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  Rainy Lake House - Twilight of...

  Theodore Catton

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  “Focuses on three men from vastly different backgrounds and serves as a vehicle for exploring the rigors of the fur trade . . . lyrical and transcendent.” —American Historical Review 
   
  In September 1823, three men met at Rainy Lake House, a Hudson’s Bay Company trading post near the Boundary Waters. Dr. John McLoughlin, the proprietor of Rainy Lake House, was in charge of the borderlands west of Lake Superior, where he was tasked with opposing the petty traders who operated out of US territory. Major Stephen H. Long, an officer in the US Army Topographical Engineers, was on an expedition to explore the wooded borderlands west of Lake Superior and the northern prairies from the upper Mississippi to the forty-ninth parallel. John Tanner, a white man living among the Ojibwa nation, arrived in search of his missing daughters, who, Tanner believed, were at risk of being raped by the white traders holding them captive at a nearby fort. 
   
  Drawing on their combined experiences, Theodore Catton creates a vivid depiction of the beautiful and dangerous northern frontier from a collision of vantage points: American, British, and Indigenous; imperial, capital, and labor; explorer, trader, and hunter. At the center of this history is the deeply personal story of John Tanner’s search for kinship: first among his adopted Ojibwa nation; then in the search for his white family of origin; and finally in his quest for custody of his multiracial children. 
   
  “Written with clarity and energy, this book tells its story through the remarkable device of a triple biography.” —Gregory Evans Dowd, author of Groundless

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  David Livingstone - Africa's...

  Janet Benge, Geoff Benge

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  The lion's jaws gripped David Livingstone's arm. Razor-sharp teeth pierced his flesh as the lion savagely shook David in the air like a rag doll. A gunshot rang out. "God help us," David moaned, as the lion dropped him and turned to charge David's friend Mebalwe. With the heart of an explorer and the passion of an evangelist, David Livingstone mapped vast, unexplored areas of Africa, sharing the gospel with whomever he encountered. His stamina, perserverance, and dogged determination created the legacy of a trailblazing explorer with an undying hunger to make Christ known wherever his steps led him. David Livingstone's captivating adventures and tireless zeal continue to inspire countless men and women to bring the gospel message of God's love to those souls who have never heard.

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  Prudence Crandall's Legacy - The...

  Donald E. Williams

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  The “compelling and lively” story of a pioneering abolitionist schoolteacher and her far-reaching influence on civil rights and American law (Richard S. Newman, author of Freedom’s Prophet).   When Prudence Crandall, a Canterbury, Connecticut schoolteacher, accepted a black woman as a student, she unleashed a storm of controversy that catapulted her to national notoriety, and drew the attention of the most significant pro- and anti-slavery activists of the early nineteenth century. The Connecticut state legislature passed its infamous Black Law in an attempt to close down her school. Crandall was arrested and jailed—but her legal legacy had a lasting impact. Crandall v. State was the first full-throated civil rights case in U.S. history. The arguments by attorneys in Crandall played a role in two of the most fateful Supreme Court decisions, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. In this book, author and lawyer Donald E. Williams Jr. marshals a wealth of detail concerning the life and work of Prudence Crandall, her unique role in the fight for civil rights, and her influence on legal arguments for equality in America that, in the words of Brown v. Board attorney Jack Greenberg, “serves to remind us once more about how close in time America is to the darkest days of our history.”    “The book offers substantive and well-rounded portraits of abolitionists, colonizationists, and opponents of black equality―portraits that really dig beneath the surface to explain the individuals’ motivations, weaknesses, politics, and life paths.” ―The New England Quarterly   “Taking readers from Connecticut schoolrooms to the highest court in the land, [Williams] gives us heroes and villains, triumph and tragedy, equity and injustice on the rough road to full freedom.” —Richard S. Newman, author of Freedom’s Prophet

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  Boys and Oil - Growing Up Gay in...

  Taylor Brorby

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  From a young, gay environmentalist, a searing coming-of-age memoir set against the arid landscape of rural North Dakota, where homosexuality "seems akin to a ticking bomb.""I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power." So begins Taylor Brorby's Boys and Oil, a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, "a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking."In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys. Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth. From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.

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  Saltwater Chronicles - Notes on...

  Lesley Choyce

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  The award–winning author celebrates the everyday disasters and discoveries that shape a life in this memoir of love, loss, and adventure in Nova Scotia.   If Lesley Choyce was not a surfer, he would not have dropped out of graduate school in Manhattan in 1978 and moved to Nova Scotia—a decision that made all the difference. In Saltwater Chronicles, he reflects on the ambitious, idealistic, and brash young man he once was, while the older man ahead of him beckons him forward with a mischievous grin.   In between, Choyce adapts to the crisis of becoming a respectable citizen. He experiences the death of his father and of his family dog. He helps guide his wife through cancer as they ride the North Atlantic waves and record a most human range of sorrows and joys.   In this, his one-hundredth book, Lesley Choyce takes readers along as he writes about nearly everything under the sun from his home by the sea on the North Atlantic coast of Canada—all of it most ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.

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  Sightlines - A Conversation with...

  Kathleen Jamie

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  In Sightlines, Kathleen Jamie reports from the field - from her native Scottish "byways and hills" to the frigid Arctic in 14 enthralling essays. She dissects whatever her gaze falls upon - vistas of cells beneath a hospital microscope, orcas rounding a headland, the aurora borealis lighting up the frozen sea. In so doing, she questions what, exactly, constitutes "nature", and upends the idea that it is always picturesque. Written with precision, subtlety, and wry humor, Sightlines urges the listener: "Keep looking, even when there's nothing much to see."

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