This collection of Bird hunting stories will touch everyone who loves the sport. Whether he is writing about a noble lab’s final retrieve, the halting steps of a young setter with a nose full of grouse scent, or the homecoming of a young woman reconnecting with her past, the author is a consummate craftsman whose prose and poetry will touch everyone for whom bird hunting in all its facets is a lifetime gift.
The art of Gary Ernest Smith speaks for landscapes and cultures rarely, if ever, spoken for in contemporary American art. A concept of place and of the people who inhabit particular places loom large in Smith's vision. The art of Gary Ernest Smith celebrates what we once had; it is a lament for vanishing places and farm-based culture. First and foremost, Smith is a painter and sculptor of rural subjects.
Using the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Boston's most impoverished neighborhood as a case stuudy, the authors show how effective organizing reinforces neighborhood leadership, encourages grassroots power and leads to successful public-private partnerships and comprehensive community development.--Prof. Norman Krumholz
Security of land tenure for the urban poor is now a major problem for developing cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America. This book presents and analyzes the main conclusions of a comparative research programme on land tenure issues. It looks at how solutions can be found and implemented to respond to the demands and needs of the majority of squatters and informal settlements, and analyzes how urban stakeholders, with different social, legal and economic constraints, find innovative and flexible solutions. The book is intended to fill a gap in the literature on comparative research on tenure policies and should be useful to researchers and professionals involved in defining and instigating tenure upgrading policies and programmes.
We walk on fire or air, so Daddy liked to say. Basement floors too hot to touch. Steaming green lawns in the dead of winter. Sinkholes, quick and sudden, plunging open at your feet. The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced eleven-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft. In the aftermath, decades-old secrets threaten to prove just as dangerous to the Howleys as the burning, hollow ground beneath their feet. Inspired by real-life events in Centralia and Carbondale, where devastating coal mine fires irrevocably changed the lives of residents, The Hollow Ground is an extraordinary debut with an atmospheric, voice-driven narrative and an indelible sense of place. Lovers of literary fiction will find in Harnett's young, determined protagonist a character as heartbreakingly captivating as any in contemporary literature.
Two Americans are presumed dead and nine people are trapped in a cabin after an avalanche falls in the remote Andes... Told from five points of view, What the Ground Can't Hold follows: Emma, an Australian faced with an impossible decision that could see her parents jailed. Jack, a teenager obsessed with Jack Kerouac, anti-globalism and sex. Carmen, a tango dancer whose estranged father is dying of cancer. Pedro, the cabin manager, who's in hiding from his ex-wife. And Wolfe, an American on a deadly family quest. With food supplies dwindling, these unlikely companions are forced to extremes and discover they are bound by more than their surroundings - each has a secret that links them to Argentina's Dirty War. What the Ground Can't Hold is a mesmerising debut about the ways the past closes in on the present, and shatters the foundations upon which we build our lives.
With humor and pathos, Forrest Pritchard recounts his ambitious and often hilarious endeavors to save his family’s seventh-generation farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Through many a trial and error, he not only saves Smith Meadows from insolvency but turns it into a leading light in the sustainable, grass-fed, organic farm-to-market community. There is nothing young Farmer Pritchard won’t try. Whether he’s selling firewood and straw, raising free-range chickens and hogs, or acquiring a flock of Barbados Blackbelly sheep, his learning curve is steep and always entertaining. Pritchard’s world crackles with colorful local characters—farm hands, butchers, market managers, customers, fellow vendors, pet goats, policemen—bringing the story to warm, communal life. His most important ally, however, is his renegade father, who initially questions his son's career choice and eschews organic foods for the generic kinds that wreak havoc on his health. Soon after his father’s death, the farm becomes a recognized success and Pritchard must make a vital decision: to continue serving the local community or answer the exploding demand for his wares with lucrative Internet sales and shipping deals. More than a charming story of honest food cultivation and farmers’ markets, Gaining Ground tugs on the heartstrings, reconnecting us to the land and the many lives that feed us.
