Casey never expected her life to change so drastically, so terribly. She never expected her beloved husband Richard to get sick. She never expected to become his caretaker, but when Richard is diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer’s, Casey must find a way to evolve. It’s horrible to watch Richard fade away, but even worse is the thought of losing the man she loves. As Casey’s emotional health plummets, she begins to learn that she can’t be a caretaker by herself. It takes a village to stay strong—a village of support as she takes her next steps. Casey’s Village is a compilation of truth and fiction. Author Sandra Hopper wrote this as catharsis from her own personal pain but also to give hope and support to others traveling a similar journey.
Eamon Casey is a young man from a cattle station in Northern Australia. He is conscripted and sent to Vietnam. Wounded and mentally scarred, he returns home to find that his mother has been murdered and his inheritance, the property Conemarra has been expropriated by a shady character who had married his mother in order to gain it for himself. Disillusioned, he seeks refuge on a small island in the Torres Strait. Here, he hopes to recover and begin his life anew, but there is something going on just above the horizon that will once more plunge him into conflict. The freedom fighters in West Papua accept Chinese arms to help them rid themselves of their Indonesian masters, but they dont know that China has an ulterior motive. They want to place nuclear armed rockets on the island in order to subjugate Australia and her neighbours in order to expropriate rich mineral and agricultural resources and cheap labour. Jessica Bradley is a photo-journalist who had gone to Papua to do a story on the rebellion. She, along with others, has to flee in a small boat and is rescued by Eamon. In the boat with her is Barry McLeod, the man who killed his mother and robbed him of his inheritance. Eamon falls back on his military training to thwart the Chinese and force them to abandon the island. But the story doesnt end there. McCloud escapes from the police and flees to Europe where he has secreted most of the money. Eamon and Jessica come upon him by accident, follow him to Switzerland, and extract both the money and a confession from him before handing him over to the police. Back in Australia, they pursue the people who had conspired with McLeod in his evil deeds, securing a substantial settlement and the return of the family property. Meanwhile, both work with Jessicas family in England to expand farming operations there, leading to a happy and successful family partnership.
Tampa takes place on a raw frontier in central Florida where white settlers are encroaching on the lands of the Seminole Indians. The U.S. Army is ordered to remove the Seminoles from Florida, but in a series of three wars, the Army takes heavy loses and fails to remove all of the Indians, who retreat into the Everglades and continue fighting. In 1854, West Pointer Clay Jordan comes to his first assignment at Fort Brooke in Tampa Bay and soon gets involved in the third war with the Seminoles. Led by their crafty chief, Billy Bowlegs, the Seminoles prove to be a dangerous foe. Clay distinguishes himself in the fighting, but on one patrol he is wounded and seeks medical attention from a doctor in Tampa. There he meets Kathleen Conley, the doctors beautiful niece and nurse in training. Clay and Kathleen fall in love, but she hates the fighting and killing he must do, and she cannot understand why the Seminoles have to be removed from Florida. The war comes to a tragic end for the Seminoles, but about the same time, yellow fever strikes Tampa. Kathleen fights the fever so courageously that she is known as The Fever Angel. Clay comes back from the war, and they face even more challenges. David Conrad is a retired history professor who, after years of dealing with historical facts with infinite care to be accurate, decided to loosen the bonds of strict history and write a novel using both fictional and historical characters placed in a true historical setting but involved in a mix of real and imagined events. He was drawn to the story of Tampa by research he did writing his own family history.
In 1835, Winston and Salem was a well-ordered, bucolic, and attractive North Carolina town. A visitor could walk up Main Street from the village square and get a sense of the quiet Moravian community that had settled here. Yet, over the next half-century, this idyllic village was to experience dramatic changes. The Industrial Revolution calls forth images of great factories, mills, and machinery; yet, the character of the Industrial Revolution went beyond mere changes in modes of production. It meant the radical transformation of economic, social, and political institutions, and the emergence of a new mindset that brought about new ways of thinking and acting. Here is the illuminating story of Winston-Salem, a community of artisans and small farmers united, as members of a religious congregation, by a single vision of life. Transformed in just a few decades from an agricultural region into the home of the smokestacks and office towers of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and the Wachovia Bank and Trust Company, the Moravian community at Salem offers an illuminating illustration of the changes that swept Southern society in the nineteenth century and the concomitant development in these communities of a new ethos. Providing a rich wealth of information about the Winston-Salem community specifically, From Congregation Town to Industrial City also significantly broadens our understanding of how wholesale changes in the nineteenth century South redefined the meaning and experience of community. For, by the end of the century, community had gained an entirely new meaning, namely as a forum in which competing individuals pursued private opportunities and interests.
Fort Meade was the home of the famous Seventh Cavalry after its ignominious defeat in the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Troops from Fort Meade played a pivotal role in the events that led to the tragedy at Wounded Knee in 1890. It was the scene of imprisonment of Ute Indians who made the mistake of interpreting their new citizenship status as freedom from government control. The fort survived the mechanization of the horse cavalry, aided the record-breaking Stratosphere Balloon flight of 1935, and became a training site for the nation’s first airborne troops. Fort Meade existed for sixty-six years, from 1878 to 1944. Robert Lee examines the strategic importance of its location on the northern edge of the Black Hills and the role it played in the settlement of the region, as well as the role played by the citizens of Sturgis in keeping it alive. One of the chief delights of Fort Meade and the Black Hills is a gallery of characters including the unfortunate Major Marcus Reno, the beautiful and fatal Ella Sturgis, and the cigar-smoking Poker Alice Tubbs. They, and events scaled to their larger-than-life size, are part of this long overdue story of Fort Meade.
