His close musical associations included such towering figures as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and John and Alan Lomax. He helped lay the foundations for blues, modern folk music, and rock 'n' roll. This definitive biography draws on a wealth of new archival material, interviews, and previously unknown recordings to detail Leadbelly's proud, tumultuous, and often violent life.

    

    Then from it, nearly overnight, emerged one of the world's largest and most iconic cities. The birth and evolution of Los Angeles--its seemingly impossible, meteoric rise--can be attributed largely to three ingenious but deeply flawed people. D.W. Griffith, the early film pioneer who first conceived of feature-length movies, gave Hollywood its industry. Aimee Semple McPherson, a young evangelist and radio preacher, infused the city with its spiritual identity as a hub for reinvention. And William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant turned ditch-digger turned autodidactic engineer, would design the massive aqueduct that made survival in the harsh climate feasible.But while Mulholland, Griffith, and Semple McPherson were all masters of their craft, each would self-destruct in spectacular fashion. D.W. Griffith, led by his ballooning ego, would go on to produce a string of commercial failures; Semple McPherson would be crucified in the tabloids for fabricating an account of her own kidnapping; and a dam designed by Mulholland would fail just hours after he gave it a safety inspection.Spanning from 1904 to 1930, The Mirage Factory is the enthralling tale of an improbable city and the people who willed it into existence by pushing the limits of human engineering and peddling fantasies.

    Martin A propulsive and panoramic history of one of the most dramatic stories never told—the greatest railroad war of all time, fought by the daring leaders of the Santa Fe and the Rio Grande to seize, control, and create the American West.It is difficult to imagine now, but for all its gorgeous scenery, the American West might have been barren tundra as far as most Americans knew well into the 19th century. While the West was advertised as a paradise on earth to citizens in the East and Midwest, many believed the journey too hazardous to be worthwhile—until 1869, when the first transcontinental railroad changed the face of transportation. Railroad companies soon became the rulers of western expansion, choosing routes, creating brand-new railroad towns, and building up remote settlements like Santa Fe, Albuquerque, San Diego, and El Paso into proper cities. But thinning federal grants left the routes incomplete, an opportunity that two brash new railroad men, armed with private investments and determination to build an empire across the Southwest clear to the Pacific, soon seized, leading to the greatest railroad war in American history. In From the River to the Sea, bestselling author John Sedgwick recounts, in vivid and thrilling detail, the decade-long fight between General William J. Palmer, the Civil War hero leading the “little family” of his Rio Grande, and William Barstow Strong, the hard-nosed manager of the corporate-minded Santa Fe. What begins as an accidental rivalry when the two lines cross in Colorado soon evolves into an all-out battle as each man tries to outdo the other—claiming exclusive routes through mountains, narrow passes, and the richest silver mines in the world; enlisting private armies to protect their land and lawyers to find loopholes; dispatching spies to gain information; and even using the power of the press and incurring the wrath of the God-like Robber Baron Jay Gould—to emerge victorious. By the end of the century, one man will fade into anonymity and disgrace. The other will achieve unparalleled success—and in the process, transform a sleepy backwater of thirty thousand called “Los Angeles” into a booming metropolis that will forever change the United States. Filled with colorful characters and high drama, told at the speed of a locomotive, From the River to the Sea is an unforgettable piece of American history “that seems to demand a big-screen treatment” (The New Yorker).

    BART" himself When BART opened in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1972, it became a catalyst for a renaissance in modern rail transit, both nationally and internationally. The concept as sold to Bay Area voters was gargantuan: by adopting aerospace technologies such as microchips for ground transportation, the new computer-operated rail system would bridge counties and curb urban sprawl amid a booming automobile culture. But it all came within a gnat's eyelash of not happening. The question raised by pundits and taxpayers alike was: would this space-age plan actually work, or be the biggest boondoggle in the country's history? In the first-ever history book about BART, longtime agency spokesman Michael C. Healy gives an insider's account of the rapid transit system's inception, hard-won approval, construction, and operations, "warts and all." Written with a master storyteller's homey wit and sharp attention to detail, Healy recreates the politically fraught venture to bring a new kind of public transit to the West Coast. What emerges is a sense of the individuals who made (and make) BART happen. From tales of staying up until 3:00 a.m. with Bill Stokes and Jack Everson to hear the election results for the rapid transit vote or weathering scandals, strikes, and growing pains, this look behind the scenes of an iconic, seemingly monolithic structure reveals people at their most human-and determined to change the status quo.

    A role model for generations of writers and performers, Doc was renowned for his mastery of virtually every popular style, from the gutbucket rhythm and blues of “Lonely Avenue” to the symphonic soul of “Save the Last Dance for Me” to the pure pop of “Viva Las Vegas.” His songs-“This Magic Moment,” “A Teenager in Love,” “Hushabye,” “Little Sister,” “Turn Me Loose,” and many others-have been recorded by everyone from Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, and B. B. King to Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and Bruce Springsteen, with sales exceeding $100 million. Doc was ready-made for literature. His collaborator Mort Shuman once described him as an “entire rollicking soul neighborhood rolled into one man.” Garrulous, profane, hilarious, and Rabelaisian, Doc was never inhibited about offering his opinions and his friendship. His confidants, collaborators, and discoveries included Duke Ellington, John Lennon, Dr. John, Jimmy Scott, Bette Midler, and Lou Reed. In the words of renowned producer Jerry Wexler, “If the music industry had a heart, it would be Doc Pomus.” Despite, or more likely because of, his successes, few acquaintances knew that this writer of jukebox hits led one of the most dramatic and unlikely lives of his time. Spanning extravagant wealth and desperate poverty, suburban domesticity and the depths of New York’s underworld, worldwide fame and near-total obscurity, enduring love and persistent loneliness, Doc’s story remains one of the great untold American lives. Its chapters comprise a back-room history of rock ’n’ roll, touching on more than a half-century of American popular music-from the blues Doc performed with Lester Young to his collaborations with the luminaries of New York’s punk scene, shot through with vivid portraits of virtually every major player. Lonely Avenue is the first biography of this American original, so elegantly rendered that it reads like a novel, and fortified by full, exclusive access to Doc Pomus’s family, friends, voluminous journals, and archives.

    The first history of the Cherokees to appear in over four decades, this is also the first to be endorsed by the tribe and the first to be written by a Cherokee. Robert Conley begins his survey with Cherokee origin myths and legends. He then explores their relations with neighboring Indian groups and European missionaries and settlers. He traces their forced migrations west, relates their participations on both sides of the Civil War and the wars of the twentieth century, and concludes with an examination of Cherokee life today. Conley provides analyses for general readers of all ages to learn the significance of tribal lore and Cherokee tribal law. Following the history is a listing of the Principal Chiefs of the Cherokees with a brief biography of each and separate listings of the chiefs of the Eastern Cherokees and the Western Cherokees. For those who want to know more about Cherokee heritage and history, Conley offers additional reading lists at the end of each chapter.

    At the peak of Red Cloud’s powers the Sioux could claim control of one-fifth of the contiguous United States and the loyalty of thousands of fierce fighters. But the fog of history has left Red Cloud strangely obscured. Now, thanks to the rediscovery of a lost autobiography, and painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of our nation’s most powerful and successful Indian warrior can finally be told.

    By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journaliststo bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city's mostimportant thoroughfare. Today the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards. In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City's rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, thepublic was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creationof Atlantic City as the Nation's Playground was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic, too open and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, the urbanbalance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casinos worlds walled off from the dilapidated houses, boarded-up businesses, and lots razed for redevelopment that never came. Tourists are deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantlypoor African American residents. Despite ten of thousands of buses and cars rolling into every day, gambling has not saved Atlantic City or returned it to its glory days. Simon's moving narrative of Atlantic City's past points to the troubling fate of urban America and the nation's cultural trajectory in the twentieth century, with broad implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.

    

    Fiction. Published in 1992, well before Sherman Alexie became well-known as the screenwriter for the film SMOKE SIGNALS, THE BUSINESS OF FANCYDANCING has now been turned into a film with none other than Alexie himself in his directorial debut. The screenplay for the movie, which recently won the Audience Award at the San Francisco Film Festival, is loosly adapted from this book. Many film-goers will want to visit or revisit the elegaic poems and stories that set the tone for the film itself. In an age when many 'Native American' writers publish books that prove their ignorance of the real Indian world, Sherman Alexie paints painfully honest visions of our beautiful and brutal lives--Adrian C. Louis.

     The young were disinterested in preserving the old ways of life and he realised that without a written language of their own, the culture, religion and folk-lore of the Blackfeet would soon fall into oblivion. “When I discovered that I could obtain the unbosoming of their secrets and that the door was open to me for study and investigation, I resolved that I would do my best to preserve all the knowledge available.” The Old North Trail: Life, Legends, and Religion of the Blackfeet Indians is the fruit of that study and investigation. McClintock was able to gain unprecedented access to Blackfoot culture due to the fact that he became adopted by Chief Mad Dog, the high priest of the Sun Dance, and spent four years living on the Blackfoot Reservation. “An intriguing . . . mixture of stories, legends, and descriptions of religious rituals, all woven into [McClintock’s] own personal account of his life with the Blackfeet. He tells of being inducted into the tribe, participating in family ceremonies, and living with his adoptive family. . . . Other times McClintock takes a serious anthropological approach as he describes the social customs of the tribe, including many of their songs, and catalogs the names, uses, and preparations of various herbs and medicinal plants. [The Old North Trail] has much more personal detail about Blackfoot daily life than can be found in any other sources from that period.” — Natural History Walter McClintock was born in Pittsburgh in 1879. He spent much of his life studying the Blackfeet Native Americans and wrote a number of anthropological books on his time with them as he grew to learn about their religion and culture. The Old North Trail is perhaps his most famous work, it was first published in 1910. McClintock eventually passed away in 1949.

    California’s gold drew fortune-seekers from the ends of the earth. It accelerated America’s imperial expansion and exacerbated the tensions that exploded in the Civil War. And, as H. W. Brands makes clear in this spellbinding book, the Gold Rush inspired a new American dream—the “dream of instant wealth, won by audacity and good luck.”Brands tells his epic story from multiple perspectives: of adventurers John and Jessie Fremont, entrepreneur Leland Stanford, and the wry observer Samuel Clemens—side by side with prospectors, soldiers, and scoundrels. He imparts a visceral sense of the distances they traveled, the suffering they endured, and the fortunes they made and lost. Impressive in its scholarship and overflowing with life, The Age of Gold is history in the grand traditions of Stephen Ambrose and David McCullough.

    His mother conceived him out of wedlock, and at age 13, in Charleston, South Carolina, he was sent to work to support her and his siblings. But, via the assistance of series of mentors, he rose from obscurity, making his way to Washington, before joining the upper echelons of society by marrying the daughter of an influential senator, Thomas Hart Benton, who only reluctantly blessed their union. Jessie Benton Frémont, as she came to be known, had grown up in the mold of her father, knowing personally then President Andrew Jackson, but her ambition was frustrated. She had limited options for own career advancement, at a time when women could not yet vote let alone hold public office. But she threw herself passionately into the promotion of her husband who rose to become one of the most famous men of the era. John travelled thousands of miles on horseback, at times with an almost willful indifference to his safety and that of the other members of his expeditions, many of whom would perish, in an effort to map the uncharted American West. The notes and letters he would send home Jessie skillfully shaped into dramatic reports and bestselling books. She became his political adviser, and was gradually recognized as a political force in her own right. Thus she helped lift John to a seat in the Senate, and ultimately to propel him, in 1856, to become the first-ever presidential nominee of the newly established Republican party. With rare detail and in consummate style, Inskeep tells this story of a couple whose joint ambitions and talents seemed somehow intertwined with those of the nascent United States itself. The Frémonts came to be influential to not one but three great social movements of the times--westward settlement, women's rights and opposition to slavery. Their adventures amount to nothing less than a tour of the early American soul.

    His long, intimate piece on the tour, The Rolling Stones Discover America, captures the highs and lows of the grueling tour and has become a classic of rock ‘n’ roll journalism—one that the Maysles brothers studied to guide the editing of their film, Gimme Shelter.