Combining lively storytelling with in-depth historical research, exclusive interviews, and insights from parapsychology, Bielski penned a unique and fascinating exploration of the region's supernatural folklore.

    For the first time, a former member of MI6 reveals her conversation with Neil Armstrong at a NASA conference, when he confirmed that there were other spacecraft on the Moon when Apollo 11 landed in 1969. Armstrong also confirmed that the CIA was behind the cover-up. In a further admission in 12/2012, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev revealed that the president of Russia is given a special top secret folder that in its entirety contains information about aliens who have visited our planet. Along with this, the president is given a report of the Special Service that exercises control over aliens in our country. "I will not tell you how many of them are among us because it may cause panic."

    These are real accounts from pilots who have experienced strange phenomena. Landing at an airfield that wasn't there; planes guided by dead pilots; Bermuda Triangle accounts; sightings of aircraft from the past; airfields haunted by airmen killed in action; ghost warning prevents plane crash; more.

    But even spending an entire day with Ozzy Osbourne wasn't as frightening as when he agreed to follow Philadelphia "demonologist" Lou Gentile on his appointed rounds. Will Storr never believed in ghosts—but his healthy skepticism couldn't explain the strange lights and sounds he witnessed, and the weird behavior of the occupants of several allegedly haunted houses.What resulted is a confirmed cynic's (and proud of it!) dedicated search for answers in a shadowy world of séances, mediums, devil worshippers—even the Vatican's chief exorcist. So get ready to confront the genuinely creepy along with the hilariously ridiculous in Will Storr vs. the Supernatural!

    His life mirrored his country's, as he grew from a Mississippi River boyhood in the days of the frontier, to a Wild-West journalist during the Gold Rush, to become the king of the eastern establishment and a global celebrity as America became an international power. Along the way, Mark Twain keenly observed the characters and voices that filled the growing country, and left us our first authentically American literature. Ron Powers's magnificent biography offers the definitive life of the founding father of our culture.

    A snake-handling preacher by the name of Glendel Buford Summerford has just tried to murder his wife, Darlene, by snakebite. At gunpoint, he forces her to stick her arm in a box of rattlesnakes. She is bitten twice and nearly dies. The trial, which becomes a sensation throughout southern Appalachia, echoes familiar themes from a troubled secular world - marital infidelity, spouse abuse, and alcoholism - but it also raises questions about faith, forgiveness, redemption, and, of course, snakes. Glenn Summerford is convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. When Dennis Covington covered the trial of Glenn Summerford for The New York Times, a world far beyond the trial opened up to him. Salvation on Sand Mountain begins with a crime and a trial and then becomes an extraordinary exploration of a place, a people, and an author's descent into himself. The place is southern Appalachia - a country deep and unsettled, where the past and its culture collide with the economic and social realities of the present, leaving a residue of rootlessness, anxiety, and lawlessness. All-night video stores and tanning salons stand next to collapsed chicken farms and fundamentalist churches. The people are poor southern whites. Peculiar and insular, they are hill people of Scotch-Irish descent: religious mystics who cast out demons, speak in tongues, drink strychnine, run blowtorches up their arms, and drape themselves with rattlesnakes. There is Charles McGlocklin, the End-Time Evangelist; Cecil Esslinder, the red headed guitar player with the perpetual grin; Aunt Daisy, the prophetess; Brother Carl Porter; Elvis Presley Saylor;Gracie McAllister; Dewey Chafin; and the legendary Punkin Brown, all of whose faith illuminates these pages. And then there is Dennis Covington, himself Scotch-Irish, whose own family came down off of Sand Mountain two generations ago to work in the steel mills of Birmingham, and

    . . You gotta love the Belz. . . . His sharp sense of humor doesn't allow him to miss an opportunity for laughs."--PlayboyI'm not asking you to believe every single conspiracy theory you find in this book. . . . I didn't write this book to give you all the answers. I wrote this book to inspire you to do what the powers that be wish you wouldn't: question authority . . . and to keep an eye out for ElvisJust what is it that they don't want you to know about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Area 51, and what the American astronauts really found on the moon? The unexplained crash at Roswell and the mysterious "face" on Mars? The link between the Nazis and the U.S. space program? Evidence of extraterrestrial experimentation?Finally, one lone "nut" exposes the conspiracy to keep conspiracies a dirty little secret, standing up to the shadowy forces that would have us believe that Oswald acted alone, those lights in the sky are weather balloons, and fluoridated water is good for you (yeah, right). "Some of the smartest people I know . . . find it easier--and certainly more comforting--to believe that America is the only country on earth with no conspiracies at all." Just remember: do not ask on whom The Belz has told--he's told on them.

    In the days before cheap air travel, families didn’t so much take vacations as survive them. Between home and destination lay thousands of miles and dozens of annoyances, and with his family Richard Ratay experienced all of them—from being crowded into the backseat with noogie-happy older brothers, to picking out a souvenir only to find that a better one might have been had at the next attraction, to dealing with a dad who didn’t believe in bathroom breaks.In hundreds of amusing ways, he reminds us of what once made the Great American Family Road Trip so great, including twenty-foot “land yachts,” oasis-like Holiday Inn “Holidomes,” “Smokey”-spotting Fuzzbusters, twenty-eight glorious flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream, and the thrill of finding a “good buddy” on the CB radio.Don’t Make Me Pull Over! reveals how the family road trip came to be, how its evolution mirrored the country’s, and why those magical journeys that once brought families together—for better and worse—have largely disappeared.

    Fallen Angels is the first book to delve into previously uncharted territory: the world of infamous angels and evil beings. Illustrated.

    Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French aristocrat, came to the young nation to investigate the functioning of American democracy & the social, political & economic life of its citizens, publishing his observations in 1835 & 1840. Brilliantly written, vividly illustrated with vignettes & portraits, Democracy in America is far more than a trenchant analysis of one society at a particular point in time. What will most intrigue modern readers is how many of the observations still hold true: on the mixed advantages of a free press, the strained relations among the races & the threats posed to democracies by consumerism & corruption. So uncanny is Tocqueville’s insight & so accurate are his predictions, that it seems as tho he were not merely describing the American identity but actually helping to create it.

    In fact, they are a study in artifice. Water diverted, riverbed reshaped, brink stabilized and landscape redesigned, the Falls are more a monument to man's meddling than to nature's strength. Held up as an example of something real, they are hemmed in with fakery -- waxworks, haunted houses, IMAX films and ersatz Indian tales. A symbol of American manifest destiny, they are shared politely with Canada. Emblem of nature's power, they are completely human-controlled. Archetype of natural beauty, they belie an ugly environmental legacy still bubbling up from below. On every level, Niagara Falls is a monument to how America falsifies nature, reshaping its contours and redirecting its force while claiming to submit to its will.Combining history, reportage and personal narrative, "Inventing Niagara" traces Niagara's journey from sublime icon to engineering marvel to camp spectacle. Along the way, Ginger Strand uncovers the hidden history of America's waterfall: the Mohawk chief who wrested the Falls from his adopted tribe, the revered town father who secretly assisted slave catchers, the wartime workers who unknowingly helped build the Bomb and the building contractor who bought and sold a pharaoh. With an uncanny ability to zero in on the buried truth, Strand introduces us to underwater dams, freaks of nature, mythical maidens and 280,000 radioactive mice buried at Niagara.From LaSalle to Lincoln to Los Alamos, Mohawks to Marilyn, Niagara's story is America's story, a tale of dreams founded on the mastery of nature. At a time of increasing environmental crisis, "Inventing Niagara" shows us how understanding the cultural history of nature might help us rethink our place in it today.

    Strange World has sold more than one million copies.

    Collected together in a handsome boxed set, this is the perfect gift for any Civil War buff.Fort Sumter to Perryville"Here, for a certainty, is one of the great historical narratives of our century, a unique and brilliant achievement, one that must be firmly placed in the ranks of the masters." -Van Allen Bradley, Chicago Daily News"Anyone who wants to relive the Civil War, as thousands of Americans apparently do, will go through this volume with pleasure.... Years from now, Foote's monumental narrative most likely will continue to be read and remembered as a classic of its kind." -New York Herald Tribune Book ReviewFredericksburg to Meridian"This, then, is narrative history-a kind of history that goes back to an older literary tradition.... The writing is superb...one of the historical and literary achievements of our time." -The Washington Post Book World"Gettysburg...is described with such meticulous attention to action, terrain, time, and the characters of the various commanders that I understand, at last, what happened in that battle.... Mr. Foote has an acute sense of the relative importance of events and a novelist's skill in directing the reader's attention to the men and the episodes that will influence the course of the whole war, without omitting items which are of momentary interest. His organization of facts could hardly be bettered." -AtlanticRed River to Appomattox"An unparalleled achievement, an American Iliad, a unique work uniting the scholarship of the historian and the high readability of the first-class novelist." -Walker Percy"I have never read a better, more vivid, more understandable account of the savage battling between Grant's and Lee's armies

    This diary became the secret place where Ellen could confess her fears of the new marriage, her confusion over her emerging sexuality, and the nightmare that her life would become. The diary not only follows the development of a girl into womanhood, it follows the construction of the Rimbauer mansion—called Rose Red—an enormous home that would be the site of so many horrific and inexplicable tragedies in the years ahead.The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red is a rare document, one that gives us an unusual view of daily life among the aristocracy in the early 1900s, a window into one woman's hidden emotional torment, and a record of the mysterious events at Rose Red that scandalized Seattle society at the time—events that can only be fully understood now that the diary has come to light. Edited by Joyce Reardon, Ph.D. as part of her research, the diary is being published as preparations are being made by Dr. Reardon to enter Rose Red and fully investigate its disturbing history. (back cover)

    Francisville, LA, with the dream of turning the historic site into a cozy inn. But she was shocked to discover that the property was haunted. Instead of losing customers, however, business exploded. Since then, Kermeen has traveled to over 150 haunted inns and hotels throughout the U.S. and collected some of the creepiest ghost stories ever told-and they're all true. Readers will enter the Oatman Hotel, where the distinct outline of a man, once murdered in the room, remains imprinted on the sheets-no matter how many times the maids change them. And in the garden of the Myrtles Plantation, two little girls, who were poisoned there in 1824, are often seen playing.