Titles

In Yamuna Walk, photographer and multimedia artist Atul Bhalla documents a five-day trek along the sacred Yamuna River as it passes through his home city of New Delhi, India. Through his vivid and haunting photographs, Bhalla explores the myriad ways that modern life along the Yamuna is shaped by water, from the rural outskirts of the city to the polluted landscape of urban Delhi. Climbing over fences, crossing concrete overpasses, and navigating between blooming fields and piles of waste on...

Yankee Blitzkrieg is the first comprehensive survey of Wilson's Raid, the largest independent mounted expedition of the Civil War. The Confederacy was reeling when Wilson's raiders left their camps along the Tennessee River in March 1865 and rode south. But there was talk of prolonged rebel resistance in the deep South using the agricultural and industrial facilties of a sweep of territory that ran from Macon to Meridian. That area had hardly been touched by the...

New Englander William Allen (1830-1889) is mostly known today as the lead editor of the 1867 anthology Slave Songs of the United States, the earliest published collection of Negro spirituals, and as a distinguished history professor at the University of Wisconsin. During the Civil War, he served from late 1863 through mid-1864 as a member of the "Gideonite band" of businessmen, missionaries, and teachers who migrated to the...

Contrasts between fighter combat and the bombers' war support Klinkowitz's belief that notions of the air war were determined by one's position in it. He extends his thesis by showing the vastly different style of air war described by veterans of the North African and Mediterranean campaigns and concludes by studying the effects of such combat on adversaries and victims. Air combat, Klinkowitz writes, offers a unique perspective on the nature of war. The experience of combat has...

Bebop saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird" Parker (1920-1955), a man of extremes in his personal life, was a disciplined musical genius who expanded and transformed the boundaries of jazz.Richly illustrated with extensive musical notations, this in-depth study of hundreds of works in the Parker discography takes into account newly discovered recordings and CD reissues. Koch meticulously documents each recording session and provides an array of musical details on theme...

James Baker Hall's blackly comic coming-of-age novel has been denied, by unfortunate circumstances surrounding its original 1964 publication, its rightful place alongside classics such as Catcher in the Rye and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the canon of essential late-twentieth-century American fiction. Set in Lexington, Kentucky, the story unfolds through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Yates Paul. He becomes consumed with revelations about his inattentive father's...

A grassroots history unmatched in Reconstruction literature Yazoo is a rare and revealing firsthand account of Reconstruction told by a Wisconsin carpetbagger and devout abolitionist who moved to Mississippi in pursuit of wealth and social reform. Seeking economic opportunity for himself as well as a chance to bring about a new social order in the defeated South, Albert T. Morgan leased a cotton...

Yazoo is a rare and revealing firsthand account of Reconstruction told by a Wisconsin carpetbagger and devout abolitionist who moved to Mississippi in pursuit of wealth and social reform. Seeking economic opportunity for himself as well as a chance to bring about a new social order in the defeated South, Albert T. Morgan leased a cotton plantation in Yazoo County, Mississippi, in1865. His farming venture failed...

Armed with "The Here List" and a Type-A personality, Seattle-based writer and cookbook author Jess Thomson sets out to spend a year exploring the food of the Pacific Northwest with her family. Planning to revel in the culinary riches of the region and hoping to break her son, Graham, of his childhood pickiness, the adventures into the great nearby include building a backyard chicken coop, truffle hunting in Oregon, and razor clamming on...

A week-by-week look at the abundant wildlife and plants in and around Maryland—where and when to find them. When can you find ripe blueberries along the Appalachian Trail in Maryland? Where can you see the air filled with monarch butterflies as they migrate south each autumn? If you want to enjoy nature this weekend, where is the best place to visit? Bryan MacKay can tell you. Written as an almanac, A Year across Maryland invites you to...

Includes lectures, essays, diaries and other writings, including "How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse)" and "Juilliard Lecture."

As a young man American Hugh Beach went to live with the Saami reindeer herders of Swedish Lapland. His lyrically written and very personal story of trying to fit into the herding way of life is a rare insider’s account of the Saami. In a passionate and informed Afterword to this new edition of the book, he revisits his old friends and looks at how Sweden is attempting to balance the conflicting needs of reindeer herders and environmentalists in the 21st century.

What we today call Shinto has been at the heart of Japanese culture for almost as long as there has been a political entity distinguishing itself as Japan. A Year in the Life of a Shinto Shrine describes the ritual cycle at Suwa Shrine, Nagasaki's major Shinto shrine. Conversations with priests, other shrine personnel, and people attending shrine functions supplement John K. Nelson's observations of over fifty shrine rituals and festivals. He elicits their views on the meaning and personal...

"As soon as she was gone from this earth, I felt an overwhelming need for more of her. I had to find her again. But how do you find someone after they're gone for good?"After her mother succumbed to a rare form of dementia, Myrl Coulter turned the eulogy she had written for the funeral into a series of meditations on absence. The result is fifteen personal narrative essays that move through the vacations, holidays, special occasions, and ordinary days each year brings. Coulter reaches for the mother who is gone, yet...

How Caesar's attack on Bibulus marked the beginning of the end of the Roman free state and the descent of the Republic into violence and civil war. The year 59 BC—when Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Calpurnius Bibulus served as joint consuls—marked a major turning point in the history of the Roman Republic. It was a dramatic and momentous time of political intrigue, bloodshed, and murder, one that boasted some of the most famous personalities...

"This memoir begins with the sixteen-year-old Hunter's plaintive efforts to enlist in the Navy. At a time when the Union was about to announce its first conscription, young Hunter is told the Navy has no need for him. But he perseveres and is 'rewarded' by an appointment to the monitor Nahant as a wardroom boy. Hunter thus becomes an intelligent and articulate observer at the very bottom of the Navy's pecking order. As a novice to naval...

On May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls (1839-1915) commandeered a Confederate warship, the Planter, from Charleston harbor and piloted the vessel to cheering seamen of the Union blockade, thus securing his place in the annals of Civil War heroics. Slave, pilot, businessman, statesman, U.S. congressman—Smalls played many roles en route to becoming an American icon, but none of his accomplishments was a solo effort. Sociologist...

"In 1942 110,000 West Coast residents, many of them United States citizens, were placed in concentration camps for no reason other than that they were of Japanese origin. One of them, Michi Weglyn, a teenager at the time, recounts their experience, drawing on Government documents and on her own memories of one of the camps. An appalling story of neglect and even brutality."—New York Times Book Review"Weglyn writes with a...