Other books that might interest you

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  The Iron Road in the Prairie...

  Simon Cordery

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  In 1836, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas agreed on one thing: Illinois needed railroads. Over the next fifty years, the state became the nation's railroad hub, with Chicago at its center. Speculators, greed, growth, and regulation followed as the railroad industry consumed unprecedented amounts of capital and labor. A nationwide market resulted, and the Windy City became the site of opportunities and challenges that remain to this day. In this first-of-its-kind history, full of entertaining anecdotes and colorful characters, Simon Cordery describes the explosive growth of Illinois railroads and its impact on America. Cordery shows how railroading in Illinois influenced railroad financing, the creation of a national economy, and government regulation of business. Cordery's masterful chronicle of rail development in Illinois from 1837 to 2010 reveals how the state's expanding railroads became the foundation of the nation's rail network.

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  Flights of Fancy - Defying...

  Richard Dawkins

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  The Wonder of Flight. The Science of Evolution. From both, Richard Dawkins weaves a fascinating account of how nature and humans have learned to overcome the pull of gravity and take to the skies.Have you ever dreamt you could fly? Or imagined what it would be like to glide and swoop through the sky like a bird? Do you let your mind soar to unknown, magical spaces?In Flights of Fancy, Richard Dawkins explains how nature and humans have learned to overcome the pull of gravity and take to the skies. From the mythical Icarus, to the sadly extinct but spectacular bird Argentavis magnificens, from the Wright flyer and the 747, to the Tinkerbella fairyfly and the Peregrine falcon. But it is also about flights of the mind, about escaping the everyday – through science, ideas and imagination.

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  A Journey with Sibbel - An...

  Susan Greening Davis, Sally...

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  “Beautiful images of the needlework and patterns inspired by the sampler, along with wonderful vignettes of culture and history from the time period.” —Sassy Jacks Stitchery  
   
  Authors Susan Greening Davis and Sally Criswell found Sibbel’s sampler in Belgium, fell in love with it and brought it to America. Through their research, they have opened a window for us to see what life for Sibbel was like growing up in the 1700s, learning needlework techniques and coming to love stitching. 
   
  Within these pages is an interpretation of Sibbel’s young life in a Netherlands charity home. As Sibbel creates the motifs in her sampler and learns special joining stitches, you are invited to stitch along. What you will have created is a stunning showpiece. In the project pages, you can create many of the items Sibbel would have made, such as her leather pincushion or the gorgeous stitching weight used to hold her sampler in place. 
   
  So collect your favorite stitching tools, find your most comfortable chair and take a journey with Sibbel.

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  The Exquisite Book of Paper...

  Livia Cetti

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  “Equips crafters with the skills for creating individual flowers and larger arrangements while providing a delightful overview on the basics of botany.” —Publishers Weekly   In The Exquisite Book of Paper Flower Transformations, artist Livia Cetti ups the ante with a host of grander and more intricate flowers and projects—more blooms, more petals, stronger stems, and bigger, bolder arrangements! Cetti will teach you how to play with size, shape, color, and texture to create twenty-five vibrant single stems in a variety of natural shapes—globes, spikes, bells, saucers, rectangles, cones, and arcs—including hydrangeas, coral charm peonies, honeysuckles, and paperwhites. Then, you’ll use these elemental shapes to build the 15 bright, abundant arrangements, including bold wreaths, bountiful bouquets, fantastical gilded wall art, and blooming garlands.   Introducing new, never-before-seen techniques for dyeing paper and creating moldable leaves and petals, this gorgeous guide is perfect for crafters of all skill levels interested in making realistic and unique home decor, gifts, accessories, and entertaining essentials.  “Unlike fresh-cut flowers, paper blooms last forever. And if you make them like floral stylist, crafter and creative director Livia Cetti, they might even be mistaken for the real thing. One of the top paper-flower artists in the U.S.” —House & Home

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  Specimen Days

  Walt Whitman

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  Specimen Days is essentially the great American poet Walt Whitman's scrap book. It documents most of his life's adventures, espeically his experience serving as a nurse during the Civil War and travelling around America.

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  Halfway to Heaven - My...

  Mark Obmascik

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  Fat, forty-four, father of three sons, and facing a vasectomy, Mark Obmascik would never have guessed that his next move would be up a 14,000-foot mountain. But when his twelve-year-old son gets bitten by the climbing bug at summer camp, Obmascik can't resist the opportunity for some high-altitude father-son bonding by hiking a peak together. After their first joint climb, addled by the thin air, Obmascik decides to keep his head in the clouds and try scaling all 54 of Colorado's 14,000-foot mountains, known as the Fourteeners -- and to do them in less than one year. The result is Halfway to Heaven, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Obmascik's rollicking, witty, sometimes harrowing, often poignant chronicle of an outrageous midlife adventure that is no walk in the park, although sometimes it's A Walk in the Woods -- but with more sweat and less oxygen. Half a million people try climbing a Colorado Fourteener every year, but only twelve hundred have reported summiting them all. Can an overweight, stay-at-home dad become No. 1,201?  With his ebullient personality and sparkling prose, Obmascik brings us inside the quirky, colorful subculture of mountaineering obsessives who summit these mountains year after year. Honoring his concerned wife's orders not to climb alone, Obmascik drags old friends up the slopes, some of them lifelong flatlanders tasting thin air for the first time, and lures seasoned Rockies junkies into taking on a huffing, puffing newbie by bribing them with free beer, lunches, and car washes. Among the new friends he makes are an ex-drag racer trying to perform a headstand on every summit, the lead oboe player in a Hebrew salsa band, and a climber with the counterproductive pre-climb ritual of gulping down four beers and a burrito. Along the way, Obmascik experiences the raw, rowdy, and rarely seen intimacy of male friendship, braced by the double intoxicants of adrenaline and altitude.  Though danger is always present -- the Colorado Fourteeners have killed more climbers than Mount Everest -- Mark knows his aging scalp can't afford the hair-raising adventures of Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, and his quest becomes a story of family, friendship, and fraternity. In Obmascik's summer of climbing, he loses fifteen pounds, finds a few dozen man-dates, and gains respect for the history of these storied mountains (home to cannibalism, gold rushes, shoot-outs, and one of the nation's most famed religious shrines). As much about midlife and male bonding as it is about mountains, Halfway to Heaven tells how weekend warriors can survive them all as they reach for those most distant things -- the summits of mountains and a teenage son. And as one man exceeds the physical achievements of his youth, he discovers that age -- like summit height -- is just a number.

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