Beautiful Wall takes us on a profound journey through the deserts of the Southwest where the ever-changing natural landscape and an aggressive border culture rewrite intolerance and ethnocentric thought into human history. Inextricably linked to his Mexican ancestry and American upbringing, Ray Gonzalez's new collection mounts the wall between the current realities of violence and politics, and a beautiful, never-to-be-forgotten past. Ray Gonzalez is the author of fifteen books of poetry. The recipient of numerous awards, including a 2002 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Southwest Border Regional Library Association, he is a professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
This book is about Billy the Kid's trial for murder, and the events leading to that trial. The result of Billy's trial sealed his fate. And yet Billy's trial is the least written about, and until this book, the least known event of Billy's adult life. Prior biographies have provided extensive - and fascinating - details on Billy's life, but they supply only a few paragraphs on Billy's trial. Just the bare facts: time, place, names, result. Billy's trial the most important event in Billy's life. You may respond that his death is more important - it is in anyone's life! That is true, in an existential sense, but the events that lead to one's death at a particular place and time, the cause of one's death, override the importance of one's actual death. Those events are determinative. Without those events, one does not die then and there. If Billy had escaped death on July 14, 1881, and went on to live out more of his life, that escape and not his trial would probably be the most important event of Billy's life. The information presented here has been unknown until now. This book makes it possible to answer these previously unanswerable questions: Where was Billy captured? Where was Billy tried? What were the governing Territorial laws? What were the charges against Billy? Was there a trial transcript and what happened to it? What kind of defense did Billy present? Did Billy testify in his own defense? Did Billy have witnesses standing for him? Who testified against him for the prosecution? What was the jury like? What action by the trial judge virtually guaranteed his conviction? What legal grounds did he have to appeal his verdict? Was the trial fair? Supplementing the text are 132 photos, including many photos never published before.
Since their mother's death, Carter and Sadie have become near strangers. While Sadie has lived with her grandparents in London, her brother has traveled the world with their father, the brilliant Egyptologist, Dr. Julius Kane. One night, Dr. Kane brings the siblings together for a "research experiment" at the British Museum, where he hopes to set things right for his family. Instead, he unleashes the Egyptian god Set, who banishes him to oblivion and forces the children to flee for their lives. From the creator of the hit Percy Jackson series.
"For generations the remote villages of northern New Mexico lay virtually undisturbed, quietly passing through the predictable cycles of an agrarian society and preserving a colonial Hispanic culture unique to the United States Fortunately, many of the old traditions were preserved through the work of Lorin W. Brown who was born and raised in New Mexico. In the late 1930s he was employed by the New Mexico Federal Writers' Project to document the folklife of Hispanic northern New Mexico. Brown produced almost 200 manuscripts, all based on his interviews with many elderly residents of Cordova, Truchas, and other isolated communities., thus preserving an oral history stretching back to the late 18th century"--Amazon.
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.