In 1942 alone, German U-Boats sank almost four million gross registered tons of Allied ships convoying goods and war supplies to the war ravaged European continent, Britain and North Africa. That same year, 17-year-old Jimmy Kindall leaves his small Mississippi town to join the Merchant Marine. He soon discovers that supplying the troops in unprotected waters exposes him to some of the fiercest battles in WWII.
A Land Remembered has become Florida's favorite novel. Now this Student Edition in two volumes makes this rich, rugged story of the American pioneer spirit more accessible to young readers. Patrick Smith tells of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family battling the hardships of the frontier. The story opens in 1858, when Tobias and Emma MacIvey arrive in the Florida wilderness with their son, Zech, to start a new life, and ends in 1968 with Solomon MacIvey, who realizes that his wealth has not been worth the cost to the land. Between is a sweeping story rich in Florida history with a cast of memorable characters who battle wild animals, rustlers, Confederate deserters, mosquitoes, starvation, hurricanes, and freezes to carve a kingdom out of the Florida swamp. In this volume, meet young Zech MacIvey, who learns to ride like the wind through the Florida scrub on Ishmael, his marshtackie horse, his dogs, Nip and Tuck, at this side. His parents, Tobias and Emma, scratch a living from the land, gathering wild cows from the swamp and herding them across the state to market. Zech learns the ways of the land from the Seminoles, with whom his life becomes entwined as he grows into manhood. Next in series > > See all of the books in this series
Twenty-five-year-old Seminole Toby Tiger lives in despair in the Florida Everglades. He loves the land and everything that exists in the natural world: the deer and egrets, turtles and herons, cypress trees and sawgrass, ponds and marshes, and, most of all, Allapattah, the crocodile. He watches helplessly as the white man imposes his will on the Seminoles, forcing them either to conform or to eke out a living wrestling alligators and carving trinkets for tourists. According to Toby, the whites “destroy all that they touch." Toby refuses to bend to the white man's will and fights back the only way he knows how. He becomes Allapattah, a creature that earns his respect and protection.
Poor in material possessions, Skeeter's kinfolk are rich in their appreciation of their beautiful natural surroundings. The river on which they live—with its food supply, steamboats, and floods—figures strongly in their lives as the source of life, change, and death. Though their life is a simple one, it's filled with friendship, loyalty, love, and compassion
This is a collection of six short stories and a poem. The short stories were written throughout Smith's writing career, going back as far as the 1960's. Reading them, you can see him developing the literary style for which he later became famous. They are a delightful trip back into the deep South. The poem was written when he was 16 years old. A White Deer And Other Stories is edited and published by Patrick Smith's son, Rick (Patrick, Jr.)
In his "utterly fascinating" (Book Smuggler) debut, The Adamantine Palace, Stephen Deas "restored [dragons] to all their scaly fire- breathing glory" (Daily Telegraph). Now, as the Realms teeter on the brink of war, the fate of humanity rests in the survival of one majestic white dragon. Prince Jehal has had his way-now his lover Zafir sits atop the Realms with hundreds of dragons and their riders at her beck and call. But Jehal's plots are far from over, for he isn't content to sit back and watch Zafir command the earth and sky. He wants that glory for himself- no matter who he must sacrifice to get it. The one thing Jehal fears is that the white dragon still lives-and if that is so, then blood will flow, on all sides...
If scholars no longer necessarily find the essence and origins of what came to be known as Christianity in the personality of a historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth, it nevertheless remains the case that the study of early Christianity is dominated by an assumption of the force of Jesus's personality on divergent communities. In The Godman and the Sea, Michael J. Thate shifts the terms of this study by focusing on the Gospel of Mark, which ends when Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome discover a few days after the crucifixion that Jesus's tomb has been opened but the corpse is not there. Unlike the other gospels, Mark does not include the resurrection, portraying instead loss, puzzlement, and despair in the face of the empty tomb. Reading Mark's Gospel as an exemplary text, Thate examines what he considers to be retellings of other traumatic experiences—the stories of Jesus's exorcising demons out of a man and into a herd of swine, his stilling of the storm, and his walking on the water. Drawing widely on a diverse set of resources that include the canon of western fiction, classical literature, the psychological study of trauma, phenomenological philosophy, the new materialism, psychoanalytic theory, poststructural philosophy, and Hebrew Bible scholarship, as well as the expected catalog of New Testament tools of biblical criticism in general and Markan scholarship in particular, The Godman and the Sea is an experimental reading of the Gospel of Mark and the social force of the sea within its traumatized world. More fundamentally, however, it attempts to position this reading as a story of trauma, ecstasy, and what has become through the ruins of past pain.
One hundred years before Columbus and his fellow Europeans began their voyages of discovery, fleets of giant junks commanded by the eunuch admiral Zheng He and filled with the empire’s finest porcelains, lacquerware, and silk ventured to the world’s “four corners.” Seven epic expeditions brought China’s treasure ships across the China Seas and Indian Ocean, from Japan to the spice island of Indonesia and the Malabar Coast of India, on to the rich ports of the Persian Gulf and down the East African coast, to China’s “El Dorado,” and perhaps even to Australia, three hundred years before Captain Cook’s landing. It was a time of exploration and expansion, but it ended in a retrenchment so complete that less than a century later, it was a crime to go to sea in a multimasted ship. In When China Ruled the Seas, Louise Levathes takes a fascinating and unprecedented look at this dynamic period in China’s enigmatic history, focusing on the country’s rise as a naval power that briefly brought half the world under its nominal authority. Drawing on eyewitness accounts, official Ming histories, and African, Arab, and Indian sources, many translated for the first time, Levathes brings readers inside China’s most illustrious scientific and technological era. She sheds new light on the historical and cultural context in which this great civilization thrived, as well as the perception of China by other contemporary cultures. Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, When China Ruled the Seas is the fullest picture yet of the early Ming dynasty—the last flowering of Chinese culture before the Manchu invasion.
One of the most rugged expanses in the continental U.S., the coast of northern California and Oregon saw frequent shipping disasters in the 19th century, before Congress ordered the construction of lighthouses on such dangerous promontories as Heceta Head, Cape Mendocino and a seaward-trending pile of rocks called St. George Reef. The brave, resourceful engineer who directed the Tillamook Rock lighthouse construction, Alexander Ballantyne, was later engaged for the St. George job, and it's this story that author Powers (Treasure Ship) chronicles here. Without any maps to illustrate it, however, readers will need an atlas to follow the movement of men and ships up and down the coast. Later chapters describing lighthouse life prove less problematic; lighthouse keepers were fascinating, courageous characters (and included a good number of women) who not only kept lights burning and fog horns sounding, but also risked life and limb to rescue people stranded in torrential weather.
