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  The Alphabet and Simplified...

  Mark Twain

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  Mark Twain gave this speech at an event honoring Andrew Carnegie, who helped found the Simplified Spelling Board. Twain mentions how uncomfortable it is to only receive compliments when one is the guest of honor, so he critiques Carnegie’s “pestiferous” ideas about spelling reform. In doing so, he provides his own suggestions for fixing “this present silly alphabet, which I fancy was invented by a drunken thief.” This speech is a fine example of the brazen humor that made Twain himself famous.  

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  Becoming Kevin - From Warrior to...

  Kevin Osterman

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  Kevin Osterman takes us through a fascinating journey from delinquency, his time as a Marine scout in Vietnam to learning leadership and ultimately becoming a peacemaker. Becoming Kevin – From Warrior to Peacemaker is a chronology that highlights specific pivotal events in the author's personal development, and which impacted the world around him.Whether he's shoplifting, completing boot camp at Parris Island, working his way through an enemy bunker complex, learning to fly, helping people find jobs, or facilitating dispute resolution, you'll be right there with him, so hang on! This is a trip worth taking!

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  From Dixie To Canada: Romances...

  H. U. Johnson

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  The years intervening since the abolition of American slavery leave a majority of our people ignorant of its workings, and of matters connected with it, except as they are gleaned from the pages of history, or from the lips of those now grown old.It is not the purpose of this little volume to discuss the history of the “peculiar institution” in detail, but simply to give so much of it as will make appreciable the cause for another one equally “peculiar,” known for the last twenty years of its existence as the Underground Railroad,—a name for a mode of operation, and not of a corporation or material object.During the years of its operation, secrecy was a cardinal, an imperative principle of its management, as the following pages will make apparent. On the breaking out of the War of the Rebellion, thus putting an end to its operations, every other subject was swallowed up in the excitement of the great struggle, and subsequently in that of Reconstruction. Thus the Road dropped measurably out of sight, leaving but meager reports and archives to tell the story of its working.The promptings of a desire to leave to posterity some realistic record of this, one of the most wonderful and thrilling features of our national history, vino parallel to which is afforded in the annals of time, must be the excuse for these pages. During the eighties, the writer, who had lived amid its excitements for years, and was more or less familiar with the writings of Coffin, Pettit, the Clarkes and others, undertook a systematic research into the matter, the result of which was the accumulation of a large fund of incident and information pertaining to the Road, much of which was published in the Home Magazine between the years 1883 and 1889, inclusive. Those articles, in part, carefully revised, are now placed before the reader in this more permanent form, with the hope that they may receive the generous approval of an appreciative public.The Author

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  With William Burroughs - A...

  Victor Bockris

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  A trove of intimate conversations between Burroughs and Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, David Bowie, and more icons of ’70s New York and beyond. During the 1970s, William Burroughs, author of Junky and Naked Lunch, lived in a loft on the Bowery in New York City’s Lower East Side. Christened “The Bunker,” his apartment became a modern-day literary salon with people like Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Susan Sontag, and fellow beat poet Allen Ginsberg passing through for a drink or a joint and the promise of stimulating conversation with the ingenious and eccentric Burroughs.   Among Burroughs’s entourage was author Victor Bockris, whose tape recorder was always running to capture meandering dinner party conversations and electric late-night sessions in the Bunker. In these moments, Bockris captures Burroughs’s desires, anxieties, and thoughts on writing, photography, punk rock, and more. The recordings and recollections in With William Burroughs create an unprecedentedly multidimensional portrait of a man who is often overshadowed by his reputation.  

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  The Healing Power of Music

  PBS NewsHour

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  An unconventional approach to recovery and coping, music therapy is a field of medicine capturing new attention due to its role in helping Gabrielle Giffords recover from a gunshot. Correspondent Spencer Michels reports on the versatility of music in a medical setting, but the difficulty of quantifying its effectiveness.

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  Off the Tracks - A Meditation on...

  Pamela Mulloy

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  Train travel is having a renaissance. Grand old routes that had been canceled, or were moldering in neglect, have been refurbished as destinations in themselves. The Rocky Mountaineer, the Orient Express, and the Trans-Siberian Railroad run again in all their glory. 
  		 
  Pamela Mulloy has always loved train travel. Whether returning to the Maritimes every year with her daughter on the Ocean, or taking her family across Europe to Poland, trains have been a linchpin of her life. As COVID locked us down, Mulloy began an imaginary journey that recalled the trips she has taken, as well as those of others. Whether it was Mary Wollstonecraft traveling alone to Sweden in the late 1700s, or the incident that had Charles Dickens forever fearful of trains, or the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt trapped in her carriage in a midwestern blizzard in the 1890s, or Sir John A. Macdonald’s wife daring to cross the Rockies tied to the cowcatcher at the front of the train, the stories explore the odd mix of adventure and contemplation that travel permits. 
  		 
  Thoughtful, observant, and fun, Off the Tracks is the perfect blend of research and personal experience that, like a good train ride, will whisk you into another world.

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