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  Zebulon Pike: The Life and...

  Editors Charles River

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  Given that Lewis and Clark remain so famous, it was inevitable that the other American explorers would be overlooked, particularly William Eaton, the hero of the Battle of Derna in the Barnaby Wars, and Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the explorer of the Mississippi. In the case of Pike, Orsi suggests that the explorer is overlooked and in some cases slighted due to what the expeditions did and did not accomplish. Eaton and Pike represented “the first wave of Manifest Destiny, expanding the republican principles of liberty and citizenship in the world.”[1] 
  	Contrasted to that patriotic sentiment are caveats and questions. The career of Zebulon Pike was “dominated by ambiguously motivated explorations of the American West.”[2] With the procurement of the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the nation, Pike had the full force of American authority at his disposal, and his travels through the Colorado Rockies into New Mexico pushed the boundaries between America and Spain. Captured by Spanish officials for illegal entry, he was finally released back into American custody after a year’s time with a volume of new information on Spanish territory, its economy, and its military configuration. This sparked a debate about whether the capture was planned by the American government itself. 
  	Pike’s return is still debated, as is his relationship with General James Wilkinson and Aaron Burr. The controversy is relevant to Burr’s alleged conspiracy to establish a competing empire in the American Southwest, or perhaps as a way of conquering Spanish America without involving the White House. Pike’s papers, confiscated by the Spanish, have complicated the search for the truth, and any evidence of his complicity remains confidential, in part because of the unpredictable explorer’s unpredictable demise.

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  Tolstoy and the Purple Chair -...

  Anonymous

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  Nina Sankovitch has always been a reader. As a child, she discovered that a trip to the local bookmobile with her sisters was more exhilarating than a ride at the carnival. Books were the glue that held her immigrant family together. When Nina's eldest sister died at the age of forty-six, Nina turned to books for comfort, escape, and introspection. In her beloved purple chair, she rediscovered the magic of such writers as Toni Morrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ian McEwan, Edith Wharton, and, of course, Leo Tolstoy. Through the connections Nina made with books and authors (and even other readers), her life changed profoundly, and in unexpected ways. Reading, it turns out, can be the ultimate therapy. 
  Tolstoy and the Purple Chair also tells the story of the Sankovitch family: Nina's father, who barely escaped death in Belarus during World War II; her four rambunctious children, who offer up their own book recommendations while helping out with the cooking and cleaning; and Anne-Marie, her oldest sister and idol, with whom Nina shared the pleasure of books, even in her last moments of life. In our lightning-paced culture that encourages us to seek more, bigger, and better things, Nina's daring journey shows how we can deepen the quality of our everyday lives—if we only find the time.

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  My Secret Life Vol 7 Chapter 10

  Dominic Crawford Collins

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  My Secret Life is an anonymously penned memoir written during a period from the 1840s to the 1880s by a wealthy and sex obsessed English gentleman who refers to himself simply as ‘Walter’. Part confessional, part investigative erotic journalism, it meticulously documents every detail of the author’s prolific sexual encounters, offering us in the process an eye and thigh opening account of life behind closed doors in the Victorian age.
  
  Women, in both mind and body, were the all consuming object of Walter’s interest. From early youth through to old age his quest for erotic discovery and adventure with them was never diminished.
  
  Unlike contemporary 19th century erotic texts, such as The Pearl, whose sole object was to titillate, Walter’s interest in his subjects did not end with the extinguishing of the carnal flame. His hunger to understand the circumstances and minds of the women he encountered is never upstaged by the sex. Their potted life histories, their most intimate desires and acts were shared with him and in turn meticulously recorded by him, written down verbatim while still fresh in his mind.
  
  The resulting poignant record of a lost era and the intimate moments of the women who inhabited it offer us a remarkable insight into the 19th century that cannot be gleaned from any other source.
  
  The complete unabridged text is being released as a fully scored audiofilm (an audio book with accompanying music soundtrack) by film composer Dominic Crawford Collins.
  
  Volume 7 Chapter 10
  The baud's avarice. • The couples hurried. • Cyprians remuneration. • A tight cunted one. • One who knew the spy hole. • A loving, handsome couple. • The mother's maid. • Amorous impatience. • His lustful power. • Varied postures. • Copulations reckoned. • Brother John's cock exhibited. • Gossip with Sarah on gamahuching. • The fourth poke. • The pocket handkerchief. • Laxities with Sarah. • Heads to tails. • Sarah's letch for gamahuching. • On female cunilingers.

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  The Story of My Boyhood and Youth

  John Muir

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  Before he became one of America’s most influential environmental voices, John Muir was a curious Scottish immigrant boy growing up on the Wisconsin frontier. This honest and vivid memoir traces his journey from a strict religious upbringing to the early stirrings of a lifelong love for nature. 
  In simple yet moving detail, Muir recalls farm life, his inventive mechanical creations, and the challenges of a hard pioneer existence. What shines through is his relentless curiosity about the natural world and the quiet strength that would later shape the U.S. conservation movement. 
  A compelling read for fans of nature writing, American history, and personal memoirs, this book offers a glimpse into the early mind of the man who helped inspire the creation of Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Club.

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  Bookends - Collected Intros and...

  Anonymous

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  A brilliant, idiosyncratic collection of introductions and afterwords (plus some liner notes) by New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon—“one of contemporary literature’s most gifted prose stylists” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). 
  In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature—age-old classics as well as his own—that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading. 
  Chabon asks why anyone would write an introduction, or for that matter, read one. His own daughter Rose prefers to skip them. Chabon's answer is simple and simultaneously profound: ""a hope of bringing pleasure for the reader."" Likewise, afterwords—they are all about shared pleasure, about the ""pure love"" of a work of art that has inspired, awakened, transformed the reader. Ultimately, this thought-provoking compendium is a series of love letters and thank-you notes, unified by the simple theme of the shared pleasure of discovery, whether it's the boyhood revelation of the most important story in Chabon's life (Ray Bradbury's ""The Rocket Man""); a celebration of ""the greatest literary cartographer of the planet Mars"" (Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his character John Carter); a reintroduction to a forgotten master of ghost stories (M. R. James, ironically ""the happiest of men""); the recognition that the worlds of Wes Anderson's films are reassembled scale models of our own broken reality (as is all art); Chabon's own rude awakening from the muse as he writes his debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; or a playful parody of lyrical interpretation in the liner notes for Mark Ronson's Uptown Special, the true purpose of which, Chabon insists, is to ""spread the gospel of sensible automotive safety and maintenance practices."" 
  Galaxies away from academic or didactic, Bookends celebrates wonder—and like the copy of The Phantom Tollbooth handed to young Michael by a friend of his father he never saw again—it is a treasured gift.

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  The Child's Book of American...

  Mary Stoyell Stimpson

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  "The Child's Book of American Biography, compiled by Mary Stoyell Stimpson, is a wonderful collection that introduces young readers to notable figures who have shaped American history. Let's explore this enlightening work:    Title and Contents:  The full title of this book is "The Child's Book of American Biography: Selections from the Old and New Testaments."  It features concise biographies of remarkable individuals who have contributed to the fabric of America.  Here are some of the notable figures covered in the book:  George Washington  William Penn  John Paul Jones  John Singleton Copley  Benjamin Franklin  Louis Agassiz  Dorothea Lynde Dix  Ulysses Simpson Grant  Clara Barton  Abraham Lincoln  Robert Edward Lee  John James Audubon  Robert Fulton  George Peabody  Daniel Webster  Augustus St. Gaudens  Henry David Thoreau  Louisa May Alcott  Samuel Finley Breese Morse  William Hickling Prescott  Phillips Brooks  Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)  Joe Jefferson  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow  James McNeill Whistler  Ralph Waldo Emerson  Jane Addams  Luther Burbank  Edward Alexander MacDowell  Thomas Alva Edison "

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