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Author: Louis Decimus Rubin (Jr.)
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 224
ISBN-13: 9781570033827
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe author, a literary critic and historian, uses over 100 of his own photographs to recall his life-long love of trains.
Author: Miriam Winter
Publisher:
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 230
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe moving account of a hidden child, a lonely girl who survived the Holocaust and escaped the Nazis in World War II Poland by living among strangers and pretending to be a Catholic girl, and who continued to hide her identity, heritage, and history in Communist Poland for two decades after the war ended.
Author: Jenny Diski
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2013-09-17
Total Pages: 292
ISBN-13: 1466853085
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe book about America de Tocqueville might have written had he spent some time in the nation's smoking sections Using two cross-country trips on Amtrak as her narrative vehicles, British writer Jenny Diski connects the humming rails taking her into the heart of America with the track-like scars leading back to her own past. As she did in the highly acclaimed Skating to Antarctica, Diski has created a seamless and seemingly effortless amalgam of reflection and revelation. Stranger on a Train is a combination of travelogue and memoir, a penetrating portrait of America and Americans that is at the same time an unsparing look in the mirror. Traveling and remembering both involve confronting strangers—those we have just met and those we once were—and acknowledging the play of proximity and separation. Diski has written a moving, courageous, and deeply rewarding book about who we are, and the landscapes through which we have passed to get there.
Author: James McCommons
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2009-11-06
Total Pages: 306
ISBN-13: 1603582592
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDuring the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.
Author: Bruce Catton
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 1987
Total Pages: 284
ISBN-13: 9780814318850
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe celebrated writer reminisces about his boyhood in Michigan at the turn of the century.
Author: Yu Miri
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2021-06-22
Total Pages: 193
ISBN-13: 0593187520
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.
Author: H. Roger Grant
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2012-10-17
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 0253006333
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRailroads and the American People is a sparkling paean to American railroading by one of its finest historians.
Author: Carrot Quinn
Publisher: Dial Press
Published: 2021-07-06
Total Pages: 321
ISBN-13: 0593133285
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe unforgettable story of one woman who leaves behind her hardscrabble childhood in Alaska to travel the country via freight train—a beautiful memoir about forgiveness, self-discovery, and the redemptive power of nature, perfect for fans of Wild or Educated. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER • “An urgent read. A courageous life. Quinn’s story burns through us and bleeds beauty on every page.”—Noé Álvarez, author of Spirit Run: A 6,000-Mile Marathon Through North America’s Stolen Land After a childhood marked by neglect, poverty, and periods of homelessness, with a mother who believed herself to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, Carrot Quinn moved out on her own. She found a sense of belonging among straight-edge anarchists who taught her how to traverse the country by freight trains, sleep in fields under the stars, and feed herself by foraging in dumpsters. Her new life was one of thrilling adventure and freedom, but still she was haunted by the ghosts of her lonely and traumatic childhood. The Sunset Route is a powerful and brazenly honest adventure memoir set in the unseen corners of the United States—in the Alaskan cold, on trains rattling through forests and deserts, as well as in low-income apartments and crowded punk houses—following a remarkable protagonist who has witnessed more tragedy than she thought she could ever endure and who must learn to heal her own heart. Ultimately, it is a meditation on the natural world as a spiritual anchor, and on the ways that forgiveness can set us free.
Author: Anthony Bukoski
Publisher:
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 210
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWelcome to Superior, Wisconsin, the westernmost port on the Great Lakes, home to a declining population, often-dismal weather, and dying ethnic communities. Despite the biting winter winds and the ore dust blanketing the city, miracles occur here. In the title story, the only Jewish track inspector for the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe system discovers a magical place behind the drab house of a lonely Polish schoolteacher; in "Closing Time,” an accordion player working the bar of the local VFW finds an appreciative audience in a disillusioned German war bride; in "The Moon of the Grass Fires,” a retired flour mill worker has a vision of ultimate goodness and the meaning of his life one beautiful autumn evening as, covered with wheat dust, he takes a walk near the East End’s abandoned ore docks.
Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-08-30
Total Pages: 126
ISBN-13: 1429995203
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year One of NPR's 10 Best Novels of 2011 From the National Book Award-winning author Denis Johnson (Tree of Smoke) comes Train Dreams, an epic in miniature, and one of Johnson's most evocative works of fiction. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—this extraordinary novella poignantly captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life. It tells the story of Robert Grainer, a day laborer in the American West at the start of the twentieth century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime.
