Other books that might interest you

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  Summary of Dan Crenshaw's Fortitude

  Swift Reads

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  Buy now to get the insights from Dan Crenshaw's Fortitude. 
    
  Sample Insights: 
  1) Perspective is important to recognize and understand in life. Americans could take a lesson in perspective from the Afghans Dan Crenshaw met and fought against during his 2012 deployment in Afghanistan, as every day they were worried about their safety and well being. 
  2) IEDs, improvised explosive devices, changed the way war was fought in Afghanistan. It no longer was a straight-up firefight, but a maze that could be traversed only in a single-file line to minimize the risk of stepping on an IED – all while being shot at.

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  Désirée's Baby - From their pens...

  Kate Chopin

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  Katherine O'Flaherty was born on the 8th February 1850 in St Louis, Missouri to parents of French and Irish descent. 
  At age 5, she was sent to the Sacred Heart Academy and, apart from a 2 year period at home when her father died, remained there until graduating in 1868.  Whilst there she began writing and became an avid reader of almost anything that crossed her path.   
  Kate married Oscar Chopin in 1870 and the couple moved to New Orleans, and later to the rural setting of Cloutierville, Louisiana to raise their 6 children.  
  In 1882 her husband died leaving her in a deep trench of debt.  Despite her best efforts to turn the businesses around they were sold, and she moved the family back to St Louis and the financial help of her mother.  Sadly, her mother died within the year.  Kate, now struggling with depression, pushed herself to write and gained a local reputation as a writer of short stories that captured the local color and vibrancy of her surroundings.  
  By the early 1890’s her short stories were published nationally.  With this widespread audience also came negative reviews, controversy, and cries of immorality as themes such as interracial relationships, the rights of women and other burning issues of the day were written about. 
  Despite the criticism, which unnerved her, she continued to write though in the main her works, around 100 short stories and two novels, were not attributed with any literary worth. 
  Kate Chopin died from a brain haemorrhage in St Louis Missouri on the 22nd of August 1904.  She was 54. 
  For much of the 20th Century her work was forgotten and out of print.  It was only in early 1970’s, with the rise of feminism and the call for a more just society that she was given the status her works had long described and shone a literary light at.  She is now safely revered as one of America’s great authors.

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  Building America - The Life of...

  Jean H. Baker

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  An English émigré who became America's first professional architect, Benjamin Henry Latrobe put his stamp on the built landscape of the new republic. Latrobe contributed to such iconic structures as the south wing of the US Capitol building, the White House, and the Navy Yard. He created some of the early republic's greatest neoclassical interiors, including the Statuary Hall. 
   
   
   
  As a young man, Latrobe was apprenticed to both a leading architect and civil engineer in London, studied the European continent's architectural and engineering monuments, worked on canals, and designed private houses. After the death of his first wife, he was bankrupt and emigrated to the United States in 1796 to restart his career. For the new nation with grand political expectations, he intended buildings and engineering projects to match those aspirations. Like his patron Thomas Jefferson, Latrobe saw his neoclassical designs as a way to convey American democracy. He envisioned his engineering projects as a way to unite the nation and improve public health. 
   
    
   
  Building America masterfully narrates the life and legacy of a key figure in creating an American aesthetic in the new United States.

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  My Mam Shirley

  Julie Shaw

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  Behind the notorious Hudson men who dominated the Canterbury Estate for over 30 years were the girls, and my mam Shirley. Whether marrying into or determined to escape from it, the third instalment of this gritty series recounts the incredible stories of the unflinching women behind the legendary Hudson family. 
  The Canterbury Estate in Bradford during the ’50s and ’60s was a tight-knit community reared on poverty, crime and violence, and at the top of the heap were the infamous Hudson family. But it wasn’t just the boys who had a story to tell: from matriarch Annie, who gave birth to 13 children, to daughters Margaret and Eunice, who married up and out, each had a personality as indomitable as the last. 
  Then came Shirley Read, who was just 17 when she fell in love with Keith, one of the Hudson lads. To Shirley, the only child of affluent parents, the poverty of the unruly estate was as exciting as it was mysterious; newspapers for tablecloths, jam jars for cups, and, even by that time, no electricity. But it was a friendship forged with Annie and June, the younger Hudson sisters, that would teach Shirley not only to how to survive, Canterbury-style, but would also give her the strength to overcome an unexpected personal tragedy that would soon become a nightmare for women across the world… 
  Eye-opening and warm, this is the vivid account of the ‘Tucker’ girls; the resourceful women at the helm of a notorious Bradford family who will never be forgotten. 
  This bestselling book, a vivid autobiography, is a testament to the resilience and resourcefulness of the Tucker girls. The author, Julie Shaw, the Sunday Times bestselling author, masterfully recounts the tales of these indomitable women, making My Mam Shirley a must-read. 
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  Where Crocodiles Roam - A...

  Hollie and Jamie Manuel

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  My goodness! How are you boys still alive? 
  Because survival is by co-ordination, good luck, respect and karma and ‘sometimes luck is with you, and sometimes not, but the important thing is to take the dare.’ David Brower 
  Where Kingsley Holgate explores Africa beneath an outrageous beard with a keg of rum by his side – 40 years his junior I decided to explore my Africa with naiveté, invincibility and the testosterone fueled charisma of boyhood. 
  Unprepared, untested, unperturbed – who said that an explorer needs to be tried and tested? 
  Taking six months from our boyhood lives to find adventure? That’s easy. Undertaking a Zambezi source-to-sea paddling expedition with no previous kayaking experience? That’s harder. And stupid. 
  Staying alive amongst crocodiles and hippos, rapids and whirlpools, sunstroke and dysentery – now that’s almost impossible ... or commendable if you can live through to the end of your own story. 
  Now throw in two marauding rhino and appendicitis and see if you would still predict survival and start packing for your own adventure. Did I worry that each day may be my last? Of course I did but in the end ‘the principal difference between an adventurer and a suicide is that the adventurer leaves himself a margin of escape (the narrower the margin the greater the adventure), a margin whose width and length may be determined by unknown factors but whose successful navigation is determined by the measure of the adventurers nerve and wits. It is always exhilarating to live by one’s nerves and toward the summit of one’s wits.’ Tom Robbins. Another Roadside Attraction

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  Hole in My Heart - Love and Loss...

  Lorraine Dusky

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  FINALIST: MEMOIR, STORY CIRCLE AWARDS, 2024 
  FINALIST: NARRATIVE NONFICTION, INDEPENDENT PUBLISHERS OF NEW ENGLAND AWARDS, 2024 
  In the days before Roe v. Wade, an ambitious young journalist, abandoned by her beau, leaves Michigan for a dream job on the city desk of a Rochester, NY newspaper. Burned once, she's eager for love, but as the only "girl" in the newsroom, she's more concerned about finding allies and making friends. When a new leading man appears, she recognizes a kindred spirit. Soon her bylined stories claim front-page space. However, when she becomes pregnant, she must switch her attention from deadlines to decisions.  
  With adoption on the horizon, she pushes her man to make a commitment. Sadly, he wants her, but not their daughter. Will Dusky ever find the little girl she longed to raise, and if she does, what will be the fallout from their years apart? In HOLE IN MY HEART, the author uses her skills as a journalist to report on the social history and long-term consequences of family separation.  
  If you like true stories with strong women narrators, you'll love Lorraine Dusky's timely and heart-rending memoir about motherhood, identity and love. Written and narrated by a leader in the movement to reform adoption practices and the first to come out of the era's closet of shame.

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