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  Jefferson An Autobiography In...

  Thomas Jefferson

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  Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. He had previously served as the second vice president of the United States under John Adams and as the first United States secretary of state under George Washington. The principal author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was a proponent of democracy, republicanism, and individual rights, motivating American colonists to break from the Kingdom of Great Britain and form a new nation; he produced formative documents and decisions at both the state and national levels.During the American Revolution, Jefferson represented Virginia in the Continental Congress that adopted the Declaration of Independence. As a Virginia legislator, he drafted a state law for religious freedom. He served as the second Governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, during the American Revolutionary War. In 1785, Jefferson was appointed the United States Minister to France, and subsequently, the nation's first secretary of state under President George Washington from 1790 to 1793. Jefferson and James Madison organized the Democratic-Republican Party to oppose the Federalist Party during the formation of the First Party System. With Madison, he anonymously wrote the provocative Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions in 1798 and 1799, which sought to strengthen states' rights by nullifying the federal Alien and Sedition Acts.As president, Jefferson pursued the nation's shipping and trade interests against Barbary pirates and aggressive British trade policies. Starting in 1803, Jefferson promoted a western expansionist policy, organizing the Louisiana Purchase which doubled the nation's claimed land area. To make room for settlement, Jefferson began the process of Indian tribal removal from the newly acquired territory. As a result of peace negotiations with France, his administration reduced military forces.

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  Surprised at Being Alive - An...

  Robert F. Curtis

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  From flying with the Screaming Eagles in Vietnam to serving with the Marines and the Royal Navy, this memoir recounts the life of a career military pilot.   Sometimes it just isn’t your day. Whether your helicopter comes apart in flight due to equipment failure, or another aircraft runs into you in midair, or an enemy gunner lands his rounds in exactly the right spot to take you out of the sky. That’s why, after twenty-four years and more than five thousand flight hours with four armed services, Maj. Robert Curtis was surprised to still be alive when he passed his retirement physical.   His flying career began in the thick of the war, flying Chinooks over Vietnam with the 101st Airborne. From there, Curtis continued to serve with the National Guard while attending college. By then, flying had become an addiction for Curtis, so he continued on with the Marine Corps and Royal Navy. Over the next seventeen years, he would fly off US and British ships from Egypt to Norway and all points in between.   Curtis flew eight different helicopters—the wooden-bladed OH-13E, through the Chinook, SeaKnight, and SeaKing—in war and peace around the world. During that time, many of his friends died in crashes, both in combat and in accidents. But some combination of skill, luck, and superstition saw him through.

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  Winter

  Karl Ove Knausgaard

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  The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard's unborn daughter 
  2 December - It is strange that you exist, but that you don't know anything about what the world looks like. It's strange that there is a first time to see the sky, a first time to see the sun, a first time to feel the air against one's skin. It's strange that there is a first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pajamas, a shoe. In my life it almost never happens anymore. But soon it will. In just a few months, I will see you for the first time. 
  In Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as he waits for the birth of his daughter. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it as if for the first time. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays-to name just a handful of his subjects. These oh-so-familiar objects and ideas he fills with new meaning, taking nothing for granted or as given. New life is on the horizon, but the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return, and so a contradictory melancholy inflects his gaze. 
  Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard's writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.

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  The Removalist - On the Front...

  Matthew Franklin Sias

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  "To be able to thrive in a field most are terrified of is a source of pride.... To be in the presence of those who have crossed over the great divide is oddly meaningful, in an ultimate sense."In this sequel to Silent Siren: Memoirs of a Lifesaving Mortician, ride along with mortuary removal technician Matthew Franklin Sias as he cares for the deceased in rural Washington State.Step into the hidden world of death care and explore the challenge of removing the deceased from the often-difficult, regularly awkward, and sometimes downright bizarre circumstances in which they die, the art and science of embalming, and the intrigue of forensic pathology.Sias is a veteran death investigator, former funeral director/embalmer intern, and paramedic with 28 years of emergency response experience.

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  Blow Your House Down - A Story...

  Gina Frangello

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  Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness.Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.

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  Mary Elizabeth Garrett - Society...

  Kathleen Waters Sander

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  “[A] richly detailed biography of a formidable nineteenth-century woman who worked in a man’s world to help women attain education, suffrage, and equality.” —Journal of American History As youngest child and only daughter to B&O Railroad mogul John Work Garrett, Mary was bright and capable, well suited to become her father’s heir apparent. But social convention prohibited her from following in his footsteps, a source of great frustration for the brilliant and strong-willed woman. Mary turned her attention instead to promoting women’s rights, using her status and massive wealth to advance her uncompromising vision for women’s place in the expanding United States. She contributed the endowment to establish the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine with two unprecedented conditions: that women be admitted on the same terms as men and that the school be graduate level, thereby forcing revolutionary policy changes at the male-run institution. Believing that advanced education was the key to women’s betterment, she helped found and sustain the prestigious girls’ preparatory school in Baltimore, the Bryn Mawr School. Her philanthropic gifts to Bryn Mawr College helped transform the modest Quaker school into a renowned women’s college. She was also a great supporter of women’s suffrage. Kathleen Waters Sander recounts in impressive detail the life and times of this remarkable woman, through the turbulent years of the Civil War to the early twentieth century. At once a captivating biography of Garrett and an epic account of the rise of commerce, railroading, and women’s rights, Sander’s work is the first to recognize her monumental contributions to America while also reexamining the great social and political movements of the age.

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