Cold Blue Steel contains fifty lyric poems set in the world of the urban street cop in Houston, the nation’s fourth largest metropolis. In the patrol car, at scenes of suicides and DOAs, in the overtime reality of aching feet and sweating torsos, the reader experiences the hard realities and unexpected luminosities of doing America’s most dangerous job.
A captivating debut, introducing a spirited young heroine coming of age in coastal Maine during the early 1960s. When her mother disappears during a weekend trip, Florine Gilham's idyllic childhood is turned upside down. Until then she'd been blissfully insulated by the rhythms of family life in small town Maine: watching from the granite cliffs above the sea for her father's lobster boat to come into port, making bread with her grandmother, and infiltrating the summer tourist camps with her friends. But with her mother gone, the heart falls out of Florine's life and she and her father are isolated as they struggle to manage their loss. Both sustained and challenged by the advice and expectations of her family and neighbors, Florine grows up with her spirit intact. And when her father's past comes to call, she must accept that life won't ever be the same while keeping her mother vivid in her memories. With Fannie Flagg's humor and Elizabeth Stroud's sense of place, this debut is an extraordinary snapshot of a bygone America through the eyes of an inspiring girl blazing her own path to womanhood.
The skeptical philosopher, Richard Creighton, and the psychic, Drew Beltane, spend the night at Aubrey House in order to discover if it is actually haunted by ghosts.
Way Out There in the Blue is a major work of history by the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Fire in the Lake. Using the Star Wars missile defense program as a magnifying glass on his presidency, Frances FitzGerald gives us a wholly original portrait of Ronald Reagan, the most puzzling president of the last half of the twentieth century. Reagan's presidency and the man himself have always been difficult to fathom. His influence was enormous, and the few powerful ideas he espoused remain with us still -- yet he seemed nothing more than a charming, simple-minded, inattentive actor. FitzGerald shows us a Reagan far more complex than the man we thought we knew. A master of the American language and of self-presentation, the greatest storyteller ever to occupy the Oval Office, Reagan created a compelling public persona that bore little relationship to himself. The real Ronald Reagan -- the Reagan who emerges from FitzGerald's book -- was a gifted politician with a deep understanding of the American national psyche and at the same time an executive almost totally disengaged from the policies of his administration and from the people who surrounded him. The idea that America should have an impregnable shield against nuclear weapons was Reagan's invention. His famous Star Wars speech, in which he promised us such a shield and called upon scientists to produce it, gave rise to the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan used his sure understanding of American mythology, history and politics to persuade the country that a perfect defense against Soviet nuclear weapons would be possible, even though the technology did not exist and was not remotely feasible. His idea turned into a multibillion-dollar research program. SDI played a central role in U.S.-Soviet relations at a crucial juncture in the Cold War, and in a different form it survives to this day. Drawing on prodigious research, including interviews with the participants, FitzGerald offers new insights into American foreign policy in the Reagan era. She gives us revealing portraits of major players in Reagan's administration, including George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Regan and Paul Nitze, and she provides a radically new view of what happened at the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington and Moscow. FitzGerald describes the fierce battles among Reagan's advisers and the frightening increase of Cold War tensions during Reagan's first term. She shows how the president who presided over the greatest peacetime military buildup came to espouse the elimination of nuclear weapons, and how the man who insisted that the Soviet Union was an "evil empire" came to embrace the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and to proclaim an end to the Cold War long before most in Washington understood that it had ended. Way Out There in the Blue is a ground-breaking history of the American side of the end of the Cold War. Both appalling and funny, it is a black comedy in which Reagan, playing the role he wrote for himself, is the hero.
Blood a Cold Blue is James Claffey's debut story collection that Ronlyn Domingue says "spans the distance of continents and the gulf between memories. At times beautifully surreal then painfully stark, his stories reach into those parts of us that long to be gathered and made whole again." Meg Tuite says, "Claffey is a collector of moments that throb to life; shapes appear out of the mist of memory as irreducible as the mystery of existence itself. Blood a Cold Blue is fueled by a masterful writer: powerful, unforgettable and mesmerizing."
“One of the most captivating novels of the year.” – Washington Post NATIONAL BESTSELLER A Best Book of the Year: Bloomberg | Boston Globe | Chicago Public Library | Chicago Tribune | Esquire | Kirkus | New York Public Library | New York Times Book Review (Historical Fiction) | NPR's Fresh Air | O Magazine | Washington Post | Publishers Weekly | Seattle Times | USA Today A Library Reads Pick | An Indie Next Pick From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins comes another “literary miracle” (NPR)—a propulsive, richly entertaining novel about two brothers swept up in the turbulent class warfare of the early twentieth century. An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams. The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula. Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war? Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, The Cold Millions is a tour de force from a “writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors” (Boston Globe).
This is the third of three volumes in a huge collection of 100 of my short stories. Volume one has 35 sweet wholesome contemporary romance short stories. Volume two has 33 historical romances, and volume three has 32 time travel stories. All these stories are published individually. But thanks to my wonderful Kickstarter supporters, they are now available in three volumes. The three volumes together are 2,500 pages of reading.
What if the United States knew of a nuclear threat and could have stopped it? Serena Wilcox and her family have destroyed their old home and faked their deaths to go off the grid under new identities, after obtaining insider information about a threat to the United States. The threat results in a geographically divided America, with two governing presidents: John Williams and Japanese-American Ann Kinji. Conspiracy, greed and a lust for power are at the root of this plot-twisting thriller about corrupt American government; when the future of the nation depends on former private detective Serena Wilcox and her unlikely crew. This freebie is a great option for sampling the Serena Wilcox series. If you enjoy Angels Mark, move on to the other books in this Christian fiction mystery/thriller/futuristic series: Covert Coffee, Bluebird Flown, Project Scarecrow, Ruby Red, Future Beyond, Project Willow and Downward Spiral. The first book is FREE! Revolting and oddball characters, quirky humor, shocking dialog and events: "Spellbinding!"
"The Way of an Indian" is one of the few books that look at the colonial expansion of American wild west through the eyes of a Native Indian. The book faithfully captures their spiritual beliefs, agency and speech to show what it was like to be the original inhabitants of a land that was taken away from them. A must read western classic! Excerpt: "White Otter's heart was bad. He sat alone on the rim-rocks of the bluffs overlooking the sunlit valley. To an unaccustomed eye from below he might have been a part of nature's freaks among the sand rocks. The yellow grass sloped away from his feet mile after mile to the timber, and beyond that to the prismatic mountains...." Frederic Remington was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th-century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U. S. Cavalry. Remington's fame made him a favorite of the Western Army officers fighting the last Indian battles.
