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  Unlikely Angel - The Songs of...

  Lydia R. Hamessley, Steve...

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  Dolly Parton's success as a performer and pop culture phenomenon has overshadowed her achievements as a songwriter. But she sees herself as a songwriter first, and with good reason. Parton's compositions like "I Will Always Love You" and "Jolene" have become American standards with an impact far beyond country music.Lydia R. Hamessley's expert analysis and Parton's characteristically straightforward input inform this comprehensive look at the process, influences, and themes that have shaped the superstar's songwriting artistry. Hamessley reveals how Parton's loving, hardscrabble childhood in the Smoky Mountains provided the musical language, rhythms, and memories of old-time music that resonate in so many of her songs. Hamessley further provides an understanding of how Parton combines her cultural and musical heritage with an artisan's sense of craft and design to compose eloquent, painfully honest, and gripping songs about women's lives, poverty, heartbreak, inspiration, and love.Filled with insights on hit songs and less familiar gems, Unlikely Angel covers the full arc of Dolly Parton's career and offers an unprecedented look at the creative force behind the image.

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  Roughing It in the Bush - Or...

  Susanna Moodie, J.W.D. Moodie

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  Originally published in 1852, Roughing It in the Bush by Susanna Moodie, with contributions from her husband John Wedderburn Dunbar Moodie, is a vibrant, humorous, and wry description of their arrival and life in the young country of Canada after their immigration in 1832, and settlement in the rugged backwoods of what is now Ontario-unimaginably difficult, but also breathtakingly beautiful by turns. 
    
  It is filled with hope and passion for the future that Canada may grow to fulfill, a song of hope for what may be built out of multi-cultural immigration. 
    
  This edition is the complete text of the original publication, including poems by Susanna, her brother, and her husband (J.W.D.M); and four chapters contributed by John W. D. Moodie.

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  Last Rites

  John Lukacs

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  An accomplished historian delves into his own history: “An often witty and always fascinating—even entertaining—writer.”—TheWashington Post In Confessions of an Original Sinner, an adroit blend of autobiography and personal philosophy, historian John Lukacs paused to set down the history of his own thoughts and beliefs. Now, in Last Rites, he continues and expands his reflections, this time integrating his conception of history and human knowledge with private memories of his wives and loves, and enhancing the book with footnotes from his idiosyncratic diaries. The resulting volume is fascinating and delightful—an auto-history by a passionate, authentic, brilliant, and witty man. Lukacs begins with a concise rendering of a historical understanding of our world (essential reading for any historian), then follows with trenchant observations on his life in the United States, commentary on his native Hungary and the new meanings it took for him after 1989, and deeply personal portraits of his three wives, about whom he has not written before. He also includes a chapter on his formative memories of May and June 1940 and of Winston Churchill, a subject in some of Lukacs’s later studies. Last Rites is a richly layered summation combined with a set of extraordinary observations—an original book only John Lukacs could have written 

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  Breakaway Amish - Growing Up...

  Johnny Mast

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  “I am the grandson of Bishop Sam Mullet, who was arrested for the Amish beard-cutting attacks. This is my story.”Beard-cutting attacks on Amish people in the middle of the night. Five incidents. Nine victims. How could members of a Christian tradition known for peace and forgiveness enact such violence? What could make members of one Amish group turn against other Amish? In Breakaway Amish, Johnny Mast tells in riveting detail how his Amish community became increasingly isolated from other Amish people, and how the wishes and edicts of his grandfather, Bishop Sam Mullet, overtook daily life in the group. Over time, members became convinced that cutting their own hair was a sign of repentance and remorse. When that conviction led them to cut off the beards of those outside their community, however, it was more than a strange religious ritual. It was a crime.Here is an eyewitness account of the disturbing events at Bergholz, an Amish community gone awry. Yet redemption dwells even here, in the bravery and conviction of one who chose to break free.

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  Red Blood Black Sand - Fighting...

  Chuck Tatum

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  In 1944, the U.S. Marines were building the 5th Marine Division—also known as "The Spearhead"—in preparation for the invasion of the small, Japanese-held island of Iwo Jima. 
  When Charlie Tatum entered Camp Pendleton to begin Marine boot camp, he was just a smart-aleck teenager eager to serve his country. Little did he know that he would be training under the watchful eyes of a living legend of the Corps—Congressional Medal of Honor recipient John Basilone, who had almost single-handedly fought off a Japanese force of three-thousand on Guadalcanal, and survived. 
  It was from Basilone and other "Old Breed" sergeants that Tatum would learn how to fight like a Marine and act like a man, as he went through the hell of boot camp to the raucous port of Pearl Harbor with its gambling, gals, and tattoos, to the island of death itself, where he hit the black sand of Iwo Jima with thirty thousand other Marines in the climactic battle of the Pacific Theater. 
  It was on that godforsaken strip of land that Tatum and Basilone would meet again under a hellish rain of bullets and bombs—and where Tatum would make his own mark, carrying ammo for the machine gun carried by Basilone. Together they would lead the breakout off the beach, driving through and destroying a swath of enemy soldiers in the first man-to-man combat on Iwo Jima. 
  Red Blood, Black Sand is the story of Chuck's two weeks in hell, where he would watch his hero, Basilone, fall, where the enemy stalked the night, where snipers haunted the day, and where Chuck would see his friends whittled away in an eardrum-shattering, earth-shaking, meat grinder of a battle. 
  Before the end, Chuck would find himself, like Basilone, standing alone, blind with rage, firing a machine gun from the hip, in a personal battle to kill a relentless foe he had come to hate. This is the island, the heroes, and the tragedy of Iwo Jima, through the eyes of the battle's greatest living storyteller, Chuck Tatum.

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  Flames in the Sky

  Pierre Clostermann

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  From near suicidal RAF attacks in 1940 through to the dawn of the jet age in 1945, Flames in the Sky captures the astonishing drama, intensity, heroism, and incomparable exhilaration of the World War Two air war like no other book.This epic global struggle between Spitfires, Hurricanes, Mustangs, Mosquitos, Messerschmitts, Zeros, Kamikazes and more is brought vividly to life by a writer who was himself in the thick of the action.Pierre Clostermann was one of the outstanding Allied Aces of the Second World War, shooting down scores of enemy aircraft, while friends and comrades lost their lives in the deadly skies above Europe. Flames in the Sky was born of his desire "to do justice to their courage."Flames in the Sky is packed with dramatic aerial action, including the Battle of France, the attack on Pearl Harbor, last stand on the Bataan Peninsula, Operation Vengeance: The Assassination of Admiral Yamamoto, and the Messerschmitt 262 and the dawn of the jet age.

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