Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do

Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society
by Peter McWilliams

A refresher course on rights and personal freedom. What is your position on prostitution, pornography, gambling and other victimless crimes? This book will make readers consider their rights and the rights of others in a more humanistic and caring way.

Farewell to Manzanar

Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment
by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

During World War II a community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese American internees. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were ordered to leave their fishing business in Long Beach and take with them only the belongings they could carry. For Jeanne Wakatsuki, a seven-year-old child, Manzanar became a way of life in which she struggled and adapted, observed and grew. For her father it was essentially the end of his life.

At age thirty-seven, Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston recalls life at Manzanar through the eyes of the child she was. She tells of her fear, confusion, and bewilderment as well as the dignity and great resourcefulness of people in oppressive and demeaning circumstances. Written with her husband, Jeanne delivers a powerful first-person account that reveals her search for the meaning of Manzanar.

Farewell to Manzanar has become a staple of curriculum in schools and on campuses across the country. Last year the San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the twentieth century's 100 best nonfiction books from west of the Rockies.

A Long Way Gone

A Long Way Gone
by Ishmael Beah

My new friends have begun to suspect I haven't told them the full story of my life.

“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”
“Because there is a war.”
“You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”
“Yes, all the time.”
“Cool.”
I smile a little.
“You should tell us about it sometime.”
“Yes, sometime.”

This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.

What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived.

In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he'd been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts.

This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself
by Frederick Douglass

Douglass's graphic depictions of slavery, harrowing escape to freedom, and life as a newspaper editor, eloquent orator, and impassioned abolitionist.

In his third autobiography, American abolitionist, editor, orator, author, statesman, and reformer Frederick Douglass reflected upon his life, observing that he had “lived several lives in one: first, the life of slavery; secondly, the life of a fugitive from slavery; thirdly, the life of comparative freedom; fourthly, the life of conflict and battle; and fifthly, the life of victory, if not complete, at least assured."

Freedom Train

Freedom Train: The Story of Harriet Tubman
by Dorothy Sterling

Born into slavery, young Harriet Tubman knew only hard work and hunger. Escape seemed impossible--certainly dangerous. Yet Harriet did escape North, by the secret route called the Underground Railroad. Harriet didn't forget her people. Again and again she risked her life to lead them on the same secret, dangerous journey.

The Souls of Black Folk

The Souls of Black Folk
by W.E.B. Du Bois

This landmark in the literature of black protest eloquently affirms that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to beg for those rights that belong inherently to all mankind.

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963), writer, civil rights activist, scholar, and editor, is one of the most significant intellectuals in American history. A founding member of the NAACP, editor for many years of The Crisis and three other journals, and author of seventeen books, his writings, speeches, and public debates brought fundamental changes to American race relations.

Forty Lashes Less One

Forty Lashes Less One
by Elmore Leonard

The hell called Yuma Prison can destroy the soul of any man. And it's worse for those whose damning crime is the color of their skin. The law says Chiricahua Apache Raymond San Carlos and black-as-night former soldier Harold Jackson are murderers, and they'll stay behind bars until they're dead and rotting. But even in the worst place on Earth, there's hope. And for two hard and hated inmates -- first enemies, then allies by necessity -- it waits at the end of a mad and violent contest ... on a bloody trail that winds toward Arizona's five most dangerous men.

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
by Larry McMurtry

Ranging from Texas to California on a young writer's journey in a car he calls El Chevy, All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is one of Larry McMurtry's most vital and entertaining novels.

Danny Deck is on the verge of success as an author when he flees Houston and hurtles unexpectedly into the hearts of three women: a girlfriend who makes him happy but who won't stay, a neighbor as generous as she is lusty, and his pal Emma Horton. It's a wild ride toward literary fame and an uncharted country...beyond everyone he deeply loves. All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a wonderful display of Larry McMurtry's unique gift: his ability to re-create the subtle textures of feelings, the claims of passing time and familiar place, and the rich interlocking swirl of people's lives.

Brules

Brules
by Harry Combs

Not so many years ago, rumor had it that the grizzled mountain man living by himself in a cabin on Lone Cone Peak in southwestern Colorado was an outlaw to stay clear of. A true survivor of the woolliest days of America's great move westward, he was a man with chilling memories and few regrets, a legend folks whispered about for years - a hard, hurting cowboy. His name was Brules.

Cat Brules began life as a wild, full-of-the-devil young plainsman. He rode carefree and hell-bent on his favorite horse across Kansas, where he met a girl and fell in love. He drove a mule team deep into buffalo country with a starry-eyed scheme to strike it rich, and he had the deadly misfortune to lose his best friend to the Comanches. And from that point on Brules became a man in search of justice and his own soul...a man whose life would embrace the whole short, passionate history of the Old West. Bringing to life this grand, sweeping novel is a feat of sheer storytelling genius.

The tale unfolds as Brules tells it to a young man who dared to approach the gritty outlaw's lonely cabin and was rewarded with the story of Cat Brules's life...of his one brief, passionate love with Wild Rose, a Shoshone woman; of his unshakable friendship with a silver-spurred Mexican named Pedro; and of his one-man war against those who robbed him of his girl, his friend, and his heart. Written by Harry Combs, the charismatic eighty-year-old aviator and outdoorsman, Brules began as a story Combs told to his grandchildren and grew into this sprawling, impeccably researched historical novel about freedom and our nation's past. It is a work so grand in scope and scale, so filled with brutality and violence, heroism and tenderness, it will take your breath away. Brules is written in fire and blood; it is tougher than Lonesome Dove, richer than Jack London, and better than any of them.

To Kill a Mockingbird

To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee

At the age of eight, Scout Finch is an entrenched free-thinker. She can accept her father's warning that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird, because mockingbirds harm no one and give great pleasure. The benefits said to be gained from going to school and keeping her temper elude her.

The place of this enchanting, intensely moving story is Maycomb, Alabama. The time is the Depression, but Scout and her brother, Jem, are seldom depressed. They have appalling gifts for entertaining themselves—appalling, that is, to almost everyone except their wise lawyer father, Atticus.

Atticus is a man of unfaltering good will and humor, and partly because of this, the children become involved in some disturbing adult mysteries: fascinating Boo Radley, who never leaves his house; the terrible temper of Mrs. Dubose down the street; the fine distinctions that make the Finch family "quality"; the forces that cause the people of Maycomb to show compassion in one crisis and unreasoning cruelty in another.

Also because Atticus is what he is, and because he lives where he does, he and his children are plunged into a conflict that indelibly marks their lives—and gives Scout some basis for thinking she knows just about as much about the world as she needs to.

Catcher In the Rye

Catcher In the Rye
by J.D. Salinger

Ever since it was first published in 1951, this novel has been the coming-of-age story against which all others are judged. Read and cherished by generations, the story of Holden Caulfield is truly one of America's literary treasures.

1984

1984
by George Orwell

Orwell's final novel, 1984, is the story of one man's struggle against the ubiquitous, menacing state power (“Big Brother”) that tries to dictate nearly every aspect of human life. The novel is a classic in anti-utopian fiction, and a trenchant political satire that remains as relevant today as when it was first published.

A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol
by Charles Dickens

Here the Christmas story that we all love is presented in its original language with artwork that captures the period and its ghostly theme. The beautiful language is once again a joy to read. Marley's Ghost warns: "Oh! . . . Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness."

Unusual words of the period such as, negus, Cold Boiled, or bedight, may be looked up or understood in the context. The watercolor and gauche illustrations with smoky spirits and pages tinted with wash draw us into the surreal spirit world. The snowy village with hovering ghosts on the book jacket and the greenish moire book cover with the door knocker of Marley's head, immediately set the tone. This is a jewel of a book for Christmas giving and family enjoyment.

All Quiet On the Western Front

All Quiet On the Western Front
by Erich Maria Remarque

Considered one of the greatest war stories ever written -- and one of the classics of antiwar literature -- Remarque's 1929 masterpiece tells the story of young Paul Baumer, who enlists in the German Army in World War I and takes place with his comrades in the trenches.

The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

"The greatest charter of our movement."
---Rosa Luxemburg

"An integral and systematic exposition of [Marx's] doctrine . . . the best to this day."
---Lenin

"Laid the foundation for modern socialism."
---Karl Kautsky

"[A] model philosophy of history . . . cannot be corrected."
---Arturo Labriola

Over 150 years after its publication, Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto continues to inspire and provoke students, activists and citizens.

The principles embodied within in it lie at the heart of thousands of academic and literary works. It is the starting point for millions of people who refuse to accept that capitalism represents the final and optimum stage of human development. After reading this book, it is impossible to remain convinced that There Is no alternative to unrestrained neoliberalism and difficult to claim that there is anything more crucial than finding one.

A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess

A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. And when the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, the novel asks, "At what cost?"

This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition and Burgess's introduction "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."

Lord of the Flies

Lord of the Flies
by William Golding

Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954, igniting passionate debate with its startling, brutal portrait of human nature. Though critically acclaimed, it was largely ignored upon its initial publication. Yet soon it became a cult favorite among both students and literary critics who compared it to J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye in its influence on modern thought and literature.

Labeled a parable, an allegory, a myth, a morality tale, a parody, a political treatise, even a vision of the apocalypse,Lord of the Flies has established itself as a true classic. And now readers can own it in a beautifully designed hardcover edition worthy of its stature.

This Christmas' meaningful gift, the 50th Anniversary Edition of the Lord of the Flies is the volume that every fan of this classic book will have to own.

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea
by Ernest Hemingway

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

Candide

Candide
by Voltaire

One of the finest satires ever written, Voltaire’s Candide savagely skewers this very “optimistic” approach to life as a shamefully inadequate response to human suffering. The swift and lively tale follows the absurdly melodramatic adventures of the youthful Candide, who is forced into the army, flogged, shipwrecked, betrayed, robbed, separated fromhis beloved Cunégonde, and tortured by the Inquisition.

As Candide experiences and witnesses calamity upon calamity, he begins to discover that—contrary to the teachings of his tutor, Dr. Pangloss—all is perhaps not always for the best. After many trials, travails, and incredible reversals of fortune, Candide and his friends finally retire together to a small farm, where they discover that the secret of happiness is simply “to cultivate one's garden,” a philosophy that rejects excessive optimism and metaphysical speculation in favor of the most basic pragmatism.

Filled with wit, intelligence, and an abundance of dark humor, Candide is relentless and unsparing in its attacks upon corruption and hypocrisy—in religion, government, philosophy, science, and even romance. Ultimately, this celebrated work says that it is possible to challenge blind optimism without losing the will to live and pursue a happy life.

Rebel Without A Crew: Or how a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player

Rebel Without A Crew: Or how a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player
by Robert Rodriguez

In his own witty and straight-shooting style, Robert Rodriguez discloses all the strategies and innovative techniques he used to make El Mariachi on the cheap—including filming before noon so he wouldn't have to buy the actors lunch. You'll witness Rodriguez's whirlwind, 'Mariachi-style' filmmaking, where creativity—not money—is used to solve problems. Culminating in his "Ten-Minute Film School," this book may render conventional film-school programs obsolete. Rodriguez also offers an insider's view of the amazing courtship he enjoyed with Hollywood's A-list. It's an entertaining tour of Hollywood's deal-making machine as he navigates you through studio meetings, pitch sessions, and power lunches. Candidly divulging all the tactics and tempting lures the warring studios used to win him over, he admits that he barely escaped with his movie and his soul intact. Exploding the conventional wisdom that you need at least a million dollars to make a feature film, this nuts-and-bolts account features the full "El Mariachi" shooting script, postproduction tips, film festival anecdotes, and publicity blitz secrets. He demonstrates the countless ways to do for free what the pros spend thousands (or more) on without a second thought. "Rebel Without a Crew" is both one man's remarkable story and the essential guide for anyone who has a celluloid story to tell and the determination to see it through.

Sade: A Biography

Sade: A Biography
by Maurice Lever

Lever is the French editor of the Marquis de Sade's correspondence, and thus in a particularly good position to check and curb much of the mythical fervor that surrounds the writer everyone thinks he knows all about and almost no one does. By modern French surrealists and leftists, Sade has been championed as an archangel of revolution, of sexual revolt; by the general public, as evil and cruelty incarnate. The facts support both and neither, though Lever works upon the framework constructed most seminally by Gilbert Lely in the Fifties. Sade's noble Provencal family related to Petrarch; his feverish libertinage and real crimes of perversity; his first imprisonment (during which he wrote the first of his novels, The 120 Days of Sodom); his second imprisonment, during Robespierre's Terror; his authorial ambitions (not especially pure or demonic sometimes: Sade acknowledged the popular taste for ``spicy books'' when he was writing Justine); the two remarkable women who put up with him as wife, then companion; his rearrest and reimprisonment during the Napoleonic reaction to Jacobin excesses; the end of his days spent in the mental ``hospital'' at Charenton, where Sade ran the loony bin's semi- psychodrama theatricals. What Lever brings across, in a vigorous, unpedantic, well-translated style, is how much (and also how merely) a writer Sade would become--with the largeness and smallness that goes with it--after his aristocratic sexual frenzies burned themselves out early in life. Like many writers, Sade thought most about money. But nobleman that he was, he knew nothing about people; and Lever is right to mention (though the book is almost devoid of literary analysis) that Sade's greatest distinction as an imaginative writer was to create a self-contained repetitious rhythm--of impossible sexual acts that have no relation to what real people would do (or want to do)--the likes of which have never been repeated in prose. Demythologizing, level, and consistently fascinating.

Running on Empty

Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do about It
by Peter G. Peterson

Acclaimed by all sides of the political spectrum, Peter Peterson's Running on Empty not only traces the deterioration of America’s finances but offers solutions. This national bestseller is required reading for everyone concerned with America’s long-term economic survival.

In clear and concise prose, Peterson offers America not only a vision but the practical steps by which to ensure our children’s economic future. Running on Empty is not only a warning, it is also a manifesto calling for the next administration to finally confront a deep and disturbing problem that politicians of all parties have insisted on ignoring for too long.

Ten Things You Can't Say in America

Ten Things You Can't Say in America
by Larry Elder

Straight Talk From the Firebrand Libertarian Who Struck a Chord Across America

Larry Elder tells truths this nation's public figures are afraid to address. In The Ten Things You Can't Say in America, he turns conventional "wisdom" on its head and backs up his commonsense philosophy with cold, hard facts many ignore. Elder says what no one else will:

Blacks are more racist than whites.
White condescension is mor damaging than white racism There is no health-care crisis The War on Drugs is the new Vietnam...and we're losing Republicans and Democrats are the same beast in different rhetoric Gun control advocates have blood on their hands.
America's greatest problem? Illegitimacy.
The welfare state is our national narcotic.
There is no glass ceiling.
The media bias: it's real, it's widespread, it's destructive

John Brown

John Brown
by W.E.B. Du Bois

This new edition of Du Bois's John Brown includes the text of the original 1909 edition and is accompanied by a major introduction that underscores Du Bois's intellectual and emotional debt to the martyred abolitionist. John David Smith's introduction asks new questions about Brown's influence on Du Bois's emerging thoughts on race and society. Smith also provides contextualizing documents, including letters from Brown to his family and Frederick Douglass's account of his last meeting with Brown.

Crazy Horse

Crazy Horse
by Larry McMurtry

Legends cloud the life of Crazy Horse, a seminal figure of American history but an enigma even to his own people in his own day. Yet his story remains an encapsulation of the Native American tragedy and the death of the untamed West. Crazy Horse strips away the tall tales to reveal the essence of this brilliant, ascetic warrior-hero. Larry McMurtry's vivid, carefully considered, succinct biography will lure not only his own fans but history buffs, Western enthusiasts, students of all things Native American, and anyone concerned with the white man's atonement and restitution to native peoples. In a portrait that only he could render, Larry McMurtry captures the poignant passing of a time and offers a vibrant new understanding of the mythic Crazy Horse and what he stood for.

Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
by Christopher Hitchens

In this unique biography of Thomas Jefferson, leading journalist and social critic Christopher Hitchens offers a startlingly new and provocative interpretation of our Founding Father. Situating Jefferson within the context of America's evolution and tracing his legacy over the past two hundred years, Hitchens brings the character of Jefferson to life as a man of his time and also as a symbolic figure beyond it.

Conflicted by power, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and acted as Minister to France yet yearned for a quieter career in the Virginia legislature. Predicting that slavery would shape the future of America's development, this professed proponent of emancipation elided the issue in the Declaration and continued to own human property. An eloquent writer, he was an awkward public speaker; a reluctant candidate, he left an indelible presidential legacy.

Jefferson's statesmanship enabled him to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase with France, doubling the size of the nation, and he authorized the Lewis and Clark expedition, opening up the American frontier for exploration and settlement. Hitchens also analyzes Jefferson's handling of the Barbary War, a lesser-known chapter of his political career, when his attempt to end the kidnapping and bribery of Americans by the Barbary states, and the subsequent war with Tripoli, led to the building of the U.S. navy and the fortification of America's reputation regarding national defense.

In the background of this sophisticated analysis is a large historical drama: the fledgling nation's struggle for independence, formed in the crucible of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and, in its shadow, thedeformation of that struggle in the excesses of the French Revolution. This artful portrait of a formative figure and a turbulent era poses a challenge to anyone interested in American history -- or in the ambiguities of human nature.

Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border

Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border
by Peter Laufer

Journalist Laufer lays out the case for opening the U.S.-Mexican border to the free passage of Mexicans who wish to come North. He makes the case on human, political, and legal terms, frequently referencing the personal stories of those affected by current failed border policies in order to illustrate the problems caused by not doing so.

The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro: A Tale of Passion and Folly in the Heart of Italy

The Miracle of Castel Di Sangro: A Tale of Passion and Folly in the Heart of Italy
by Joe McGinniss

In the summer of 1996, Joe McGinniss, the author of such nonfiction bestsellers as The Selling of the President, Fatal Vision, Blind Faith, and The Last Brother, set out for the remote Italian village of Castel di Sangro, located deep within the forbidding and isolated region of the Abruzzo. His goal was to spend a season with the village soccer team, which only weeks before had accomplished the feat - hailed throughout Italy as a "miracle" - of winning promotion to the second-highest professional league in the land. Though Castel di Sangro had only five thousand inhabitants, its team would now compete against those from such cities as Genoa, Turin, Padua, and Venice in a fight to keep its miracle alive. Almost immediately Joe McGinniss was embroiled in a small-town drama that had less to do with a game played by men kicking a ball than with hope, fear, love, loss, and almost unbearable suspense.

How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization

How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization
by Franklin Foer

Religious, economic, political and ethnic divisions around the world are dramatically illuminated using the world's most popular sport as a lens and metaphor. A groundbreaking work.
Soccer is much more than a game, or even a way of life. In fact, it's a perfect window into the cross–currents of today's world, with all of its joys and sorrows.

Soccer clubs don't represent geographic areas; they stand for social classes and political ideologies. And unlike baseball or tennis, soccer is freighted with the weight of ancient hatreds and history. It's a sport with real stakes –– one that is capable of ruining regimes and launching liberation movements.

In this remarkably insightful, wide–ranging work of reportage, Franklin Foer takes us on a surprising tour through the world of soccer, shattering the myths of our new global age. Instead of destroying local cultures, as the left predicted, globalization has revived tribalism. Far from the triumph of capitalism that the right predicted, it has entrenched corruption.

From Brazil to Bosnia, and Italy to Iran, this is an eye–opening chronicle of how a beautiful sport and its fanatical followers can highlight the fault lines of a society, whether it's terrorism, poverty, anti–Semitism, or radical Islam –– issues that now have an impact on all of us. Filled with blazing intelligence, colourful characters, wry humour, and an equal passion for soccer and humanity, How Soccer Explains the World is an utterly original book that makes sense of our troubled times.

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
by Richard Rodriguez

Hunger of Memory is the story of Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez, who begins his schooling in Sacramento, California, knowing just 50 words of English, and concludes his university studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum.

Here is the poignant journey of a “minority student” who pays the cost of his social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation — from his past, his parents, his culture — and so describes the high price of “making it” in middle-class America.

Provocative in its positions on affirmative action and bilingual education, Hunger of Memory is a powerful political statement, a profound study of the importance of language ... and the moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man.

When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433

When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433
by Louise Levathes

This fascinating book takes an unprecedented look at the dynamic period in China's history--a hundred years before Columbus and his fellow Europeans began making their way to the New World--focusing on China's rise as a naval power that literally could have ruled the world.

1421

1421: The Year China Discovered America
by Gavin Menzies

On March 8, 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen set sail from China. Its mission was "to proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas" and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony.

When it returned in October 1423, the emperor had fallen, leaving China in political and economic chaos. The great ships were left to rot at their moorings and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost in China's long, self-imposed isolation that followed was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America seventy years before Columbus and had circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. Also concealed was how the Chinese colonized America before the Europeans and transplanted in America and other countries the principal economic crops that have fed and clothed the world.

Unveiling incontrovertible evidence of these astonishing voyages, 1421 rewrites our understanding of history. Our knowledge of world exploration as it has been commonly accepted for centuries must now be reconceived due to this landmark work of historical investigation.

The Journals of Lewis & Clark

The Journals of Lewis & Clark
edited by Frank Bergon

In 1803, when the United States purchased Louisiana from France, the great expanse of this new American territory was a blank - not only on the map but in our knowledge. President Thomas Jefferson keenly understood that the course of the nation's destiny lay westward and that a national "Voyage of Discovery" must be mounted to determine the nature and accessibility of the frontier. He commissioned his young secretary, Meriwether Lewis, to lead an intelligence-gathering expedition from the Missouri River to the northern Pacific coast and back.

From 1804 to 1806, Lewis, accompanied by co-captain William Clark, the Shoshone guide Sacajawea, and thirty-two men, made the first trek across the Louisiana Purchase, mapping the rivers as he went, tracing the principal waterways to the sea, and establishing the American claim to the territories of Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Together the captains kept a journal, a richly detailed record of the flora and fauna they sighted, the Indian tribes they encountered, and the awe-inspiring landscape they traversed, from their base camp near present-day St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River. In keeping this record they made an incomparable contribution to the literature of exploration and the writing of natural history.

A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution

A Struggle for Power: The American Revolution
by Theodore Draper

Theodore Draper's new book is an acute dissection of the process that led to the final break with England and to the armed revolt in 1775. It is an interpretation that differs from others which have given most prominence to ideological factors as the root cause of the rebellion. Draper's treatment gives as much importance to the British as to the American side of the struggle. He shows how early in the colonial story British thinkers began to worry about the inevitability of an American breakaway.

Draper lucidly examines the logic of dissolution, and the manifold ways in which the rapidly increasing colonial population and commerce propelled an unfolding revolutionary process. Ideological arguments, he contends, provided a means, not an end, to the revolutionary struggle. Before the outbreak of the rebellion, American leaders foresaw that the colonies were bound to become "a mighty empire" or "a rising Empire." They were determined that Americans, not the British, should control this future. But they aimed at little more than a change in the power relationship and left political, economic, and social changes for later.

A Struggle for Power offers a lively and compelling account of not one but of two highly complex conflicts - of the British against the French, and of the Americans against the British. A Struggle for Power seeks to answer the question of how and why, in the space of little more than a decade after the Stamp Act of 1765, the people in the New World transformed themselves from proud British colonists into self-conscious Americans intent on establishing an independent republic.

Fued: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900

Fued: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900
by Altina L. Waller

Providing more than a narration of the events, Altina Waller tells the real story of the Hatfields and McCoys instead of perpetuating the myths surrounding them. At the same time, she analyzes the fundamental social and cultural tensions underlying the feud. She argues that it was not an outgrowth of traditional mountain culture but rather a contest for social and economic control between local people and outside industrial capitalists.

A People's History of the United States

A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of -- and in the words of -- America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers.

Lewis & Clark: Through Indian Eyes

Lewis & Clark: Through Indian Eyes
edited by Alvin M. Josephy, Jr.

For the first time in the two hundred years since Lewis and Clark led their expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific, we hear the other side of the story—as we listen to nine descendants of the Indians whose homelands were traversed.

Among those who speak: Newspaper editor Mark Trahant writes of his childhood belief that he was descended from Clark and what his own research uncovers. Award-winning essayist and fiction writer Debra Magpie Earling describes the tribal ways that helped her nineteenth-century Salish ancestors survive, and that still work their magic today.

Montana political figure Bill Yellowtail tells of the efficiency of Indian trade networks, explaining how axes that the expedition traded for food in the Mandan and Hidatsa villages of Kansas had already arrived in Nez Perce country by the time Lewis and Clark got there a few months and 1,000 miles later. Umatilla tribal leader Roberta Conner compares Lewis and Clark’s journal entries about her people with what was actually going on, wittily questioning Clark’s notion that the natives believed the white men “came from the clouds”—in other words, they were gods. Writer and artist N. Scott Momaday ends the book with a moving tribute to the “most difficult of journeys,” calling it, in the truest sense, for both the men who entered the unknown and those who watched, “a vision quest,” with the “visions gained being of profound consequence.”

Some of the essays are based on family stories, some on tribal or American history, still others on the particular circumstances of a tribe today—but each reflects the expedition’s impactthrough the prism of the author’s own, or the tribe’s, point of view.

Thoughtful, moving, provocative, Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes is an exploration of history—and a study of survival—that expands our knowledge of our country’s first inhabitants. It also provides a fascinating and invaluable new perspective on the Lewis and Clark expedition itself and its place in the long history of our continent.

Che Guevara

Che Guevara
by Andrew Sinclair

'I was born in Argentina. I fought in Cuba, and I began to be a revolutionary in Guatemala.' Che Guevara was the most admired and beloved revolutionary of his time, the first man since Simon Bolivar seriously to plan to unite the countries of Latin America.

This concise biography unravels Che's life, from his birth in 1928, the child of free-thinking radical Argentinian aristocrats, his youthful membership of Accion Argentina and his training as a doctor in Buenos Aires, through his witnessing of the fall of the new revolutionary government in Guatemala alongside its leader, Arbenz, his action as a commander in the guerrilla war in Cuba with Fidel Castro and his part in the reforming Marxist Cuban government, to his fight for liberation of the Congo and, finally, of Bolivia, where he was executed.

Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.

Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A.
by Luis J. Rodriguez

By age twelve, Luis Rodriguez was a veteran of East L.A. gang warfare. Lured by a seemingly invincible gang culture, he witnessed countless shootings, beatings, and arrests, then watched with increasing fear as drugs, murder, suicide, and senseless acts of street crime claimed friends and family members.

Before long, Rodriguez saw a way out of the barrio through education and the power of words and successfully broke free from years of violence and desperation. Achieving success as an award-winning Chicano poet, he was sure the streets would haunt him no more -- until his son joined a gang. Rodriguez fought for his child by telling his own story in Always Running, a vivid memoir that explores the motivations of gang life and cautions against the death and destruction that inevitably claim its participants. At times heartbreakingly sad and brutal, Always Running is ultimately an uplifting true story, filled with hope, insight, and a hard-learned lesson for the next generation.

The Africans

The Africans
by David Lamb

In these 17 well written essays, news correspondent Lamb ranges throughout Africa, creating an insightful portrait of the land and especially its people. This now-classic book is a wide-ranging political and social survey of the continent, banned in a number of countries -- and as interesting today as when it was first published in 1984.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
by Anthony Bourdain

When Chef Anthony Bourdain wrote "Don't Eat Before You Read This" in The New Yorker, he spared no one's appetite, revealing what goes on behind the kitchen door. In Kitchen Confidential, he expanded that appetizer into a deliciously funny, delectable shocking banquet that lays out his 25 years of sex, drugs, and haute cuisine.

From his first oyster in the Gironde to the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop Rockefeller Center, from the restaurants of Tokyo to the drug dealers of the East Village, from the mobsters to the rats, Bourdain's brilliantly written, wild-but-true tales make the belly ache with laughter.

1491

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
by Charles C. Mann

In this groundbreaking work of science, history, and archaeology, Charles C. Mann radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of Columbus in 1492.Contrary to what so many Americans learn in school, the pre-Columbian Indians were not sparsely settled in a pristine wilderness; rather, there were huge numbers of Indians who actively molded and influenced the land around them.

From the astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, which had running water, immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city, to the Mexican corn that was so carefully created in a specialized breeding process that it has been called man’s first feat of genetic engineering, Indians were not living lightly on the land but were landscaping and manipulating their world in ways that we are only now beginning to understand. Challenging and surprising, this a transformative new look at a rich and fascinating world we only thought we knew.

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
by Christopher Hitchens

"I did not, I wish to state, become a journalist because there was no other ‘profession' that would have me. I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information."

Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases America's leading polemicist's rejection of consensus and cliché, whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud"), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael Bloomberg.

Hitchens began the nineties as a "darling of the left" but has become more of an "unaffiliated radical" whose targets include those on the "left," who he accuses of "fudging" the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens shows in his reportage, cultural and literary criticism, and opinion essays from the last decade, he has not jumped ship and joined the right but is faithful to the internationalist, contrarian and democratic ideals that have always informed his work.