurant, where he is tormented by an endless loop of Shania Twain songs on the overhead sound system. A wandering actor returns to his hometown against his better instincts and runs into an old friend, who recounts their teenage days of stealing cars, scoring Benzedrine, and sleeping with whores in Tijuana. A Minnesota family travels south for a winter vacation but, caught up in the ordinary tyrannies of family life, remains oblivious to the beauty of the Yucatan Peninsula. A solitary horse rancher muses on Sitting Bull and Beckett amid the jumble of stuff in his big country kitchen--from rusted spurs and Lakota dream-catchers to yellowing pictures of hawks and galloping horses to "snapshots of different sons in different shirts doing different things like fishing, riding mules and tractors; leaning up against their different mothers at radical angles." Made up of short narratives, lyrics, and dialogues, "Day out of Days" sets conversation against tale, song against memory, in a cubistic counterpoint that finally links each piece together. The result is a stunning work of vision and clarity imbued with the vivid reverberations of myth--Shepard at his flinty-eyed, unwavering best.

    Historian Patricia Sullivan unearths the little-known early decades of the NAACPOCOs activism, telling startling stories of personal bravery, legal brilliance, and political maneuvering by the likes of W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Walter White, Charles Houston, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, and Roy Wilkins. In the critical post-war era, following a string of legal victories culminating in Brown v. Board, the NAACP knocked out the legal underpinnings of the segregation system and set the stage for the final assault on Jim Crow. A sweeping and dramatic story woven deep into the fabric of American history?OCOhistory that helped shape AmericaOCOs consciousness, if not its soulOCO " (Booklist)" ? " Lift Every Voice " offers a timeless lesson on how people, without access to the traditional levers of power, can create change under seemingly impossible odds.

    It also includes many sites and attractions the WPA chronicled in 1938.

    In Hearst's San Simeon: The Gardens and the Land, the castle's official historian Victoria Kastner takes readers on a time-traveling tour of the estate, from the beginning of its construction to the present. Featuring two spectacular swimming pools, 120 acres of luxuriant gardens, and 450 square miles of pristine coastal landscape, it's no wonder that the estate was named "La Cuesta Encantada" (The Enchanted Hill). From the 1920s through the 1940s, publisher William Randolph Hearst and actress Marion Davies hosted the country's elite here, encouraging them to enjoy the outdoors at "the ranch," which Hearst created with the architect Julia Morgan. With stunning photographs, original drawings, and lively anecdotes, Hearst's San Simeon: The Gardens and the Land tells the story of one of California's most beautiful and unspoiled treasures.

    This book argues that they are and that the reason is growing polarization of worldviews - what guides people's view of right and wrong and good and evil. These differences in worldview are rooted in what Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler describe as authoritarianism. They show that differences of opinion concerning the most provocative issues on the contemporary issue agenda - about race, gay marriage, illegal immigration, and the use of force to resolve security problems - reflect differences in individuals' levels of authoritarianism. This makes authoritarianism an especially compelling explanation of contemporary American politics. Events and strategic political decisions have conspired to make all these considerations more salient. The authors demonstrate that the left and the right have coalesced around these opposing worldviews, which has provided politics with more incandescent hues than before.

    Growing up, Thomas Chatterton Williams knew he loved three things in life: his parents, literature, and the intoxicating hip-hop culture that surrounded him. For years, he managed to juggle two disparate lifestyles, "keeping it real" in his friends' eyes and studying for the SATs under his father's strict tutelage-until it all threatened to spin out of control. Written with remarkable candor and emotional depth, Losing My Cool portrays the allure and danger of hip-hop culture with the authority of a true fan who's lived through it all, while demonstrating the saving grace of literature and the power of the bond between father and son.

    In a very real sense, geology made us. This is that story.

    As part of the journey, the pair decide to make a pilgrimage across America, travelling on Greyhound buses, to get to Graceland for the celebrations of the 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death, with Shady busking and singing Elvis songs at cities and towns along the way. As they travel across America, memories of her past begin to surface and Shady realises that while she is coming to understand the meaning of 'home', she is also untangling the knotted threads of her difficult relationship with her estranged, erratic, unreliable and often violent father.A moving, witty and original meditation on the idea of pilgrimage, family, home and loss, She Played Elvis is a classic road story and a journey of self-discovery set to an Elvis soundtrack; a story told with a clear-eyed, intelligent, unforgettable grace.

    no dray moves more readily to the Thill, than I do to the Painters Chair." - George Washington, 16, 1785When George Washington was born, the New World had virtually no artists. Over the course of his life, a cultural transformation would occur. Virtually everyone regarded Washington as America's indispensable man, and the early painters and sculptors were no exception. Hugh Howard surveys the founding fathers of American painting through their portraits of Washington. Charles Willson Peale was the comrade-in-arms, John Trumbull the aristocrat, Benjamin West the mentor, and Gilbert Stuart the brilliant wastrel. Their images of Washington fed an immense popular appetite that has never faded, Stuart's image endures today on the $1 bill. The Painter's Chair is an eloquent narrative of how America's first painters toiled to create an art worthy of the new republic, and the hero whom they turned into an icon.

    In Lynching and Spectacle, Amy Wood explains what it meant for white Americans to perform and witness these sadistic spectacles and how lynching played a role in establishing and affirming white supremacy. Lynching, Wood argues, overlapped with a variety of cultural practices and performances, both traditional and modern, including public executions, religious rituals, photography, and cinema, all which encouraged the horrific violence and gave it social acceptability. However, she also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images ultimately fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and the decline of the practice. Using a wide range of sources, including photos, newspaper reports, pro- and antilynching pamphlets, early films, and local city and church records, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.Wood expounds on the critical role lynching spectacles played in establishing and affirming white supremacy at the turn of the century, particularly in towns and cities experiencing great social instability and change. She also shows how the national dissemination of lynching images fueled the momentum of the antilynching movement and ultimately led to the decline of lynching. By examining lynching spectacles alongside both traditional and modern practices and within both local and national contexts, Wood reconfigures our understanding of lynching's relationship to modern life.

    After years of neglect and exclusion, labor organizers are recognizing both the needs and the importance of immigrants and women employed in the growing ranks of low-paid and insecure service jobs. In Organizing at the Margins, Jennifer Jihye Chun focuses on this shift as it takes place in two countries: South Korea and the United States.Using comparative historical inquiry and in-depth case studies, she shows how labor movements in countries with different histories and structures of economic development, class formation, and cultural politics embark on similar trajectories of change. Chun shows that as the base of worker power shifts from those who hold high-paying, industrial jobs to the formerly unorganizable, labor movements in both countries are employing new strategies and vocabularies to challenge the assault of neoliberal globalization on workers' rights and livelihoods.Deftly combining theory and ethnography, she argues that by cultivating alternative sources of symbolic leverage that root workers' demands in the collective morality of broad-based communities, as opposed to the narrow confines of workplace disputes, workers in the lowest tiers are transforming the power relations that sustain downgraded forms of work. Her case studies of janitors and personal service workers in the United States and South Korea offer a surprising comparison between converging labor movements in two very different countries as they refashion their relation to historically disadvantaged sectors of the workforce and expand the moral and material boundaries of union membership in a globalizing world.

    From London or Lvov, Bombay or Beijing, Dublin or Dusseldorf, people have come to America to remake themselves, their lives, and their identities. Despite political obstacles, popular indifference, or hostility, they put down roots here, and their social, cultural, and entrepreneurial energies helped forge the open and diverse society we live in. The history of American immigration has often been told by those already here. Becoming Americans tells this epic story from the inside, gathering for the first time over 400 years of writing--from seventeenth-century Jamestown to contemporary Brooklyn and Los Angeles--by first-generation immigrants about the immigrant experience. In sum, over eighty writers create a vivid, passionate, and revealing firsthand account of the challenges and aspirations that define our dynamic multicultural society.In nearly 100 selections--poems, stories, novel excerpts, travel pieces, diary entries, memoirs, and letters--Becoming Americans presents the full range of the experience of coming to America: the reasons for departure, the journey itself, the shock and spectacle of first arrival, the passionate ambivalence toward the old country and the old life, and above all the struggle with the complexities of America. Arranged in chronological order by date of arrival, this unprecedented collection presents a history of the United States that is both familiar and surprisingly new, as seen through the fresh eyes and words of newcomers from more than forty different countries.

    By 1981, this had dwindled to just over 1,000—not unusual for a onetime mining town. But as of 2007, Centralia had the unwelcome distinction of being the state’s tiniest municipality, with a population of nine. The reason: an underground fire that began in 1962 has decimated the town with smoke and toxic gases, and has since made history. Fire Underground is the completely updated classic account of the fire that has been raging under Centralia for decades. David DeKok tells the story of how the fire actually began and how government officials failed to take effective action. By 1981 the fire was spewing deadly gases into homes. A twelve-year-old boy dropped into a steaming hole as a congressman toured nearby. DeKok describes how the people of Centralia banded together to finally win relocation funds—and he reveals what has happened to the few remaining residents as the fiftieth anniversary of the fire’s beginning nears.

    The sound of shells whizzing overhead, screeching through the night like wounded pheasants, was terrifying. When the shells exploded prematurely overhead, a rain of shrapnel fell on the men below—better than when the shells exploded in the trenches...In A More Unbending Battle, journalist and author Pete Nelson chronicles the little-known story of the 369th Infantry Regiment—the first African-American regiment mustered to fight in WWI. Recruited from all walks of Harlem life, the regiment had to fight alongside the French because America’s segregation policy prohibited them from fighting with white U.S. soldiers.Despite extraordinary odds and racism, the 369th became one of the most successful—and infamous—regiments of the war. The Harlem Hellfighters, as their enemies named them, spent longer than any other American unit in combat, were the first Allied unit to reach the Rhine, and showed extraordinary valor on the battlefield, with many soldiers winning the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. Replete with vivid accounts of battlefield heroics, A More Unbending Battle is the thrilling story of the dauntless Harlem Hellfighters.

    Beechwold, three more miles north, was a farm, then a zoo. Today they are bedroom communities but no longer sleepy. The beauty of their grassy knolls, springs, river, and wooded ravines inspired the creation of one of Ohio s best amusement parks, which in turn spurred housing and businesses. The City of Columbus marched right alongside this progress, annexing residential areas almost as soon as they were developed. This new compilation tells, through images and words, the story of Clintonville and Beechwold as they evolved from sleepy hamlets to the communities they are today."

    Based on extensive research at twelve different schools and analyzing at least twenty national fraternities, The Company He Keeps explores many factors--such as class, religiosity, race, sexuality, athleticism, intelligence, and recklessness--that have contributed to particular versions of fraternal masculinity at different times. Syrett demonstrates the ways that fraternity brothers' masculinity has had consequences for other students on campus as well, emphasizing the exclusion of different groups of classmates and the sexual exploitation of female college students.

    With recipes that range from elaborate entrees to simple snacks, I give an overview of American food as I see it and, hopefully, will provide a primer to navigate through an array of international influences to bring a world of flavor into your own home."—Marcus SamuelssonIn his bestselling The Soul of a New Cuisine, Marcus Samuelsson returned to the land of his birth to explore the continent's rich diversity of cultures and cuisines through recipes and stories from his travels in Africa. Now, in The New American Table, Samuelsson takes you on a journey of the inspired food of the United States, his beloved adopted country.Acclaimed for the distinct and diverse cuisine he has created at Aquavit and Riingo, Samuelsson shares more than 300 recipes that embody the uniquely inclusive spirit of American cuisine, from high-end fare to street food; down-home Southern cooking to Southwestern flavors to Asian cuisines, and beyond.In this new book, he explores the full spectrum of this regional American cooking that he has grown to love, meeting people along the way who have brought wonderful foods to their new home and to the receptive American people who have opened their minds and hearts to new foods and new cultures, includingGreen Salsa, to serve over shrimp or as a dipBreakfast BurritosSalmon FlatbreadTempura Crab Salad with Tamarind-Soy VinaigretteSoy-Glazed Dumplings with Sweet Chile SauceChicken Sate with Baby Spinach and Garlic Feta DipTurkey Meatloaf with Tomato-Spinach SauceBeer-Braised Short RibsRustic Chocolate TartRed Berry CobblerA true celebration of the culinary gifts that define The New American Table, this book is accompanied by stunning food and travel photographs documenting Samuelsson's journeys across America and his discovery of the flavors of a nation. Drawing on his own rich cultural heritage, he has created an exciting tribute to the wide range of cultural influences and culinary traditions that have shaped modern American cuisine. The New American Table presents Samuelsson's interpretation of the food that has evolved from these diverse traditions-a contemporary, original, and uniquely American cuisine.