Tecumseh and the Quest for Indian Leadership


R. David Edmunds - 1984
    Since his death as an avowed warrior at the Battle of the Thames in 1813, the details of Tecumsehrsquo;s life have passed into the realm of legend, myth and drama. In this new edition, David Edmunds considers the man who acted as a diplomat ndash; a charismatic strategist who attempted to smooth cultural divisions between tribes and collectively oppose the seizure of their land.pThe titles in the Library of American Biography Series make ideal supplements for American History Survey courses or other courses in American history where figures in history are explored. Paperback, brief, and inexpensive, each interpretive biography in this series focuses on a figure whose actions and ideas significantly influenced the course of American history and national life. In addition, each biography relates the life of its subject to the broader themes and developments of the times.

The Bay of Pigs


Howard Jones - 2008
    Drawing on recently declassified CIA documents, Jones deftly examines the train of missteps and self-deceptions that led to the invasion of U.S.-trained exiles at the Bay of Pigs. Ignoring warnings from the ambassador to Cuba, the Eisenhower administration put in motion an operation that proved nearly unstoppable even after the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. The CIA and Pentagon, meanwhile, both voiced confidence in the outcome of the invasion, especially after coordinating previous successful coups in Guatemala and Iran. And so the Kennedy administration launched the exile force toward its doom in Cochinos Bay on April 17, 1961. Jones gives a riveting account of the battle--and the confusion in the White House--before moving on to explore its implications. The Bay of Pigs, he writes, set the course of Kennedy's foreign policy. It was a humiliation for the administration that fueled fears of Communist domination and pushed Kennedy toward a hardline cold warrior stance. But at the same time, the failed attack left him deeply skeptical of CIA and military advisers and influenced his later actions during the Cuban missile crisis.

Can't Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945-2000


Martin Torgoff - 2004
    In Can't Find My Way Home, journalist and filmmaker Martin Torgoff chronicles what a long strange trip it's been as the American Century became the Great Stoned Age. Weaving together first-person accounts and historical background, Can't Find My Way Home is a narrative vast in scope yet rich in intimate detail. Torgoff tells the stories of those whose lives became synonymous with the drug culture, from Charlie Parker, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John Belushi to ordinary people who felt their consciousness "expanded" or who plumbed the depths of addiction. He also examines the broader impact of drugs on society and politics, from the war on drugs to the recovery movement, and the continuing debate over drug policy. A vivid work of cultural history that neither demonizes nor romanticizes its subject, Can't Find My Way Home is a provocative and fascinating look at how drugs have entered the American mainstream.

Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn


Charles Higham - 1975
    And she herself tells the deeply moving story of her twenty-five-year love affair with Tracy. Here is a vivid portrait of the most elegant, independent, and tempestuous star to grace the screen. Over a half million copies sold.

Sober Is My New Drunk


Paul Bradley Carr - 2012
    The letter was both a confession and an invitation for public scrutiny. “No matter where I was,” he recalls, “there was always a chance that someone had read my post and was waiting to catch me with a drink in my hand.” To help keep himself on the straight and narrow, Carr still has a counter at the top of his site, ticking off the number of days he’s gone without a drink.In this bracing (but zero-proof) tale of recovery, Carr delivers his own twelve steps to building a life without booze. His hard-earned advice, punctuated with anecdotes that are both cautionary and comic (a bender once took him to Iceland, where he drunkenly believed he’d get better Wi-Fi) is given with humility and goodwill. Along the way, Carr celebrates the simple yet overlooked pleasures of sobriety—weight loss, a renewed love life, the ability to buy a phone or laptop without promptly losing it in a bar. As he slowly discovers, a sober life actually CAN be fun. What’s more, he’ll remember it.

Eastern Passage


Farley Mowat - 2010
    This was a time in which he wrote his first books and weathered his first storms of controversy, a time when he was discovering himself through experiences that, as he writes, "go to the heart of who and what I was" during his formative years as a writer and activist.In the 1950s, with his career taking off but his first marriage troubled, Farley Mowat buys a piece of land northwest of Toronto and attempts to settle down. His accounts of building his home are by turns hilarious and affecting, while the insights into his early work and his relationship with his publishers offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a writer’s career.But in the end, his restless soul could not be pinned to one place, and when his father offered him a chance to sail down the St. Lawrence, he jumped at it, not realizing that his journey would bring him face to face with one of Canada’s more shocking secrets – one most of us still don’t know today. This horrific incident, recalling as it did the lingering aftermath of war, and from which it took the area decades to recover, would forge the final tempering of Mowat as the activist we know today.Farley Mowat grows wiser and more courageous with each passing year, and Eastern Passage is a funny, astute, and moving book that reveals that there is more yet to this fascinating and beloved figure than we think we know.

Novels and Social Writings


Jack London - 1901
    His prose, always brisk and vigorous, rises in The People of the Abyss to italicized horror over the human degradations he saw in the slums of East London. It also accommodates the dazzling oratory of the hero of The Iron Heel, an American revolutionary named Ernest Everhard, whose speeches have the accents of some of London’s own political essays, like the piece (reprinted in this volume) entitled “Revolution.” London’s prophetic political vision was recalled by Leon Trotsky, who observed that when The Iron Heel first appeared, in 1907, not one of the revolutionary Marxists had yet fully imagined “the ominous perspective of the alliance between finance capitalism and labor aristocracy.”Whether he is recollecting, in The Road, the exhilarating camaraderie of hobo gangs, or dramatizing, in Martin Eden, a life like his own, even to the foreshadowing of his own death at age forty, or confessing his struggles with alcoholism in the memoir John Barleycorn, London displays a genius for giving marginal life the aura of romance. Violence and brutality flash into life everywhere in his work, both as a condition of modern urban existence and as the inevitable reaction to it.Though he is outraged in The People of the Abyss by the condition of the poor in capitalist societies, London is even more appalled by their submission, and in the novel he wrote immediately afterward, The Call of the Wild (in the companion volume, Novels and Stories), he constructed an animal fable about the necessary reversion to savagery. The Iron Heel, with its panoramic scenes of urban warfare in Chicago, envisions the United States taken over by fascists who perpetuate their regime for three hundred years. It constitutes London’s warning to his fellow socialists that mere persuasion is insufficient to combat a system that ultimately relies on force.

Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and the First Clash Over the New Deal


Eric Rauchway - 2018
    Meanwhile, still-President Hoover, worried about FDR's abilities and afraid of the president-elect's policies, became the first comprehensive critic of the New Deal. Thus, even before FDR took office, both the principles of the welfare state, and reaction against it, had already taken form.Winter War reveals how, in the months before the hundred days, FDR and Hoover battled over ideas and shaped the divisive politics of the twentieth century.

Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans


Joyce Appleby - 2000
    Anyone who started a business, marketed a new invention, ran for office, formed an association, or wrote for publication was helping to fashion the world's first liberal society. These are the people we encounter in Inheriting the Revolution, a vibrant tapestry of the lives, callings, decisions, desires, and reflections of those Americans who turned the new abstractions of democracy, the nation, and free enterprise into contested realities. Through data gathered on thousands of people, as well as hundreds of memoirs and autobiographies, Joyce Appleby tells myriad intersecting stories of how Americans born between 1776 and 1830 reinvented themselves and their society in politics, economics, reform, religion, and culture. They also had to grapple with the new distinction of free and slave labor, with all its divisive social entailments; the rout of Enlightenment rationality by the warm passions of religious awakening; the explosion of small business opportunities for young people eager to break out of their parents' colonial cocoon. Few in the nation escaped the transforming intrusiveness of these changes. Working these experiences into a vivid picture of American cultural renovation, Appleby crafts an extraordinary--and deeply affecting--account of how the first generation established its own culture, its own nation, its own identity.The passage of social responsibility from one generation to another is always a fascinating interplay of the inherited and the novel; this book shows how, in the early nineteenth century, the very idea of generations resonated with new meaning in the United States.

In Search of the Edge of Time: Black Holes, White Holes, Wormholes


John Gribbin - 1992
    Physicists who formerly shunned these astrophysical eccentricities have begun to theorize about them and search for the physical proof of their existence with the zeal of converts. The unavoidable conclusion of this research is that these rips in the fabric of spacetime are not only real, they might actually provide a passage to other universes and travel through time. This book tells the story of the theories and discoveries that have led scientists to these conclusions.

Amidst the Shadows of Trees: A Holocaust Child’s Survival in the Partisans


Miriam M. Brysk - 2007
    They announce that the logical and important places to begin to examine that history are eye witnesses. Miriam Brysk’s chronicle is among the more exceptional of these works. It reflects her own life: highly accomplished, intelligent, detailed and thoughtful. At age seven, Miriam, her mother Bronka and father, Chaim Miasnik, a renowned surgeon, escaped the Lida ghetto and joined Jewish partisans in the Lipiczany Forest. Before the end of the war, Miriam estimates that her father had saved hundreds of lives and helped build and supervise a partisan hospital in the swamps of the forest. Constantly hunted by German soldiers, she experienced childhood terror that has remained with her. She lost her innocence, her childhood, her youth as she clung to her mother and her prized possession, a pistol. Her head was shaved so she would look like a boy. Her memory of the details of that time—both in the Lida ghetto and in the forest—remains remarkably sharp and distinguishes this memoir from many others. — Sidney Bolkosky, William E. Stirton Professor in the Social Sciences, Professor of History, University of Michigan-Dearborn

The Naked Trader's Guide to Spread Betting: How to make money from shares in up or down markets


Robbie Burns - 2010
    But it's not a world populated by pinstriped men waiting to rob you, steal your savings and do nasty things to small kittens. You can win. (And you never have to pay a penny in tax!) This book shows you how. Robbie Burns, bestselling author of The Naked Trader, has been spread betting for years. He explains why it's an indispensable tool to use alongside normal investing or trading. Especially as you can make money even if the market goes down. Robbie takes you through everything from how it works, to managing your risk, working out exposure, and how, often, doing nothing is the best move! He explains the ins and outs of successfully betting on shares in his trademark down-to-earth style, covering everything you need to know. From the simple stuff through to proven strategies, including those that can be used in different markets - it's all here. There are also behind-the-scenes visits to two top spread betting firms. But it's a big, bad old world out there, and there are a whole heap of mistakes you can make, an awful lot of money you can lose. Rounding up spine-chilling traders' tales of spread bets gone wrong, and using all he has learnt from making silly mistakes himself, Robbie also helps you learn what not to do. This is the ultimate guide to spread betting - how to do it, have fun and hopefully make a few quid.

Howl of the Hearthworld


Aaron Dembski-Bowden - 2015
    Find out how the wolf pack assigned to guard over the most most redoubtable of all the Emperor’s sons, Rogal Dorn, feel about their mission.

Sid James: A Biography


Cliff Goodwin - 1995
    Covering Sid's early years in South Africa and life as a ladies' hairdresser, his obsession with gambling and women, his questioning by Scotland Yard in a murder case, Hancock's Half Hour and the Carry On films, and Sid's death on stage at the age of 63, Cliff Goodwin reveals the amazing truth behing the legend.

Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening: The Secret to Growing Piles of Food in the Sunshine State


David The Good - 2015
    You CAN grow buckets upon buckets of food in Florida - and this book gives you the secrets to pulling it off year after year. Lots more food - for a lot less work! Whether you want to save money, feed your family, start a survival garden, garden year-round, go paleo or build a huge prepper garden, this is the book for you. Learn the cheap simple techniques that will kickstart your Florida gardening. Discover the crops that will always come through for you. Quit hating the sand and the bugs and start reaping abundant harvests like you've never had before! This book provides the answers for both beginners and experts, delivered with humor. If you want yet another boring gardening book - this isn't it. Through combining Back to Eden gardening, Square Foot Gardening, Biointensive gardening, container gardening and some of the most productive crops on the planet, you WILL succeed! This is easy Florida gardening like you've never seen before. Pick up a copy of Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening and turn your backyard patch of weeds and sand into a money-saving vegetable factory that will keep your family fed no matter what the economy does. Start gardening RIGHT NOW before it's too late! Expert Florida gardener David The Good shares how in Totally Crazy Easy Florida Gardening.