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  The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium -...

  Mark Dery

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  A wide-ranging collection of essays on millennial American culture that “marshals a vast pop vocabulary with easy wit” (The New York Times Book Review).   From the far left to the far right, on talk radio and the op-ed page, more and more Americans believe that the social fabric is unraveling. Celebrity worship and media frenzy, suicidal cultists and heavily armed secessionists: modern life seems to have become a “pyrotechnic insanitarium,” Mark Dery says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dery elucidates the meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like the Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety—a combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and the paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through the extremes of American culture of which The Atlantic has written, “Mark Dery confirms once again what writers and thinkers as disparate as Nathanael West, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, and Oliver Sacks have already shown us: the best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes.”   “Dery is the kind of critic who just might give conspiracy theory a good name.” —Wired

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  A Man of Faith - The Spiritual...

  David Aikman

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  “Offers some Bush family history, examines his wayward years and details Bush’s transformation from churchgoer to a Christian who internalized his faith.” —Publishers Weekly 
   
  More than any other world leader in recent times, George W. Bush is a man of faith . . . a conservative Christian who has brought the power of prayer and the search for God’s will into the Oval Office. His faith has proven to be a bedrock of strength and resolve during two of the most tumultuous years in our nation’s history. According to Newsweek magazine, “This presidency is the most resolutely faith based in modern times. An enterprise founded, supported and guided by trust in the temporal and spiritual power of God.” David Aikman, skilled journalist and former senior correspondent for TIME magazine, pens this dramatic and gripping account of Bush’s journey to faith. Based on interviews and behind-the-scenes stories, you’ll learn how . . . His life changed after a conversation with Billy Graham on the beach at KennebunkportHe walked away from alcoholism toward a new destinyThe events following 9/11 caused many to view him as God’s chosen man for this critical time in historyHis decision to go to war with Iraq became the ultimate test of his faith 
   
  A Man of Faith . . . an intimate look at how Bush’s spiritual life has impacted his presidency, the nation, and the world.

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  Wolf Island - Discovering the...

  L. David Mech, Greg Breining

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  In the late 1940s, a small pack of wolves crossed the ice of Lake Superior to the island wilderness of Isle Royale, creating a perfect "laboratory" for a long-term study of predators and prey. As the wolves hunted and killed the island's moose, a young graduate student named Dave Mech began research that would unlock the mystery of one of nature's most revered (and reviled) animals—and eventually became an internationally renowned and respected wolf expert. This is the story of those early years.Wolf Island recounts three extraordinary summers and winters Mech spent on the isolated outpost of Isle Royale National Park, tracking and observing wolves and moose on foot and by airplane—and upending the common misperception of wolves as destructive killers of insatiable appetite. Mech sets the scene with one of his most thrilling encounters: witnessing an aerial view of a spectacular hunt, then venturing by snowshoe to photograph the pack of hungry wolves at their kill. Wolf Island owes as much to the spirit of adventure as to the impetus of scientific curiosity. Written with science and outdoor writer Greg Breining, who recorded hours of interviews with Mech and had access to his journals and field notes from those years, the book captures the immediacy of scientific fieldwork in all its triumphs and frustrations.

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  Still Wild - Short Fiction of...

  Larry McMurtry

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  Larry McMurtry, the preeminent chronicler of the American West, celebrates the best of contemporary Western short fiction, introducing a stellar collection of twenty stories that represent, in various ways, the coming-of-age of the legendary American frontier.Featuring a veritable Who's Who of the century's most distinctive writers, this collection effectively departs from the standard superstars of the Western genre. McMurtry has chosen a refreshing range of work that, when taken as a whole, depicts the evolution and maturation of Western writing over several decades. The featured tales are not so concerned with the American West of history and geography as they are with the American West of the imagination—one that is alternately comic, gritty, individual, searing, and complex. Including authors such as Jack Kerouac, Wallace Stegner, Raymond Carver, Annie Proulx, and Diana Ossana, this collection captures the real Western canon like no other.

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  John Coates - The Man Who Built...

  Marie Beardmore

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  An abundantly illustrated biography of the British animation producer behind Yellow Submarine, The Snowman, and other classics. 
   
  John Coates is best known as the producer of The Snowman, When the Wind Blows, Wind in the Willows, Willows in Winter, and Famous Fred—and as the man behind the Beatles film Yellow Submarine. In his long, eventful career, he earned a BAFTA and a CableACE Award as well as Primetime Emmy and Academy Award nominations. 
   
  This intimate biography takes us on a journey through Coates’s youth, his years as an army officer in the 11th Hussars in World War II, and his postwar life, working as a distributor for Rank Films throughout Asia before returning to England and eventually taking over TVC’s animation studio. 
   
  With a foreword by Raymond Briggs and an epilogue by John Coates

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  Walking to Greenham

  Ann Pettitt

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  A young mother bringing up her children in rural Wales, Ann Pettitt began a movement that changed the face of modern history

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