Split Rock Road is a collection of stories from first-time author, James McAllen. It consists of 20 stories about ordinary people in less-than-ordinary circumstances. There are stories of loss and redemption. Stories of faith and hope, triumph and defeat. There are stories about the frailty of the human spirit, from the young child afraid to face his parents, to the recent widower afraid to face the world without his beloved wife.
After losing her favorite aunt, inheriting a house on Martha's Vineyard, and finding herself alone there with three young children, Annie Tucker must confront her past when an unresolved love tests whether she has the courage to resist the pull of seduction and reclaim her true self. Both poignant and funny, this story is about forgiveness, acceptance, and the power of love and family.
Within the recent explosion of creative nonfiction, a new type of form is quietly emerging, what Brenda Miller calls "hermit crab essays." The Shell Game is an anthology of these intriguing essays that borrow their structures from ordinary, everyday sources: a recipe, a crossword puzzle, a Craig's List ad. Like their zoological namesake, these essays do not simply wear their borrowed "shells" but inhabit them so perfectly that the borrowed structures are wholly integral rather than contrived, both shaping the work and illuminating and exemplifying its subject. The Shell Game contains a carefully chosen selection of beautifully written, thought-provoking hybrid essays tackling a broad range of subjects, including the secrets of the human genome, the intractable pain of growing up black in America, and the gorgeous glow residing at the edges of the autism spectrum. Surprising, delightful, and lyric, these essays are destined to become classics of this new and increasingly popular hybrid form.
A riveting, urgent account of the explorers and scientists racing to understand the rapidly melting ice sheet in Greenland, a dramatic harbinger of climate change “Jon Gertner takes readers to spots few journalists or even explorers have visited. The result is a gripping and important book.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • The Christian Science Monitor • Library Journal Greenland: a remote, mysterious island five times the size of California but with a population of just 56,000. The ice sheet that covers it is 700 miles wide and 1,500 miles long, and is composed of nearly three quadrillion tons of ice. For the last 150 years, explorers and scientists have sought to understand Greenland—at first hoping that it would serve as a gateway to the North Pole, and later coming to realize that it contained essential information about our climate. Locked within this vast and frozen white desert are some of the most profound secrets about our planet and its future. Greenland’s ice doesn’t just tell us where we’ve been. More urgently, it tells us where we’re headed. In The Ice at the End of the World, Jon Gertner explains how Greenland has evolved from one of earth’s last frontiers to its largest scientific laboratory. The history of Greenland’s ice begins with the explorers who arrived here at the turn of the twentieth century—first on foot, then on skis, then on crude, motorized sleds—and embarked on grueling expeditions that took as long as a year and often ended in frostbitten tragedy. Their original goal was simple: to conquer Greenland’s seemingly infinite interior. Yet their efforts eventually gave way to scientists who built lonely encampments out on the ice and began drilling—one mile, two miles down. Their aim was to pull up ice cores that could reveal the deepest mysteries of earth’s past, going back hundreds of thousands of years. Today, scientists from all over the world are deploying every technological tool available to uncover the secrets of this frozen island before it’s too late. As Greenland’s ice melts and runs off into the sea, it not only threatens to affect hundreds of millions of people who live in coastal areas. It will also have drastic effects on ocean currents, weather systems, economies, and migration patterns. Gertner chronicles the unfathomable hardships, amazing discoveries, and scientific achievements of the Arctic’s explorers and researchers with a transporting, deeply intelligent style—and a keen sense of what this work means for the rest of us. The melting ice sheet in Greenland is, in a way, an analog for time. It contains the past. It reflects the present. It can also tell us how much time we might have left.
"Roni Horn (b. 1955) is a prominent contemporary artist known for her sculptures, photography, and installations inspired by landscape and the natural world, and especially the isolated landscapes of Iceland, where she has travelled and lived for substantial periods of time since the early 1970s. Horn's work explores geology and climate; the interplay of nature, art, and place; and the relationships between words, appearance, androgyny, and the self. Horn is author of more than twenty books and artist's books, and is herself the subject of more than thirty books and exhibition catalogs, including a survey published by Phaidon and many by Steidl. Examples of her work include You Are the Weather (1994-96), a series of photographs of a young woman bathing in Icelandic hot springs; Pair Objects (1988), identical metal sculptures placed in two different locations; and the installation Library of Water (2007) in Iceland, with columns that enclose water from melting glaciers. Horn is arguably the most important visual chronicler of the landscape of Iceland. Upon graduating from her MFA program at Yale, she traveled to Iceland, journeying across its interior on a motorcycle. Over thirty years, she has continually returned to Iceland to explore and record the astonishing beauty of its geology, climate, and culture. This book will contain a range of texts, from evocative vignettes to illustrated essays written for Iceland's most widely-read newspaper. A combination of artists' writings and travelogue, the texts reveal Iceland as one of Horne's most important influences and inspirations, and record a unique and beautiful environment undergoing climate change"--
Describes the military history of the American Revolution and the grim realities of the eight-year conflict while offering descriptions of the major engagements on land and sea and the decisions that influenced the course of the war.
Thomas Pell and the Legend of the Pell Treaty Oak is a meticulously-researched and well-documented work about a seventeenth century swashbuckling soldier of fortune, Thomas Pell, and the legend of the "Treaty Oak" that bore his name. Beneath that oak, on June 27, 1654, Pell acquired from local Native Americans the lands that became the Manor of Pelham. Memories have faded and the mists of time have obscured the story of Thomas Pell's Treaty Oak. Thomas Pell and the Legend of the Pell Treaty Oak is an effort to part the mists and document the story in honor of the 350th anniversary celebration of Pelham, New York.
