Best of
United-States

1963

I Have a Dream / Letter from Birmingham Jail


Martin Luther King Jr. - 1963
    explains why blacks can no longer be victims of inequality. Also features King's "I Have a Dream" speech, which was delivered to 250,000 civil rights marchers

Runes of the North


Sigurd F. Olson - 1963
    Olson explores the haunting appeal of the wilderness. He recounts how the legends of the northern vastness of Canada and Alaska have influenced him, weaving the tales and myths with his own stories and experiences as an explorer, writer, grandfather, and biologist. Now available in paperback for the first time, Runes of the North is a mystical and reflective guide to the northern wilderness written with a oneness and communion with nature that is unique to Olson's pen. It is a work filled with beauty, wisdom, and renewal.

Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area


Harry M. Caudill - 1963
    Today it details Appalachia's difficult past, and at the same time, presents an accurate historical backdrop for a contemporary understanding of the Appalachian region.

The American Revolution: Pages from a Negro Worker's Notebook


James Boggs - 1963
    He grew up in a world where the white folks are gentlemen by day and Ku Klux Klanners at night. Marion Junction is in Dallas County where as late as 1963, although African-Americans made up over 57 percent of the total county population of 57,000, only 130 were registered voters. After graduating from Dunbar High School in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1937, Boggs took the first freight train north, bumming his way through the western part of the country, working in the hop fields of the state of Washington, cutting ice in Minnesota, and finally ending up in Detroit where he worked on WPA until the Second World War gave him a chance to enter the Chrysler auto plant. Both a keen analysis of U.S. society and a passionate call for revolutionary struggle, The American Revolution has been translated into French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese.

Miss Osborne-the-Mop


Wilson Gage - 1963
    Jody discovers she has magic powers, and turns a mop into a person.

This is the Way to the Moon


Miroslav Sasek - 1963
    The brilliant, vibrant illustrations have been meticulously preserved, remaining true to his vision more than forty years later and, where applicable, facts have been updated for the twenty-first century, appearing on a "This is . . . Today" page at the back of each book. The stylish, charming illustrations, coupled with Sasek’s witty, playful narrative, make these books a perfect souvenir that will delight both children and their parents, many of whom will remember them from their own childhood. In This is the Way to the Moon, first published in 1963, Sasek rockets readers to Cape Canaveral—the space capital of the world, a science-fiction-turned-fact spot on the Florida coast—with a nostalgic look at the electronic brains that put our man up into space and brought him down again. Also included are the updated statistics about the lunar landing and a mini history of NASA’s space program.

Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure


R. Buckminster Fuller - 1963
    And he sets forth his amazing and challenging ideas for the world of the future - ideas that would revolutionize everything from university education to bathroom design, ideas that, above all, demonstrate how we can and must make for more imaginative and efficient use of the resources now available to us to ensure a better standard of living for all men. --- from book's back cover

Mark Twain's San Francisco


Mark Twain - 1963
    Editor Bernard Taper has gathered together a heady selection of newspaper articles, correspondence, poetry, and short stories that are humorous--sometimes exasperating and controversial--but always engaging. Like a good sidekick in a comedy duo, Edward Jump, a contemporary of Twain's, offers through his lively illustrations a visual drum roll to Twain's cantankerous prose. From earthquakes, police scandals, and tantalizing silver mine bonanzas to elegant ladies blowing their noses in "exquisitely modulated tones" and seals "writhing and squirming like exaggerated maggots" below the Cliff House, Mark Twain has left us a vision of San Francisco that is at once fascinating and hilariously familiar.

Two Roads to Sumter


Bruce Catton - 1963
    By showing how these two major figures--both Kentucky-born--developed divergent attitudes, the Cattons simultaneously reveal why the North and South became increasingly isolated from each other during the 1850s, and why war became inevitable. Also captured: the epic sweep of the era, with its great new railroads, land-hungry westward expansion, and developing industrial and agricultural empires.

The Messenger


Charles Stevenson Wright - 1963
    Realistically narrated in the first person by Charles Stevenson -- a light-skinned African American newcomer to Manhattan from small-town Missouri -- the novel dramatizes the isolation and alienation of those who fall prey to America's social, economic, and racial caste systems. Stevenson works as an office messenger and constantly finds himself on the edges of power, yet is utterly devoid of any. A man perceived as neither black nor white, “a minority within a minority,” he drifts through the naturalistic city of New York, where victory and defeat are accepted “with the same marvelous indifference.”