Other books that might interest you

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  Ghosts of Bristol - Haunting...

  V.N. "Bud" Phillips

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  “A whirlwind ride through the spooky and supernatural, including a ghostly Civil War leftover” (SWVA Today).   The nighttime glow of the Cameo Theatre illuminates an apparition of the infamous madam Pocahontas Hale, and the ghost of a young Confederate soldier rises from Cedar Hill to gaze mournfully on his lost homestead—these are the haunts of the Twin Cities. Local author Bud Phillips takes readers on an eerie, and sometimes humorous, journey through the ghostly lore of Bristol, Virginia and Tennessee. From the terrifying specter of a headless hobo and the spirits of a young couple parted through violence and reunited in death to the organist who played the Sunday after her funeral, Phillips’s collection of tales raises the otherworldly residents of Bristol from the shadows.   Includes photos!

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  The Passenger: Ireland

  Passenger The

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  The best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from and about Ireland—in the series that’s “like a literary vacation” (Publishers Weekly). 
   
  Ireland is a land full of charm and conflict, a country that in just a few decades has gone from being a poor, semi-theocratic society to a thriving economy free from the influence of the Catholic Church. With the 1998 peace agreements, the conflict between nationalists and unionists seemed, if not resolved, at least dormant. But Brexit—with the ambiguous position it leaves Northern Ireland in—caused old tensions to resurface, with ramifications in politics, society, culture, and sport. 
   
  Meanwhile, south of the border, epochal transformation has seen a deeply patriarchal, conservative society give space to diversity, the only country in the world to enshrine gay marriage in law through a referendum. And there’s a whole other Ireland abroad, an Irish diaspora that looks to the old country with newfound pride but doesn’t forget the ugliness it fled from. 
   
  Memory and identity intertwine with the transformations—from globalization to climate change—that are remodeling the Irish landscape, from the coastal communities under threat of disappearing along with the Irish language fishermen use to talk about the sea, inland the peat bogs, until recently important sources of energy and jobs, are being abandoned. Pieces in this collection include: 
   
  The mass is ended by Catherine Dunne and Caelainn Hogan · The Way Back by Colum McCann · A Trip to Westeros by Mark O’Connell · Plus: life on the margins of two unions and right in the middle of Brexit, making war on each other for thirty years while playing on the same national rugby team, emigrating to the great enemy or transforming the country one referendum at a time, digging peat bogs and building cottages, talking of the sea in Gaelic, and much more . . .  
   
  “These books are so rich and engrossing that it is rewarding to read them even when one is stuck at home.” —The Times Literary Supplement

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  To America with Love

  A. A. Gill

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  A celebrated British provocateur and Vanity Fair columnist serves up an “immensely entertaining book inspired by his love and knowledge of America” (Sunday Times, London).IN TO AMERICA WITH LOVE, celebrated British provocateur and Vanity Fair colum­nist A. A. Gill traverses the Atlantic to become the freshest chronicler of American identity in recent memory. With a fiery temper, a sharp-tongued wit, and an insatiable curiosity to figure out what makes more than 300 million of the world’s population tick, Gill traces the history and logic of our nation’s habits, collecting wild stories and startling facts along the way. From Colorado, where he meets a local vegeta­tion expert and learns which flowers were in Poca­hontas’s nuptial bouquet, to Kentucky, where he visits the Creationist Museum and drinks moonshine with a hog farmer, and to Harlem, where he misses a turn and stumbles into the wrong barbershop for a once-in-a-lifetime haircut, Gill embarks on a tour of not only the nation’s landscape but also its psyche, playing adventurer, philosopher, statistician, and raconteur all at once. In inimitable fashion he explains why pressing a button in a Manhattan elevator means entering a social contract of American etiquette and inverting conventional hierarchies of space; why browsing through Playboy centerfolds becomes the perfect litmus test for a generation’s political views; and how Hollywood is the metaphysical marketplace for movies, the place where Americans are sold on American romance and taught how to dream the American dream. Weaving together a tapestry of historical erudition and outrageous anecdotes, Gill ultimately captures the scope and spirit of a nation that started off as a conceptual experiment and became a political, sci­entific, and cultural fortress. This humorous and revelatory book shows us why we are who we are by transforming ordinary experiences into extraordinary lessons and promising to never let us look in the mirror the same way again.

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  Maritime National Historical...

  Patricia L. Lawrence

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  The San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park is the country's only floating  museum.  Patricia Lawrence explores two of the six ships with a park ranger; the 1886 square-rigger Balclutha, and the 1890 steam ferryboat Eureka.

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  Prehistoric California - at...

  Patricia L. Lawrence

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  Archeology meets paleontology on the Sonoma Coast of California where State Parks archeologist, Breck Parkman and others have made discovers of the existence of Columbian mammoths, and saber tooth tigers, as the last ice age melted and humans moved in 15,000 years ago.  Patricia Lawrence is exploring Sonoma State Park and Goat Rock Park with Breck Parkman.

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  Glastenbury - The History of a...

  Tyler Resch

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  The curious history of a tiny town that all but disappeared . . . Includes photos!   Founded by a famously scheming New Hampshire governor, Glastenbury struggled for over a century to break triple digits in population. A small charcoal-making industry briefly flourished after the Civil War, yet by 1920 Glastenbury counted fewer than twenty inhabitants.   The end came officially in 1937, when the state, following a spirited debate, formally disincorporated the town. Yet Glastenbury’s legacy lives on in Tyler Resch’s lively and amusing history. Follow Resch as he chronicles the community’s compelling, if always precarious, existence.   From mysterious murders and curious development schemes to the township’s eventual annexation by the US Forest Service, Glastenbury tells the ultimately redemptive tale of a community that lost its political status, only to gain a national forest.

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