Joe “Metal Cowboy” Kurmaskie actually took his two kids along. For a 4,000-mile bicycle ride across America, Joe’s seven-year-old son, Quinn, rides a tagalong bike attached to his dad’s; and behind that is five-year-old Enzo in a bike trailer. Our hero the Metal Cowboy answers the question “What are you, crazy?” with a resounding and cheerful “Yes.” Unassisted—with no support crew except his boys’ comic relief and the periodic kindness of strangers—he pedals hundreds of pounds of gear and offspring over mountain passes, across the wide plains, through thunderstorms, and into the heart of what it means to be a dad.Along the way they encounter everything that makes up America—small-town kindness and inner-city heart, wild horses and highway roadkill, a?bitter Vietnam vet and a hopeful young inventor, grizzly bears and bison roaming free, cyclists and monstrous RVs, a very peppy cheerleader and a visitation from the ghost of the author’s father, horrible traffic and serene dirt roads, a monastery and a distillery, baseball, and yes, lots of pie.By the time they reach Washington, DC, two months after leaving Portland, Oregon, they’ve bonded in a rare way. Kurmaskiewrites, “We share a secret, the three of us; one permanent summer in our hearts now, where we’re never apart.”

    Isolated and estranged in a small town in the harsh Karoo desert, her only real companions are her diary and her housemaid, and later the housemaid's daughter, Ada. When Ada is born, Cathleen recognizes in her someone she can love and respond to in a way that she cannot with her own family.Under Cathleen's tutelage, Ada grows into an accomplished pianist and a reader who cannot resist turning the pages of the diary, discovering the secrets Cathleen sought to hide. As they grow closer, Ada sees new possibilities in front of her—a new horizon. But in one night, everything changes, and Cathleen comes home from a trip to find that Ada has disappeared, scorned by her own community. Cathleen must make a choice: should she conform to society, or search for the girl who has become closer to her than her own daughter?Set against the backdrop of a beautiful, yet divided land, The Housemaid's Daughter is a startling and thought-provoking novel that intricately portrays the drama and heartbreak of two women who rise above cruelty to find love, hope, and redemption.

    After the Turner thesis which celebrated the frontier as the source of American freedom and democracy, and the iconoclasm of the new western historians who dismissed the idea of the frontier as merely a mask for conquest and exploitation, David Hackett Fischer and James C. Kelly take a third approach to the subject. They share with Turner the idea of the westward movement as a creative process of high importance in American history, but they understand it in a different way.Where Turner studied the westward movement in terms of its destination, Fischer and Kelly approach it in terms of its origins. Virginia's long history enables them to provide a rich portrait of migration and expansion as a dynamic process that preserved strong cultural continuities. They suggest that the oxymoron "bound away"--from the folksong Shenandoah--captures a vital truth about American history. As people moved west, they built new societies from old materials, in a double-acting process that made America what is today.Based on an acclaimed exhibition at the Virginia Historical society, the book studies three stages of migration to, within, and from Virginia. Each stage has its own story to tell. All of them together offer an opportunity to study the westward movement through three centuries, as it has rarely been studied before.Fischer and Kelly believe that the westward movement was a broad cultural process, which is best understood not only through the writings of intellectual elites, but also through the physical artifacts and folkways of ordinary people. The wealth of anecdotes and illustrations in this volume offer a new way of looking at John Smith and William Byrd, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Dred Scott, and scores of lesser known gentry, yeomen, servants, and slaves who were all "bound away" to an old new world.

    . . Patterson's book must now be considered the definitive Tsavo lion study... one of the world's leading experts on lions as well as an important conservationist.--Publishers WeeklyThrough field research and forensic evidence, a scientist reveals his theory on why two Kenyan lions killed humans and then ate their preyIn March 1898, the British began building a bridge over the Tsavo River in East Africa. In nine months, two male lions killed and ate nearly 135 workers, halting construction.After a long hunt Colonel J. H. Patterson killed the lions, which are now on display at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.As codirector of the Tsavo Research Project, Bruce Patterson has conducted extensive fieldwork throughout the region on these lions. In The Lions of Tsavo, Patterson retells the harrowing story of those bloody nights in Kenya. He presents new forensic evidence on these maneless lions and argues that the man-eating behavior exhibited in 1898 came from the encroachment of human populations on wild habitats.Patterson continues this theory by exploring man's interaction with the changing Kenyan environment, creating a complete, up-to-date, and scientific look behind this intriguing murder mystery.

    In 1990, when thousands of teenage fighters, including young men wearing women's clothing and bizarre objects of decoration, laid siege to the capital, the world took notice. Since then Liberia has been through devastating civil upheaval. What began as a civil conflict, has spread to other West African nations.Eschewing popular stereotypes and simple explanations, Stephen Ellis traces the history of the civil war that has blighted Liberia in recent years and looks at its political, ethnic and cultural roots. He focuses on the role religion and ritual have played in shaping and intensifying this brutal war. In this edition, with a new preface by the author, Ellis provides a current picture of Liberia and details how much of the same problems still exist.