Other books that might interest you

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  Young Men and Fire

  Norman Maclean

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  On August 5, 1949, a crew of 15 of the U.S. Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in Montana wilderness. Less than an hour later, all but three were dead or fatally burned in a "blowup," an explosive 2,000 degree firestorm 300 feet deep and 200 feet tall. 
   Winner of a 1992 National Book Critic Award, Young Men & Fire consumed 14 years of Norman Maclean's life. He sifted through grief and controversy in search of the truth about the Mann Gulch tragedy, then wrote about it in excruciating detail. The sobering story of the worst disaster in the history of the Forest Service also embraces the themes of honor, death, compassion, rebirth, and the human spirit.

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  Alexander Dubček Unknown...

  Josette Baer Hill

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  Alexander Dubček is well-known, so one might think; nothing new can be written about him. Is this true? Dubček is the symbol of the Czechoslovak attempt to reform communism that gained worldwide admiration in 1968. The invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in the night of August 21, 1968 set a brutal end to the Prague Spring. 
  
  Josette Baer’s new biography focuses on Dubček’s early years, his childhood in Soviet Kirghizia, his participation in the Slovak National Uprising in 1944 against Nazi Germany and the Slovak clerical-fascist government, and his career in the Slovak Communist Party in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It offers new insights into the political thought of the father of ‘Socialism with a Human Face’, based on archive material available to the Western reader for the first time. Who was Alexander Dubček—a naïve apparatchik, an independent thinker, a courageous liberator, or a political dreamer?

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  Come Sit Awhile

  Alice Taylor

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  Alice celebrates the special moments and the everyday blessings of life.
  Come sit awhile with Alice Taylor. Take a little time out – to rest, to think, or just to be.
  Life can race along at a fast pace, sometimes almost stampeding us along with it. What a pity not to slow down and take the time to enjoy little things, or simply doing nothing or chatting with a good friend. Sometimes Alice finds a comfortable place to sit, maybe a low wall, a garden seat or a grassy bank. A place to let the mind calm
  
  down and let thoughts drift. With this book she invites you to share the special moments of life.

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  The Ribbon of Road Ahead

  Carol Clupny

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  At forty-nine years old, Carol Clupny was an active, driven woman with a career, a family, and a zest for adventure. A mere year later, she struggles with strange symptoms of internal tremors, frozen shoulders, and a serious intestinal infection. She doesn’t understand why she can’t paddle a kayak or throw the ball for her dogs. Then comes the diagnosis: early onset Parkinson’s Disease. “How can I keep going?” she asks her doctor. “Keep exercising and taking your meds. You have five to ten years before things get more difficult.” Carol finds she can no longer work. From her easy chair, she watches videos of people in advanced stages of Parkinson’s. “I can’t go there,” she tells herself. Struggling out of her chair, she shuffles outside to the mailbox and back. These first steps begin her training for the trip at the top of her bucket list: a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Completing this adventure once is not enough, she returns again and again. She reads in an article that bicycling helps mitigate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Dusting off a seldom-used bike in her garage, she leans it against the mailbox to mount up. Away she goes with newfound freedom to train for the RAGBRAI (the Des Moines Registers Annual Bike Ride Across Iowa). On her trips, Carol faces challenges she never could have foreseen. She forges lasting friendships and confronts the reality of living with a progressive neurological disorder. Crashing her bike, slipping along muddy paths with a heavy backpack, suffering through blisters and tendonitis, using a field as a bathroom, she approaches every aspect of life with an attitude of adventure. Carol is not afraid to face the apathy and depression that come with Parkinson’s. Instead of being drug down into darkness, she finds strategies for lifting herself, and others around her, up into the light.

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  How We Survived Communism & Even...

  Slavenka Drakulic

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  This essay collection from renowned journalist and novelist Slavenka Drakulic, which quickly became a modern (and feminist) classic, draws back the Iron Curtain for a glimpse at the lives of Eastern European women under Communist regimes. Provocative, often witty, and always intensely personal, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed cracks open a paradoxical world that through its rejection of capitalism and commoditization ends up fetishizing both. Examining the relationship between material goods and expressions of happiness and individuality in a society where even bananas were an alien luxury, Drakulic hones in on the eradication of female identity, drawing on her own experiences as well as broader cultural observations. Enforced communal housing that allowed for little privacy, the banishment of many time-saving devices, and a focus on manual labor left no room for such bourgeois affectations as cosmetics or clothes, but Drakulic’s remarkable exploration of the reality behind the rhetoric reveals that women still went to desperate lengths to feel “feminine.” How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed also chronicles the lingering consequences of such regimes. The Berlin Wall may have fallen, but Drakulic’s power pieces testify that ideology cannot be dismantled so quickly; a lifetime lived in fear cannot be so easily forgotten.

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  Look at the Lights My Love

  Annie Ernaux

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  A revelatory meditation on class and consumer culture, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux 
    
  “A dryly charming look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler.”—Kirkus Reviews 
   
  For half a century, the French writer Annie Ernaux has transgressed the boundaries of what stories are considered worth telling, what subjects worth exploring. In this probing meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature. 
   
  Recording her visits to a store near Paris for over a year, she captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Through Ernaux’s eyes, the superstore emerges as “a great human meeting place, a spectacle”—a flashy, technologically advanced incarnation of the ancient marketplace where capitalism, cultural production, and class converge, dictating our rhythms of desire. With her relentless powers of observation, Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.

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