Good-bye to the Mermaids conveys the horrors of war as seen through the innocent eyes of a child. It is the story of World War II as it affected three generations of middle-class German women: Karin, six years old when the war began, who was taken in by Hitler’s lies; her mother, Astrid, a rebellious artist who occasionally spoke out against the Nazis; and her grandmother Oma, a generous and strong-willed woman who, having spent her own childhood in America, brought a different perspective to the events of the time. Finell depicts the lives of people tainted by Hitler’s influence: her half-Jewish relatives who gave in to the strain of trying to remain unnoticed;
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In Dreaming the Mississippi, Fischer offers a fresh perspective on the river’s environment, industry, and recreation by sharing experiences of modern Americans who work the barges, rope–swing into muddy bottoms, struggle against hurricane floodwaters, and otherwise find new meaning on this great watery corridor. Through compelling words and photographs, Dreaming the Mississippi invites readers to taste life on today’s Mississippi, as sweet, tangy, and wildly cantankerous as it gets.
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“At about three thirty a.m on June 22, 1986, someone entered, through an unlocked sliding-glass door, my father’s house on the outskirts of the central California farming town where he had grown up. The intruder took a knife from the kitchen and stabbed my father as he lay sleeping next to his third wife.”
So begins Rachel Howard’s memoir about her father’s unsolved murder, which happened when she was just ten years old. But from the start The Lost Night is about something much deeper and more complex than justice. Writing more than 15 years after her father’s bizarre death,
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“Christopher Hogwood came home on my lap in a shoebox. He was a creature who would prove in many ways to be more human than I am.” –from The Good Good Pig
A naturalist who spent months at a time living on her own among wild creatures in remote jungles, Sy Montgomery had always felt more comfortable with animals than with people. So she gladly opened her heart to a sick piglet who had been crowded away from nourishing meals by his stronger siblings. Yet Sy had no inkling that this piglet, later named Christopher Hogwood,
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When she was seven, Rachel Manija Brown’s parents, post-60s hippies, left California for an ashram in a cobra-ridden, drought-stricken spot in India to devote themselves to Meher Baba, best known as the guru to Pete Townshend of The Who. Despite the fact that Rachel is the only foreign child within a 100-mile radius, she manages to keep her wits and humor about her when everyone else seems to have lost touch with reality. Filled with eccentric characters, this astutely observed and laugh-out-loud funny debut memoir marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.
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The Innocent Man unfolds with the taut suspense, intriguing characters, and vivid scenes that have made John Grisham one of the most widely read novelists in America. But this time, he’s reporting on actual events–and a courtroom drama that results in a real-life nightmare for all the wrong people. Sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit, Ron Williamson experienced a flagrant miscarriage of justice so regrettably common in criminal prosecutions across the country. His story will leave you hungering for answers; whether you read it with a group of friends or as part of a forum,
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