A Cinderella story starring the bestselling female musical artist of the millennium. Mariah Carey grew up in a broken home, poor and with no friends. Singing was her salvation. One day, at a music industry party, another musician slips executive Tommy Mottola a demo tape of Mariah. In the limo on his way home Mottola is bored, so he listens to the tape. Mariah's voice is like liquid gold. He goes back to look for her. But just like in the Cinderella story, she has slipped away.
Americans today harbor no strong or consistent collective memory of the First World War. Ask why the country fought or what they accomplished, and 'democracy' is the most likely if vague response. The circulation of confusing or lofty rationales for intervention began as soon as President Woodrow Wilson secured a war declaration in April 1917. Yet amid those shifting justifications, Love and Death in the Great War argues, was a more durable and resonant one: Americans would fight for home and family. Officials in the military and government, grasping this crucial reality, invested the war with personal meaning, as did popular culture. 'Make your mother proud of you/And the Old Red White and Blue' went George Cohan's famous tune 'Over There.' Federal officials and their allies in public culture, in short, told the war story as a love story.
In the spring of 1940 Canada sent hundreds of highly trained volunteers to serve in Britain's Royal Air Force as it began a concerted bombing campaign against Germany. Nearly half of them were killed or captured within a year. This is the story of one of those airmen, as told through his own letters and diaries as well as those of his family and friends.
James's reign marked one of the very rare major breaks in England's monarchy. Already James VI of Scotland and a highly experienced ruler who had established his authority over the Scottish Kirk, he marched south on Elizabeth I's death to become James I of England and Ireland, uniting the British Isles for the first time and founding the Stuart dynasty which would, with several lurches, reign for over a century. Indeed his descendant still occupies the throne.
Childhood stories of family, country and belonging
The strange and varied lives of the ten children of the world's most beloved novelist
New York Times bestselling author Ali Wentworth offers her hilarious and unique advice on surviving the absurdity of modern life in her third collection of laugh-out-loud comic vignettes.
In 1906, fifteen-year old Elizabeth Gurley Flynn mounted a soapbox in Times Square to denounce capitalism and proclaim a new era for women's freedom. Quickly recognized as an outstanding public speaker and formidable organizer, she devoted her life to creating a socialist America, "free from poverty, exploitation, greed and injustice."
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane F.R.S. (1892-1964) was one of the leading scientists of the twentieth century, renowned for helping, through statistical wizardry, to reconcile Darwin's theory of natural selection with Mendel's discovery of genes. The product of a distinguished family of scientists and public figures, "JBS" trained and influenced a swathe of students and colleagues at Oxford, Cambridge, and University College London, many of whom, such as the evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith, went on to distinction in their own right.
In 1898, when war with Spain seemed inevitable, Andrew Summers Rowan, an American army lieutenant from West Virginia, was sent on a secret mission to Cuba. He was to meet with General Calixto Garcia, a leader of the Cuban rebels, in order to gather information for a U.S. invasion. Months later, after the war was fought and won, a flamboyant entrepreneur named Elbert Hubbard wrote an account of Rowan's mission titled "A Message to Garcia." It sold millions of copies, and Rowan became the equivalent of a modern-day rock star. His fame resulted in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, radio shows, and two movies. Even today he is held up as an exemplar of bravery and loyalty. The problem is that nothing Hubbard wrote about Rowan was true.
The dramatic, spiritual memoir of a prominent Muslim woman working to empower women and girls across the world-for readers of Malala Yousafzai and Azar Nafisi.
Torn from an idyllic life with a loving, extended family in 1960's Alabama, young Johnny Turnipseed found himself in Minneapolis, Minnesota with a father he no longer recognized and empty cupboards. A.C. Turnipseed's alcoholism and womanizing started a chain reaction of poverty, violence, addiction and despair that nearly destroyed three generations.
"Compelling, insightful and important, Beneath a Ruthless Sun exposes the corruption of racial bigotry and animus that shadows a community, a state and a nation. A fascinating examination of an injustice story all too familiar and still largely ignored, an engaging and essential read." CBryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy
"There followed a blue flash accompanied by a ver y bright magnesium-type flare ... Then came a frighteningly loud but rather flat explosion, which was followed by a blast of hot air ... All this was followed by eerie silence."
This passionate and powerfully argued book takes its title from President Bush's inaugural speech, when he quoted 18C statesman John Page, who enquired if it were not 'an angel who directed the storm' within which America came into being. Michael Northcott appraises two visions of religious freedom: the apocalyptic vision of George W. Bush and the Christian conservatives who back his policies, particularly in relation to Iraq and the so-called war on terror; and the peaceable vision of a Christian majority elsewhere who resist what they view as American neo-imperialism with an overlay of Christian apocalyptic rhetoric. Northcott suggests that Americans urgently need to recover a Christian critique of 'Empire' if their religion is to avoid the charge of idolatry.
"This book will be treasured by Montgomery's legions of fans." -Carolyn Strom Collins, author of The Anne of Green Gables Treasury
On rails-to-trails bike paths, city streets, and winding country roads, the bicycle seems ubiquitous in the Badger State. Yet there's a complex and fascinating history behind the popularity of biking in Wisconsin-one that until now has never been told. Meticulously researched through periodicals and newspapers, Wheel Fever traces the story of Wisconsin's first "bicycling boom," from the velocipede craze of 1869 through the "wheel fever" of the 1890s. It was during this crucial period that the sport Wisconsinites know and adore first took shape. From the start it has been defined by a rich and often impassioned debate over who should be allowed to ride, where they could ride, and even what they could wear.
The first collection of Timothy Leary's (1920-1996) selected papers and correspondence opens a window on the ideas that inspired the counterculture of the 1960s and the fascination with LSD that continues to the present. The man who coined the phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out," Leary cultivated interests that ranged across experimentation with hallucinogens, social change and legal reform, and mysticism and spirituality, with a passion to determine what lies beyond our consciousness.
In The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, Geraldine Heng questions the common assumption that the concepts of race and racisms only began in the modern era. Examining Europe's encounters with Jews, Muslims, Africans, Native Americans, Mongols, and the Romani ('Gypsies'), from the 12th through 15th centuries, she shows how racial thinking, racial law, racial practices, and racial phenomena existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged in the West. Analysing sources in a variety of media, including stories, maps, statuary, illustrations, architectural features, history, saints' lives, religious commentary, laws, political and social institutions, and literature, she argues that religion - so much in play again today - enabled the positing of fundamental differences among humans that created strategic essentialisms to mark off human groups and populations for racialized treatment. Her ground-breaking study also shows how race figured in the emergence of homo europaeus and the identity of Western Europe in this time.
On the night of October 8, 1871, a whirlwind of fire swept through northeastern Wisconsin, destroying the bustling frontier town of Peshtigo. Trees, buildings, and people burst into flames. Metal melted. Sand turned into glass. People thought the end of the world had come. When the "tornado of fire" was over, 2,500 people were dead, and Peshtigo was nothing but a smoking ruin. It was the deadliest wildfire in U.S. history.