CALIFORNIA: A Trip Across the Plains, in the Spring of 1850


James Abbey - 2015
    He kept a day-by-day journal of his overland journey. Abbey provides a wealth of information about what it was like to travel overland by wagon in 1850.

Stand To... A Journey to Manhood


E. Franklin Evans - 2008
    Franklin Evans had watched every war movie John Wayne ever made, sometimes several times over. When the “Duke” led his men, war was exciting and heroes were made as they ruggedly fought and predictably won each battle. But when Evans’ high school friend and real-life hero Glenn was killed in Vietnam, war became real and personal for Evans, and he felt a tremendous obligation to the buddy who gave his life in that faraway jungle. At the tender age of nineteen, Evans voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Army and left for basic training in early December of 1966. Before long, he was deeply entrenched in a treacherous war, far removed from his innocent and carefree youth. He had to learn not only to survive but also to muster the bravery to lead others in combat as he was thrust from adolescence into adulthood. It has taken Evans more than thirty-five years to begin to heal the physical and emotional wounds that kept him from sharing his intensely personal story. From his depiction of the picturesque aerial view of Cam Rahn Bay to that of the barbed wire, metal planking, and squat huts housing weapons of death and destruction, Evans’s Stand To …provides a vividly detailed glimpse into what it was like to become a man on the battlefields of Vietnam.

The House on Apple Hill Lane (Harbor Hills. #1)


Elizabeth Bromke - 2021
    On a tight budget, she’s thrilled to discover a charming fixer-upper and jumps to make an offer. But it isn’t until after she’s signed the paperwork that she learns there’s more to the foreclosure than a few loose floorboards… Annette Best owns Best on the Block realty, but the business is struggling. Then a new face comes to town, and Annette sees an opportunity to save her company… as long as no one finds out about the history of Apple Hill Lane.Judith Banks is freshly single but too fed up to date. Or so she thinks. Then a new neighbor moves in on her street, and brings with her a team of pros–electricians and plumbers and all the sorts of men Judith never expected to find attractive. Soon enough, she’s drawn to one particular worker, someone who happens to know about the house’s storied history.Beverly Castle had it all. Now she’s lost it all, and the only thing keeping her going is her job with the Harbor Herald. She needs something else: a good friend. When the arrival of a new neighbor inspires her to investigate, she finds that she isn’t the only one curious about the house on Apple Hill… or the woman who now lives there.If you enjoyed the Birch Harbor series, you will fall in love with Harbor Hills, a Birch Harbor spinoff. Romance, secrets and mystery, family ties and female friendships abound in this heartwarming saga about four women who find friendship right next door.

Special Ops Shifters: Dallas Force Box Set (#1-4)


Meg Ripley - 2020
    One heart-pounding series.Get lost in the fiery, action-packed pages of the Special Ops Shifters: Dallas Force series, now available as a complete collection! These rock-hard alpha shifters will stop at nothing to protect their mates, no matter what dangerous missions they face.If you like swoonworthy shifter tales with powerful soldiers, camaraderie, strong and sassy heroines, action and adventure, and an adorable baby she-cub, you'll fall in love with the Special Ops Shifters: Dallas Force series.AshAfter retiring from the Delta Force, I'm more than ready to settle down.I've got my eye on a ranch in Alaska, where I'll have the freedom to unleash my pent-up polar bear at will.But my inner beast knows life up north will be a lonely one without a mate.When the Special Ops Shifter Force asks me to enlist in their new Dallas unit, curiosity gets the best of me and I rethink my plans.Being deployed on a covert mission to Antarctica wasn't something I expected.Neither was finding a dragoness who captivated my bear the moment we met.LaneMy flight and I relocated to the tranquility of Antarctica years ago.But as one of the few dragons in existence, I don't know if I'll ever find my fated in a place so remote.Our serenity is shattered when the military infiltrates, quickly turning our home into a prison for experimentation.But little do I know the rebel who claims he's come to help might also rescue my heart.Can I trust my so-called savior, or is this the end for me and my clan?Read Rescued by the Soldier Bear and the following stories in this sizzling shifter romance box set: Rescued by the Soldier BearProtected by the Soldier TigerFated to the Soldier FoxBaby for the Soldier CougarSteamy shifter love scenes and HEAs inside! No cheating or cliffhangers in these standalone stories. Readers 18+.

In My Place


Charlayne Hunter-Gault - 1992
    A powrful act of witness to the brutal realities of segregation.

Pinochet and Me


Marc Cooper - 2000
    Marc Cooper went to Chile and became translator to Salvadore Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist head of state. With an office in the Moneda Palace, the author had to flee as the US sponsored bombing on September 11, 1973 sent the palace up in flames.

e. e. cummings: A Life


Susan Cheever - 2014
    At the time of his death in 1962, at age sixty-eight, he was, after Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in the United States. E. E. Cummings was and remains controversial. He has been called “a master” (Malcolm Cowley); “hideous” (Edmund Wilson). James Dickey called him a “daringly original poet with more vitality and more sheer uncompromising talent than any other living American writer.” In Susan Cheever’s rich, illuminating biography we see Cummings’s idyllic childhood years in Cambridge, Massachusetts; his Calvinist father—distinguished Harvard professor and sternly religious minister of the Cambridge Congregational Church; his mother—loving, attentive, a source of encouragement, the aristocrat of the family, from Unitarian writers, judges, and adventurers.  We see Cummings—slight, agile, playful, a product of a nineteenth-century New England childhood, bred to be flinty and determined; his love of nature; his sense of fun, laughter, mimicry; his desire from the get-go to stand conventional wisdom on its head, which he himself would often do, literally, to amuse.  At Harvard, he roomed with John Dos Passos; befriended Lincoln Kirstein; read Latin, Greek, and French; earned two degrees; discovered alcohol, fast cars, and burlesque at the Old Howard Theater; and raged against the school’s conservative, exclusionary upper-class rule by A. Lawrence Lowell.  In Cheever’s book we see that beneath Cummings’s blissful, golden childhood the strains of sadness and rage were already at play. He grew into a dark young man and set out on a lifelong course of rebellion against conventional authority and the critical establishment, devouring the poetry of Ezra Pound, whose radical verses pushed Cummings away from the politeness of the traditional nature poem toward a more adventurous, sexually conscious form. We see that Cummings’s self-imposed exile from Cambridge—a town he’d come to hate for its intellectualism, Puritan uptightness, racism, and self-righteous xenophobia—seemed necessary for him as a man and a poet. Headstrong and cavalier, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in World War I, working alongside Hemingway, Joyce, and Ford Madox Ford . . . his ongoing stand against the imprisonment of his soul taking a literal turn when he was held in a makeshift prison for “undesirables and spies,” an experience that became the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room. We follow Cummings as he permanently flees to Greenwich Village to be among other modernist poets of the day—Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas—and we see the development of both the poet and his work against the backdrop of modernism and through the influences of his contemporaries: Stein, Amy Lowell, Joyce, and Pound. Cheever’s fascinating book gives us the evolution of an artist whose writing was at the forefront of what was new and daring and bold in an America in transition.(With 28 pages of black-and-white images.)

The Road Most Traveled


Chuck Ragan - 2012
    There couldn't be a better person to put together this tome than Hot Water Music's Chuck Ragan and here he's collected tales from members of the Gaslight Anthem, Rise Against, At The Drive-In and more, all of whom share their own unique perspective on travel. The road isn't always glamorous but for some of us it's in our blood. These are those stories.

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights


Jonathan Francis Goodridge
    

Havoc / Chaos / Insanity


Xavier Neal - 2015
    What happens when a broken Marine collides with a girl running from a haunting past? Will the two be each other's saviors or will the havoc, chaos and insanity from their lives consume them?

Spark


Patricia Leavy - 2019
    One day an invitation arrives. Peyton has been selected to attend a luxurious all-expense-paid seminar in Iceland, where participants, billed as some of the greatest thinkers in the world, will be charged with answering one perplexing question. Meeting her diverse teammates--two neuroscientists, a philosopher, a dance teacher, a collage artist, and a farmer--Peyton wonders what she could ever have to contribute. The ensuing journey of discovery will transform the characters' work, their biases, and themselves. This suspenseful novel shows that the answers you seek can be found in the most unlikely places. It can be read for pleasure, is a great choice for book clubs, and can be used as unique and inspiring reading in qualitative research and other courses in education, sociology, social work, psychology, and communication.

Two Decades Naked


Leigh Hopkinson - 2016
    None of them fit so well, however, as stripping. She figured it couldn't be that difficult - she was just going to dance on stage in front of a bunch of strangers. She'd show them a bit of skin, but the gig wasn't going to last that long. Or so she imagined. While stripping was harder than Leigh thought it would be, she hadn't counted on it being so exhilarating - or lucrative. So when she moved to Melbourne and needed to make a living, the lure of her old job was strong. The world of the strip club had become familiar, even reassuring, though some of the people she met during the course of her job didn't exactly give her faith in the future of humanity. Over the course of Leigh's career, she learnt a lot about other people and even more about herself, and the result is a story that delves into a world that not everyone visits but everyone finds fascinating.

Archy's Life of Mehitabel


Don Marquis - 1938
    Don Marquis' creations have been constantly in print since 1934.

Make It Scream, Make It Burn


Leslie Jamison - 2019
    A combination of memoir, criticism, and journalism, Make It Scream, Make It Burn is Leslie Jamison's profound exploration of the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession. Among Jamison's subjects are 52 Blue, deemed "the loneliest whale in the world"; the eerie specter of reincarnated children; devotees of an online existence called Second Life, to the exclusion of their real lives; Civil War photography; and an entire museum dedicated to relationship breakups. Through these essays and through forays into her own obsessions and longings, Jamison delves into the nature of storytelling itself. We wonder alongside her whether it is ever really possible to hear someone else's story without somehow making it our own, without seeing it through the cracked windows of our private selves.Throughout these essays, Jamison, who has frequently been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, shines the spotlight every bit as uncomfortably on herself as she does on others. Unlike the standard journalistic practice, Jamison acknowledges her emotional investment in her subjects, always with utmost clarity and unwavering empathy. In her view, true art cannot be made any other way. Indeed, this refusal to hide—this emotional frankness—is precisely the quality that makes Jamison's questing and irrepressible voice impossible not to fall in love with.

Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates


Greg Johnson - 1998
    Johnson reveals little-known facts about Oates's personal and family history and debunks many of the myths that have arisen about this brilliant, enigmatic woman. Johnson takes readers from Oates's impoverished childhood in upstate New York and the birth of her autistic sister through Oates's studies at Syracuse University, where her talent was immediately recognized, to the full breadth of her astonishingly productive career. His astute examination of Oates's novels, short stories, and plays demonstrates how her art has been informed by her life.