The author of the bestselling Ghost Soldiers returns with the epic chronicle of the real American West. Blood and Thunder brings the history of the American conquest of the West to vivid life through the interactions of the three main forces of the territory—American Indians, Mexicans, and Americans—and through the exploits of the legendary Kit Carson. An illiterate mountain man who mastered seven Indian dialects, Carson had more respect for the tribes than did any other American; yet he was also a cold-blooded killer who willingly followed orders tantamount to massacre. Grand in scope, immediate in detail,
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In Aphrodite in Jeans, Katherine Shirek Doughtie explores what happens when a woman stalemated in the middle of life dares to answer a call to live more fully. Whether discussing motherhood, working through relationships or taking care of an aging parent, these essays are in turn funny, poignant and challenging. With wicked insight and unflinching courage, Ms. Doughtie ruthlessly examines her experiences as she dares to tackle life head on.
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In 1998, journalist Barbara Ehrenreich became a waitress, a maid, and a low level sales clerk while researching Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Selling close to one million copies, Nickel and Dimed exposed the truth about the demise of a living wage, health insurance, and other presumed rewards for American workers. In Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, she goes undercover once again, this time to explore the grim results of corporate downsizing. Immersed in the world of the white-collar unemployed, she joins the ranks of those who seem to have done everything right—finished college,
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Zeke is twenty-nine, a man who looks like a Raphael angel and who earns his living as a painter and carpenter in London. He reads the world a little differently from most people and has trouble with such ordinary activities as lying, deciphering expressions, recognizing faces. Verona is thirty-seven, confident, hot-tempered, a modestly successful radio-show host, unmarried, and seven months pregnant. When the two meet in a house that Zeke is renovating, they fall in love, only to be separated less than twenty-four hours later when Verona mysteriously disappears.
Both Zeke and Verona, it turns out, have complications in their lives,
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“I can put my eyes just at the top of the wheat and see the world stretch out flat to the sky.” With this secret diary entry, a lonely girl on a Texas wheat farm sets her sights on the larger life she yearns for. Her only companions are the Box Children, five tiny dolls she endows with the lives they lost as her mother’s miscarried babies over the years. With no privacy at all, a brave and clear-eyed Lou Ann Campbell writes her way through a coming-of-age summer as her mother’s latest pregnancy brings increasing insanity to the season’s harvest.
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The year is 1968. Like thousands of other American boys, Carl Melcher is drafted and sent to Vietnam. His new company is infected with the same racial tensions plaguing the nation. Despite that, Carl makes friends on both sides of the color line. The war, like a tiger lurking in the bushes, picks off its victims one by one. Naively over-optimistic, Carl believes that karma and good intentions will save him and his friends. Then fate intervenes to teach Carl something of the meaning of life, and death.
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