bibliography
Appy, Christian G: Vietnam: The Definitive Oral History Told From All Sides. Ebury Press 2008.
A monumental oral history of the type that is created only once in a generation. The vivid accounts of 135 men and women span the entire history of the Vietnam conflict from its murky origins in the 1940s to the chaotic fall of Saigon in 1975. The testimony in this book, sometimes detached and reflective, often raw and emotional, allows us to see and feel what this war meant to people on all sides - Americans and Vietnamese, generals and guerillas, policy makers and protesters, CIA operatives, pilots and doctors, artists and journalists, and a variety of ordinary citizens whose lives were swept up in a cataclysm that killed three million people. This is a remarkable, eye-opening and essential read for anyone with even a passing interest in one of the twentieth century's defining conflicts.
Bernstein, Carl and Woodward, Bob: All The President’s Men. Quartet 1974.
It began with a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC, on 17 June 1972. Bob Woodward, a journalist for the Washington Post, was called into the office on a Saturday morning to cover the story. Carl Bernstein, a political reporter on the Post, was also assigned. They soon learned this was no ordinary burglary. Following lead after lead, Woodward and Bernstein picked up a trail of money, conspiracy and high-level pressure that ultimately led to the doors of the Oval Office. Men very close to the President were implicated, and then Richard Nixon himself. Over a period of months, Woodward met secretly with Deep Throat, for decades the most famous anonymous source in the history of journalism. As he and Bernstein pieced the jigsaw together, they produced a series of explosive stories that would not only win the Post a Pulitzer Prize, they would bring about the President's scandalous downfall. Akll The President’s Men documents this amazing story. Taut, gripping and fascinating, it is a classic of its kind -- the true story of the events that changed the American presidency.
Bird, Isabella L: A Lady’s Life In The Rocky Mountains (The Western Frontier Library) University Of Oklahoma Press, 1960
Born in 1831, Isabella, daughter of a clergyman, set off alone to the Antipodes in 1872 'in search of health' and found she had embarked on a life of adventurous travel. In 1873, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, she rode on her spirited horse Birdie through the American 'Wild West', a terrain only recently opened to pioneer settlement. Here she met Rocky Mountain Jim, her 'dear (one-eyed) desperado', fond of poetry and whisky - 'a man any women might love, but no sane woman would marry'. He helped her climb the 'American Matterhorn' and round up cattle on horseback. The wonderful letters which make up this volume were first published in 1879 and were enormously popular in Isabella Bird's lifetime. They tell of magnificent unspoilt landscapes and abundant wildlife, of small remote townships, of her encounters with rattlesnakes, wolves, pumas and grizzly bears and her reactions to the volatile passions of the miners and pioneer settlers.
Brown, Dee: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee – An Indian History Of The American West. Vintage 1970.
First published in 1970, this extraordinary book changed the way people thought about the original inhabitants of America. Beginning with the Long Walk of the Navajos in 1860 and ending 30 years later with the massacre of Sioux men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, it tells how the American Indians lost their land and lives to a dynamically expanding white society. During these three decades, America's population doubled from 31 million to 62 million. Again and again, promises made to the Indians fell victim to the ruthlessness and greed of settlers pushing westward to make new lives. The Indians were herded off their ancestral lands into ever-shrinking reservations, and were starved and killed if they resisted. It is a truism that "history is written by the victors"; for the first time, this book described the opening of the West from the Indians' viewpoint. Accustomed to stereotypes of Indians as red savages, many white people were shocked to read the reasoned eloquence of Indian leaders and learn of the bravery with which they and their peoples endured suffering. With meticulous research and in measured language overlaying brutal narrative, Dee Brown focused attention on a national disgrace.
Brown, Dee: Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow – Railroads In The West. Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1977.
The heroes in this extraordinary epic are the Irish labourers and Chinese coolies; the villains, the avaricious bankers and the corrupt politicians. Before the undertaking was complete, more than 155 million acres of land had been given away to railway magnates, the Indian tribes had been massacred and the buffalo driven from the Great Plains, millions of settlers had been lured from Europe and a colossal industrial nation had been forged.
Caputo, Philip: 13 Seconds: A Look Back At The Kent State Shootings. (includes DVD of 2001 Emmy Award Winning Documentary “Kent State: The Day The War Came Home”.) Chamberlain 2005.
Philip Caputo, author of the classic Vietnam memoir A Rumor of War, returns to the turbulent era of the late 1960s with 13 Seconds: A Look Back at the Kent State Shootings. Caputo carefully sets the stage for the tragedy--the gunning-down of students on the Kent State, Ohio, campus--as he shows the pressures slowly building: Richard Nixon's decision to invade Cambodia, the militaristic missives of the ultra-leftist Weathermen, and statements such as high-profile California governor Ronald Reagan's declaration about student protests, given three weeks before the shootings ("If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with"). While important events surge and roil throughout the book like massive currents, Caputo focuses primarily on the smaller stories of the students injured and killed by National Guard bullets. Caputo, a journalist then writing for the Chicago Tribune (and who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1972), was on the scene soon after the shootings took place. He writes with immediacy, clearly drawn back to the moment even after 35 years have passed. Some of the students who died that day were active in campus politics, while others were caught purely by misfortune, but all paid an incredible price. By allowing readers to understand more about the students and the circumstances that surrounded May 4, 1970, Caputo turns the story of Kent State into a kind of tragic novel. The book itself is short: under 200 pages, including summaries of court testimonies that make up the bulk of the index. But the poignancy of what America lost that day comes through clearly in Caputo's dense, no-nonsense writing.
Childs, Craig: House Of Rain – Tracking A Vanished Civilization Across The American Southwest. Bay Back Books 2006.
The greatest 'unsolved mystery' of the American Southwest relates to the Anasazi, the native peoples who in the 11th century converged on Chaco Canyon (now New Mexico) and built a flourishing cultural center that attracted pilgrims from far and wide, a vital crossroads of the prehistoric world. The Anasazis' accomplishments - in agriculture, in art, in commerce, in architecture and engineering - were astounding, rivaling those of the Mayans in distant Central America. By the 13th century, however, the Anasazi were gone from Chaco. What was it - drought? pestilence? war? forced migration? mass murder or suicide? Craig Childs draws on scholarly research and a lifetime of adventure and exploration in the American Southwest, to pursue the mystery of their disappearance. Considering many possibilities - drought, suicide - he points the way to a new understanding of how a vibrant civilization collapsed. House Of Rain is a landmark work in the literature of ancient Native American culture, a key to a fascinating and mysterious lost civilization.
Childs, Craig: The Secret Knowledge Of Water – Discovering The Essence Of The American Desert. Sasquatch Books 2000.
Like the highest mountain peaks, deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to the most seasoned explorers. Craig Childs, who has spent years in the deserts of the American West - as an adventurer, a river guide, and a field instructor in natural history - has developed a keen appreciation for these forbidding landscapes: their beauty, their wonder, and especially their paradoxes. His extraordinary treks through arid lands in search of water are an astonishing revelation of the natural world at its most extreme.
Childs, Craig: The Way Out – A True Story Of Ruin And Survival. Little Brown 2004
Craig Childs is lost. In a labyrinth of canyons in the American Southwest where virtually nothing else is alive - barely any vegetation, few signs of wildlife, scant trace of any human precursors in this landscape - Childs and his friend Dirk undertake a fortnight's journey. With as much food and gear as they can carry, and little else but their wiles to help them traverse the inhospitable, unmappable terrain, the two men assume the life-or-death challenge of exploring this land - and then finding a way out. Equally gripping as their adventure in the wild is the parallel story, told in flashback, of what has propelled the two men into these extreme circumstances. In scenes that crackle with tension and suspense - recollections of barroom brawls, high-speed car chases and reckless feats of risk-taking - we discover the surprising legacy of violence that each man is escaping. As a chronicle of adventure, as emotionally-charged human drama, as confessional memoir, The Way Out is a transcendent book, a work destined to earn a lasting place in the literature of extremes.
Cohen, David (Ed.): America Then And Now – Great Old Photographs of America’s Life And Times – And How Those same Scenes Look Today. Harper Collins.
Coyne, Michael: The Crowded Prairie – American National Identity In The Hollywood Western. I.B. Tauris 1997.
Coyne brings forth a bracing analysis of what he terms the golden age of Hollywood Westerns, from Stagecoach (1939) to The Shootist (1976). As the title suggests, he targets an academic or highly literate audience, for whom lingo such as "patriarchy" and "Manichacan" signifies much. Minimally, readers must be familiar with most grade A Westerns and television miniseries of the era. Coyne is well versed in this material, and the diligent reader will welcome his ability to emphasize his points through the judicious use of dialog, contemporary critics' reviews, and box office receipts. Equally appreciated are reevaluations of Duel in the Sun (1946), The Big Country (1958), and Warlock (1959). Films are placed in context to their times and each other, but more important, combed for subtexts that create or reflect American identity. Race, male supremacy, dysfunctional families, and Vietnam are all stirred into a stimulating soup.
Cullen, Dave: Columbine. Twelve 2009.
On 20th April 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made their bid to leave 'a lasting impression on the world'. They drove to school, planted two huge bombs in the dining area, then positioned themselves outside the main entrance to pick off the fleeing teachers and students. The bombs failed, but the ensuing massacre defined a new brand of school violence - one that has started to cross the Atlantic. In the tradition of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and almost ten years in the making, Columbine is the definitive account of those terrible events. Cullen lays bare the callous brutality of mastermind Eric Harris, and the timid, suicidal Dylan Klebold, who had been to the prom just three days earlier and wrote obsessively about love in his journal. A close-up study of violence, grief and an all-consuming media frenzy, Columbine is above all a compelling, tragic and utterly human portrait of two young killers.
Cunliffe, Tom: Good Vibrations – Coast To Coast By Harley. Summersdale 2000.
Tom Cunliffe and his wife Roz take life in the saddle and on to the American highways and byways astride the quintessential 'dream machine' - the Harley-Davidson. Bikes Betty Boop and Black Madonna are chrome steeds for an extensive road-trip: from Maryland on the east coast to San Francisco on the west (and then back again), they thunder their way over the sun-beaten plains, through scorching Death Valley, neon Las Vegas, the deep South and everywhere in between. With flashbacks to the Sixties, the eclectic assortment of moonshiners, bikers hard and not-so-hard, cowhands, Sioux Indians, strippers, bible-bashers, war veterans, southern gents and the occasional alligator delivers a unique insight into the diversity of the USA. An easy-riding peepshow into today's America through British eyes and between the handlebars of the great Harley-Davidson.
Donegan, Lawrence: California Dreaming - A Smooth-Running, Low-Milage, Cut-Price American Adventure. Penguin 2001.
Some time after he quit as bass-player with 80s popsters the Bluebells, 30-something Scot Lawrence Donegan became a Californian used-car salesman. California Dreaming is his account of that unique spiritual journey. It could have been a literary disaster. Thankfully Donegan is as good with a word processor as he was with a Rickenbacker: California Dreaming is funny, clever, sharp and very readable. And as the book chugs spiritedly along, investigating the seamy underside (and overside) of daily life at Orchard Pre-Owned Autos, it also pulls the neat trick of making you like and empathise with the victims of its well-observed satire. The narrative dynamic of this travelogue-cum-autobiography derives from the reader's wonderment at whether Donegan will ever sell a motor. He starts off by being amusingly awful, a "greenpea", he can't "work the line" to save his life. But with tuition from his colourful comrades on the car lot, he improves. By the end he's a real pro, able to sell a 77 Mustang just as well as Tony "The Tank" Tognazzini. En route to this ultimate epiphany, Donegan goes to classic LA parties and clichéd LA shopping malls, thereby getting to see a slice of the American Dream from the perspective of the American Worker. If the result isn't immortal reportage, it's still a hoot: California Dreaming is a very decent little runner indeed.
Egan, Timothy: The Worst Hard Time – The Untold Story Of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl. Mariner Books 2006
Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster—the Depression—and natural disaster—eight years of drought—resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity. He grounds his tale in portraits of the people who settled the plains: hardy Americans and immigrants desperate for a piece of land to call their own and lured by the lies of promoters who said the ground was arable. Egan's interviews with survivors produce tales of courage and suffering: Hazel Lucas, for instance, dared to give birth in the midst of the blight only to see her baby die of "dust pneumonia" when her lungs clogged with the airborne dirt. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds.
Ehrenreich, Barbara: Nickel And Dimed – Undercover In Low Wage America. Granta Books 2002.
Acclaimed as an instant classic upon publication, Nickel and Dimed has sold more than 1.5 million copies and become a staple of classroom reading. Chosen for “one book” initiatives across the country, it has fueled nationwide campaigns for a living wage. Funny, poignant, and passionate, this revelatory firsthand account of life in low-wage America—the story of Barbara Ehrenreich’s attempts to eke out a living while working as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart associate—has become an essential part of the nation’s political discourse.
Fishlock, Trevor: Americans And Nothing Else. Cassell 1980.
An entertaining picture of America at the end of the seventies and has a nice fluidity to the writing making it an enjoyable journey through many parts of the vast country and its diverse peoples and varied cultures.
Fletcher, Martin: Almost Heaven – Travels Through The Backwoods Of America. Little Brown 1998.
After seven years as Washington correspondent of The Times, Martin Fletcher set off to explore the raw and untamed land far from cities and national parks. This is his account of a journey which took him to places few tourists would ever visit, to communities largely unknown to outsiders, to the quintessential America. He encounters snake-handlers, moonshiners, creationists, outlaws, polygamists, white supremacists, and communities preparing for Armageddon. He goes bear hunting in West Virginia, fur trapping in Louisiana, diamond digging in Arkansas, and gold prospecting in Nevada.
Freedman, Russell: Children Of The Wild West. Clarion Books 1983.*
Freemantle, Tom: The Moonshine Mule – A 2,700 Mile Walk From Mexico To Mahatten. Constable and Robinson 2003.
Author Tom Fremantle's 19th century American ancestor Colonel Arthur Fremantle travelled through America in 1863, when the country was gripped by the turmoil of Civil War. He travelled on stagecoaches, steam trains and Mississippi rafts, ate skunk meat, met General Robert E Lee and witnessed Gettysburg before sailing home to New York. His 20th century relative strikes out on a similar journey, aiming to walk the 2,700 miles from Mexico to Manhattan with just a mule for company, starting his journey just ten days before the events of September 11. This is engaging comic travel writing that illuminates America past and present with its uniquely peripatetic method. Like his ancestor, the modern Fremantle beds down each night outdoors, sleeping as well as walking his way across the American landscape.
George, Alice L: Awaiting Armageddon – How Americans Faced The Cuban Missile Crisis. University Of North Carolina Press 2003.
For 13 days in October 1962, America stood on the brink of nuclear war. Nikita Khrushchev's decision to place nuclear missiles in Cuba and John F. Kennedy's defiant response introduced the possibility of unprecedented cataclysm. The immediate threat of destruction entered America's classrooms and its living rooms. This text takes an in-depth look at this crisis as it roiled outside of government offices, where ordinary Americans realized their government was unprepared to protect either itself or its citizens from the dangers of nuclear war. During the seven days between Kennedy's announcement of a naval blockade and Khrushchev's decision to withdraw Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba, US citizens absorbed the nightmare scenario unfolding on their television sets. An estimated ten million Americans fled their homes; millions more prepared shelters at home, clearing the shelves of supermarkets and gun stores. Alice George seeks to capture the irrationality of the moment as Americans coped with dread and resignation, humour and pathos, terror and ignorance. In her examination of the public response to the missile crisis, the author reveals cracks in the veneer of American confidence in the early years of the space age and demonstrates how the fears generated by Cold War culture blinded many Americans to the dangers of nuclear war until it was almost too late.
Grant, Richard: Ghost Riders – Travels With American Nomads. Little Brown 2003.
'Who among us has not felt his heart beat a little faster at the sight of a plane soaring into a wide blue sky, or admired the fellow who tears up the gas bills? ...In this engaging and finely written book, Richard Grant, a restless Englishman and something of an itinerant himself seeks out the wanderers, the rootless, the "legion of drifters, grifters, hoboes and tramps". Grant traces their historical antecedents (the ghosts of the title are the nomadic horsemen of the American West) and ponders what drives a man to spend his life in motion.
Hakim, Joy: Freedom – A History Of US. Oxford 2003.
A lucid picture of the events and people that shaped our country: our treatment of Native American as settlers pushed westward: early industry with its child laborers; slavery; and the Civil War. Other topics include Reconstruction, women's suffrage, the labor movement, the Depression, World War I, and World War II, the cold war, the Vietnam War, and the civil rights movement. With more than 400 illustrations, the book's theme--our continuous struggle for freedom--is explored visually as well as through the author's fluid narrative.
Mannin, Ethel: An American Journey. Hutchinson 1967
Gordon, William A: Four Dead In Ohio – Was There A Conspiracy At Kent State? North Ridge Books 1995.
A compelling, highly readable analysis of the shooting, the cover-ups that followed, and the complex legal battles that surrounded the 1970 killings of four students by National Guardsmen at Kent State . . . Gordon systematically addresses the major unresolved questions of who did what and why in a manner that brings more clarity to this controversial historical tragedy than any other work to date . . . reads like a whodunit . . . As entertaining as the best detective fiction and as analytical and well documented as the best journalism or scholarship.
Gorman, Dave: America Unchained – A Freewheeling Road Trip In Search Of Non-Corporate America. Ebury Press 2008
Dismayed by the relentless onslaught of faceless American chains muscling in where local businesses had once thrived, Dave Gorman set off on the ultimate American road trip - in search of the true, independent heart of the US of A. He would eat cherry pie from local diners, re-fuel at dusty gas stations and stock up on supplies from Mom and Pop's grocery store. At least that was the idea. But when did you last see an independent gas station? Gamely, Dave beds down in a Colorado trailer park, sleeps in an Oregon forest treehouse, and even spends Thanksgiving with a Mexican family in Kansas. But when his trip mutates into an odyssey of near-epic proportions and he finds himself being threatened at gun point in Mississippi, Dave starts to worry about what's going to break down next. The car...or him?
Hall, Mitchell K: The Vietnam War (Seminar Studies In History) Longman 2008.
The Vietnam War examines the conflict from its origins through to 1975 and North Vietnam's victory. This new revised edition is completely up-to-date with current academic debates and includes new source material. Mitchell Hall explores all the key elements of the conflict, including: * US motivations for entering the war and the military strategies employed * The role of the media * The rise of domestic opposition * The war's impact in the US and Vietnam. Mitchell Hall provides numerous insights into the political decisions of the Vietnamese communists, and Vietnam's relations with other major powers, particularly China and the Soviet Union. The main text is supported by a comprehensive documents section, and a range of study tools, including a Chronology of events, Who's Who, a Glossary of terms and a Further Reading section. Concise yet thorough, the book provides students with an accessible and stimulating introduction to the war.
Hanners, LaVerne: Girl On A Pony (The Western Frontier Library). University of Oklahoma Press, 1994
Hanners, emeritus English professor at the University of Arkansas, here provides a moving, eloquent memoir of frontier life between the two world wars. In 1925 when she was four, her family moved from a dug-out shack in Colorado to the Valley of the Dry Cimarron, the arid, inhospitable area shared by New Mexico, Oklahoma and Colorado. There she and her younger siblings were raised in a "separate and distinct civilization with its own codes and manners." Life was hard even when times were good, as they were in the '20s, and far more difficult after the effects of the Depression were compounded by the drought of the early '30s and the dust storms that followed. Laced with the author's poems and a spirit of dry humor, including cowboy tall tales and practical jokes, Hanners' recollections convey the warm humanity that sustained her family and neighbors through the hardships of that place and time.
Heat-Moon, William Least: Blue Highways – A Journey Into America. Little Brown 1982
First published in 1982, William Least Heat-Moon's account of his journey along the back roads of the United States (marked with the color blue on old highway maps) has become something of a classic. When he loses his job and his wife on the same cold February day, he is struck by inspiration: "A man who couldn't make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity." Driving cross-country in a van named Ghost Dancing, Heat-Moon (the name the Sioux give to the moon of midsummer nights) meets up with all manner of folk, from a man in Grayville, Illinois, "whose cap told me what fertilizer he used" to Scott Chisholm, "a Canadian citizen ... [who] had lived in this country longer than in Canada and liked the United States but wouldn't admit it for fear of having to pay off bets he made years earlier when he first 'came over' that the U.S. is a place no Canadian could ever love." Accompanied by his photographs, Heat-Moon's literary portraits of ordinary Americans should not be merely read, but savored.
Heat-Moon, William Least: River-Horse – A Voyage Across America. Houghton Mifflin 1999.
Since hitting the American roads in Blue Highways nearly 20 years ago, William Least Heat-Moon has been following another calling--to traverse America by its rivers. "I wanted to see those secret parts hidden from road travelers," he writes. And from the waterways of his 5,000-mile voyage, Least Heat-Moon shares a sharp and stirring vision of America. Filling a small bottle with brine from the Atlantic Ocean, Least Heat-Moon and his wise companion, whom he calls "Pilotis," start up the Hudson River in a 22-foot C-Dory that Least Heat-Moon has named Nikawa--from the Osage words ni for river and kawa for horse. The voyage--from New York harbor to the Pacific Ocean--packs surprises, wisdom, regrets, mishaps, candor, and conversations that readers who savored Blue Highways will delight in. The impetus for River Horse is one of intrigue--less urgent than the departure in Blue Highways--and the narrative possesses a captivating pull as it courses westward through the strongest currents and pauses in the back eddies of contemporary American life. Least Heat-Moon is in his element. Written in short thematic chapters, River Horse plies canals, greets the Missouri's many moods, and challenges chaotic waves. Indeed, the turbulent and placid waters of America flow throughout this well-told story. When Nikawa finally reaches the Pacific Ocean, Least Heat-Moon has discovered a new America in the country he knows so well.
Heinrichs, Anne: The Dust Bowl (We The People). Compass Point Books 2005.*
Heminway, John: Yonder – A Place In Montana. National Geographic Society 2000
For nearly 70 years the 36-acre ranch on the West Boulder River Heminway bought in 1987 was known as the "Bar 20". When he signed the deed, Heminway was handed the Bar 20's voluminous legal history and wondered if there was more to the place than just a name. Only a handful of acres, the ranch for generations has appeared on many topological maps as a formidable feature, "Bar 20 Ranch". YONDER is the story of this improbably named ranch, and documents Heminway's search for the Bar 20's former owners, as critical to Heminway as his own ancestors. In the process he teases apart their reasons for coming, the transience of their dreams, the causes of their leaving, and in the process tells the history of Montana.
Humphreys, J.R: Timeless Towns and Haunted Places From Florida To Maine – A Journey Through The American Past. St Martins Press 1981.
Jahoda, Gloria: The Trail Of Tears – The Story Of The American Indian Removals 1813-1855. Crown 1999.
Insightful, rarely told history of Indian courage in the face of White expansionism in the 19th century. Truth-telling tale of the ruthless brutality that forced the Native American population into resettlement camps and reservations, with a look at the few white Americans who fought to help them.
Kappel-Smith, Diana: Desert Time – A Journey Through The American Southwest. Little Brown 1992.
In Desert Time, New Englander Diana Kappel-Smith travels from the Black Rock Desert of Oregon to the Mexican border seeking "the spirit of the American Southwest." Spirit-seeking can sometimes be a fuzzy enterprise, and Desert Time has an undercurrent of New Age grooviness. In the course of Kappel-Smith's travelogue, she gets at the heart of many things Western: the precision of Navajo weavers and Hopi silversmiths, the sinuous paths of sidewinders on sand dunes, and the quality of light that adds a surrealistic touch to the region, "like a copper-gold lens colored as if it were filled with pollen, but as dry and light as the outbreath of a kiln."
Kingsolver, Barbara: High Tide In Tucson – Essays From Now Or Never. Harper Collins 1995.
A collection of pieces in which Barbara Kingsolver, author of the novel "A Poisonwood Bible", explores her trademark themes of family, community and the natural world. The topics include Kentucky, housework, promiscuity, health clubs, the Canary Islands, rock and roll, space rockets, and Thoreau.
Koestler-Grack, Rachel A: The Kent State Tragedy (American Moments) ABDO 2005*
This book explores the deadly 1970 clash between Vietnam War protestors and National Guard soldiers and its aftermath. Although the format precludes nuanced analysis, this still offers a solid introduction to the topic and a basic, if somewhat superficial, sense of the era in which it occurred. Numerous black-and-white photos of the victims and their anguished friends will be particularly effective in drawing readers into the narrative. End matter includes a time line, a glossary, and directions for accessing online resources posted on the publisher's Web site.
Mathis, Nancy: Storm Warning - The Story Of A Killer Tornado. Touchstone 2007.
On May 3, 1999, a series of 71 tornadoes blasted Oklahoma. The biggest of them all spanned a mile—making it the largest in recorded history—and delivered ground-level winds of over 300 mph. In her exhaustively researched book, journalist Mathis brings the Tornado Alley calamity to life. A native Sooner who spent many hours crouching in fear in her grandmother's root cellar, Mathis has a visceral connection to the region and its heavy weather that she supplements with the expert use of interviews and historical research. Mathis introduces readers to the slow development of weather science, to the families of the victims and to such unique individuals as Tetsuya Fujita and his Fujita Scale for measuring tornado strength. Although her initial, century-spanning onslaught of science and characters can be overwhelming, the story lines eventually coalesce, and by the time the tornadoes touch down on or near Oklahoma City, the reader is engrossed.
McConnell, Williams S: Living Through The Cuban Missile Crisis. Greenhaven Press 2005.*
During thirteen tense days in October 1962, and only ninety miles from the coast of Florida, the Soviet Union constructed nuclear missile silos and shipped nuclear warheads to Communist Cuba bringing both superpowers to the brink of a nuclear war. This volume examines the missile crisis from the perspective of U.S. citizens, includes articles that highlight the public response, and provides primary documents such as speeches and communiques to which the public had access through news media during the crisis period.
McLean, Duncan: Lone Star Swing – On The Trail Of Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys. Jonathan Cape 1997.
Duncan McLean has a dilemma. He's head over heels for a music that's not only going out of style, but is found most prevalently in Texas--a long way from his home in the Orkney Islands of Scotland. After exhausting Scotland's supply of western swing, in 1995 McLean travels to America, rents a Chevy Cavalier, and heads west to explore the birthplace, meet the makers, and dig up the roots of the sounds with which he's fallen in love. As he describes it: "This is the hottering chili-pot of New Orleans Jazz, old country fiddling, big-band swing, ragtime, blues, pop, mariachi and conjunto that dominated Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and beyond--all the way to San Francisco in the west, Memphis in the east--from the mid-Thirties till mid-Elvis. This is western swing." Lone Star Swing is both musical pilgrimage and witty travelogue. As McLean trails his favorite music over the back roads of Texas, his adventures make for interesting reading. He has a way of making you feel you're riding along in the passenger seat as he finds the top 10 things to do in Turkey, Texas, on Bob Wills Day (Bob is McLean's western-swing hero), learns how to nibble an onion cooked up sunflower style at the Presidio Onion Festival, gets lectured for cussing in front of ladies after his Chevy gets its doors rehung by a hit-and-run driver, and suffers the wrath of Gulf Coast prawns eaten too far from their home waters. And although he's far away from the Orkney Islands, McLean has a way of making himself at home in just about every place the music takes him.
Middleton, Nick: Iced Tea And Elvis - A Saunter Through The Southern States. Weidenfield & Nicholson 1999.
God and guns, heat and history have long characterized the American South. As, of course, has Elvis Presley. Nick Middleton (The Last Disco in Outer Mongolia) traveled there with the ostensible aim of discovering the wilder side of human nature. What he found surprised even him. From Graceland to Miami Beach, Dolly Parton to Martin Luther King, the Smoky Mountains to the Mississippi River, Middleton discovered that the American South is, more than anything, a state of mind. A savvy, deliciously irreverent travelogue.
Morris, Charles R: A Time For Passion – America 1960–1980. Harper & Row 1984.
Moore, Robert J. and Attini, Antonio: America From The Air. White Star
Murbarger, Nell: Ghosts Of The Glory Trail - Intimate Glimpses Into The Past And Present Of 275 Western Ghost Towns. Westernlore Press 1956.
National Park Service: Soldier And Brave – Military And Indian Affairs In The Trans-Mississippi West, Including A Guide To Historic Sites And Landmarks. Harper & Row 1963.
This volume is a guide prepared by the National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings, a nationwide program conducted by the National Park Service to identify historic and prehistoric places of significance. The sites and buildings described in this volume represent a colorful phase of American history. Yet, it was a tragic era. It has also been distorted in the popular mind by television and motion picture presentations. Visits to these pertinent historic sites will do much to dispel the myths associated with the period and contribute to better understanding of its complexities. Each site listed has a detailed history in this book.
Parker,
Tony: A Place Called Bird. Secker & Warburg 1989
Written in the
form of transcribed taped interviews, this is the portrait of a small American
town in the middle of the Kansas wheat belt. The author spent three and a half
months there and interviewed people from all walks of life, including the
beautician, the mortician and a vagrant.
Raban, Jonathan: Bad Land – An American Romance. Picador 1996.
In 1993 Jonathan Raban entered the Badlands, a place the size of England and the least visited region in all of the United States. Here he came across the ruins of a community and isolated homesteads. These homes, he realized, gave clues as to the characters and lives of the thousands of landless people who, seduced by the advertising of the railroad companies in the early 20th century, took the train West in search of new lives and a permanent agricultural community. What had happened to turn these homesteaders' hopes of a new beginning into such despair? The land which betrayed them turned out to be an America in miniature.
Raban, Jonathan: Old Glory – An American Voyage. Collins 1981.
"It is as big and depthless as the sky itself. You can see the curve of the earth on its surface as it stretches away for miles to the far shore." So begins Old Glory, in which Jonathan Raban recounts his eye-opening descent of the Mississippi River in a 16-foot aluminum motorboat. As the English author explains, his obsession with the subject began with Huckleberry Finn, which he first read as a 7-year-old. And in fact, his opening sentences refer as much to the imaginary river as to the real one, which turns out to be less bucolic than Raban expected. Three miles upstream from Oquawka, Illinois, he's nearly pulverized by a towboat. Later on, the intrepid voyager only just manages to escape a treacherous whirlpool near St. Louis, calming himself afterwards with a generous dose of tobacco and Valium.
True, when Raban isn't cheating death he encounters some stunning terrain, which he describes in no-less-stunning prose. Yet Old Glory is much, much more than a travelogue. It is also a brilliant interrogation of the American psyche, in the tradition of De Tocqueville and Crevecoeur. And ultimately, Raban tells us a great deal about the very phenomenon of travel, with all its rigors and rewards, and its peculiar, metaphysical dislocations: "Riding the river, I had seen myself as a sincere traveler, thinking of my voyage not as a holiday but as a scale model of a life. It was different from life in one essential: I would survive it to give an account of its end."
Rosinsky, Natalie M: The Kent State Shootings (We The People). Compass Point Books 2008*
On a beautiful spring day in 1970, the Vietnam War came to Ohio. In less than 15 seconds, rifles fired by 28 Ohio National Guardsmen killed four college students and injured nine others. The shootings at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, were sparked by protests against the Vietnam War. And like the war itself, the shootings remain a source of bitter arguments and strong emotions.
Rozema, Vicki: Voices From The Trail Of Tears. John F. Blair 2003.
Although British and American governmental policy had been pushing Native Americans westward for much of the 18th and early 19th centuries, passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 brought this policy to a head. This act, which provided for the exchange of American Indian lands in the East for lands west of the Mississippi River and for the removal of the Indians to those lands, resulted in the relocation of an estimated 100,000 Native Americans. Although many tribes were involved in this process, the most publicized removal was that of the Cherokees. In Voices from the Trail of Tears, Vicki Rozema draws from letters, military records, physicians' records, and journal excerpts to provide insight into what actually happened during this period. Through these primary sources, which are presented in chronological order, we follow the feuding within the Cherokee ranks about whether to accept the white man's ultimatum, and if so, how it should be implemented. We have firsthand accounts of how the Indians from Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee were rounded up to prepare for their removal. We hear the sympathetic white missionaries pleading for the Cherokees to be allowed to stay in their homeland, and we see how some of these same missionaries dealt with the testing of their faith as they accompanied the Indians on their westward journey. We read official reports and private musings from the soldiers who were ordered to carry out the removal, many of whom ended up sympathizing with their wards. We see the conditions that the people endured as they traveled on what they called "the Trail Where They Cried." We even follow the confusion that resulted when the new arrivals in the West faced assimilation into a culture already established by those who had emigrated 20 to 30 years earlier
Sherman, Lauren and Gaulkin, Ellen Robb: Weehawken (Images Of America). Arcadia 2009.
Smolan, Rick and Cohen David: A Day In The Life Of America – Photographed By 200 Of The World’s Leading Photojournalists On One Day. Collins 1986.
Stone, Irving: Men To Match My Mountains – The Opening Of The Far West 1840 – 1900. Doubleday 1956.
A great deal of primary and secondary research shows in Men to Match My Mountains. The hard work and attention to detail which Irving Stone put into this work is evident. Far from being the typical boring history text, Men to Match My Mountains is liberally salted with amusing anecdotes and captivating details of the lives of those who first settled California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado. Most of what we know about the West comes from the "cowboy" legends and myths, but Stone focuses on the gold and silver rushes and the Mormon settlement of Utah as the main reasons people went West.
Tefertiller, Casey: Wyatt Earp – The Kife Behind The Legend. John Wiley 1997.
This biography of the controversial western lawman, by a former San Francisco Examiner writer, uses newly found primary sources and exhaustive archival research to uncover the real man obscured by myths, tall tales, and calumnies. Tefertiller's version of Earp finds, amid some unpleasant elements, a real core of heroism. He had a penchant for gambling and saloon life, was an energetic womanizer, and had a habit of applying undue force in arresting suspects. Yet he was also, as Tefertiller documents, indisputably courageous. His varied and colorful career included time as a security guard on Wells Fargo stagecoaches, prospecting, running faro games, and speculating on western lands and mines. Most famously, though, he served as a town sheriff and a US marshall. That Earp could be at various times a gambler and a marshall should not, the author suggests, seem all that startling: Gamblers were highly esteemed figures in the demimonde of the wide open towns of the frontier. Men familiar with violence seemed to these communities to be the ideal choice to establish order. During his term as marshall of Tombstone, Ariz., Earp did just that, confronting rustlers, robbers, and gunmen, bringing them to justice or occasionally shooting it out with them, most famously in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Earp's actions inevitably brought him into conflict with powerful, autocratic ranchers and corrupt politicians. The charges that blackened Earp's reputation, Tefertiller argues, were largely fictions circulated by his enemies, who planted stories about him in pliant frontier newspapers. Using a wide variety of primary sources, Tefertiller manages to summon up a human, complex figure and, while not omitting flaws, to persuasively demonstrate that Earp believed in the law and did his best in hard times to defend it. A great adventure story, and solid history.
Terkel, Studs: My American Century. New Press 1997
This volume is a collection of Studs Terjekl’s most memorable interviews from all eight classics. Robert Cole's foreword lays out a brief history of America's economic power, from the Great Depression on. The details that remain unchanging are the insecurities endured by working men and women. "Such a vulnerability informs the life of even those lucky to be hard at work, as anyone interested in talking with ordinary working people will soon enough learn. But precisely who has had such an interest?" Fans of Studs Terkel know the answer. A writer supremely in touch with his world, Terkel's gift is in transforming the raw clay of people's lives into a simultaneously respectful, curious, and kind narrative.
Thomson, David: In Nevada – The Land, The People, God And Chance. Little Brown 1999.
It's no great surprise that film guru David Thomson should write a sweeping, cinematic tome about America, packed with more human insight, wit and compassion than a decade of Hollywood's output can muster. What may cause a few raised eyebrows is his choice of state. But Thomson's beloved Nevada turns out to be an inspired choice. America's fastest growing state, it comes across as the raw, unhinged schizoid sibling to the rest of the union. It's home to strange phenomena--the Area 51 military base where UFO spotters gather to monitor the strange lights in the sky, Lake Tahoe where corpses sink rather than float, the pagan Burning Man Festival and Las Vegas, that most hygienically degenerate of cities. Today the harsh environment may have been tamed but one thing unites the present and the past. Whether it's the first explorers' decision to cross an unmapped mountain range, a family man's decision to sell up and join the gold rush, physicists' quest for more and more destructive nuclear weapons or the hunch of the gambler about number seven on the roulette wheel, the need to plunge headfirst into the unknown is fundamental to the Nevada experience.
Wallace, Robert: The Miners (The Old West). Time-Life Books 1976
Wallis, Michael: The Real Wild West – The 101 Ranch And The Creation Of The American West. Pimlico 2001
A wild and woolly history of a cowpoke mecca. Missouri-born writer Wallis (Way Down Yonder in the Indian Nation, 1993, etc.) has spent the better part of his prolific career explaining Oklahoma to the rest of the world. With The Real Wild West, whose subtitle is a touch overblown, he turns his attention to the big chunk of the state that a famed ranch took in for several decades: the 101, owned by the Miller Brothers dynasty, a 110,000-acre spread that produced cattle, grain, and western myth in roughly equal portions. The western myth element, as Wallis ably shows, came from the Miller Brothers' well-tuned sense of self-promotion: onto their ranch came such characters as Geronimo, Will Rogers, Buffalo Bill, and Tom Mix, the last a Hollywood cowboy who worked on the ranch for a short time. (Another Hollywood cowboy, John Wayne, learned "how to ride and how to walk with a cowboy's rolling gait" under the tutelage of a 101 alumnus, Yakima Canutt.) With an eye for the Big Picture and a sweeping style, Wallis traces the fortunes of the ranch from a political and economic powerhouse to its eventual decline some decades ago. Along the way, he turns up some nicely pointed commentary that has not been often used before, such as historian Emerson Hough's remark that "the chief figure of the American West, the figure of the ages, is not the long-haired, fringed-legged man tiding a rawboned pony, but the gaunt and sad-faced woman sitting on the front seat of the wagon, following her lord where he might lead." Wallis gives those sad-faced women room to speak in his book, but as might be expected, the rootin'-tootin' cowpokes speak louder, blustering from roundup to feud to the occasional gunfight.
Warren, Robert Penn: Who Speaks For The Negro? Vintage 1965.
A searching exploration of the thought and emotion, the tensions and conflicts of the greatest American upheaval of the 20th century.
Waters, Frank: Book Of The Hopi. Viking Press 1963.
This book is probably the most complete collection of Hopi stories, language, rituals, and photographs in one place. Waters wrote this book with assistance from thirty-two Hopi elders back in 1963. Much time has passed since then, and while the way of the Hopi remains mostly unchanged, access to their sacred ceremonies and rituals has been greatly reduced in the last several decades. Whilst the book was written through the eyes and ears of an outsider, it contains much of the spirit of the Hopi, and countless fascinating insights. One such example is the explanation of how one sacred ceremony (the Ya Ya) was profaned and is no longer performed, since much of its powers were taken for evil. "When you receive a wonderful power and use it for evil you lose the power. You have to use it for good to keep it." The richness of information contained in this little book in extraordinary: symbols, the tablets of the clans, a glossary of Hopi words, thrilling tales about the creation of the worlds, and detailed descriptions of sacred objects such as the Paho (prayer-feather). This attention to detail is marvelous, but it's the heart of Book Of The Hopi that makes one feel at home with the Hopi and at one with their spirit.
Werner, Emmy E: Pioneer Children On The Journey West. Westview Press 1995.
Between 1841 and 1865, some forty thousand children participated in the great overland journeys from the banks of the Missouri River to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. In this engaging book, Emmy Werner gives 120 of these young emigrants, ranging from ages four to seventeen, a chance to tell the stories of their journeys west. Incorporating primary materials in the form of diaries, letters, journals, and reminiscences that are by turns humorous and heartrending, the author tells a timeless tale of human resilience. For six months or more, the young travelers traversed two thousand miles of uncharted prairies, deserts, and mountain ranges. Some became part of makeshift families; others adopted the task of keeping younger siblings alive. They encountered strangers who risked their own lives for youngsters and guides whose erroneous advice led to detours and desolation. The children endured excessive heat and cold and often suffered from cholera, dysentery, fever, and scurvy. They also faced thirst and starvation, cannibalism among famished members of their own parties, kidnappings, and the deaths of family members and friends. From the teenaged Nancy Kelsey, who carried her infant daughter across the Sierra Nevada, to the survivors of the ill-fated Donner party in 18461847, Gold Rush orphans of 1849, and the youngsters who crossed Death Valley and the southwestern deserts in the 1850s, the eyewitness accounts of these pioneer children speak of fortitude, faith, and invincibility in the face of great odds.
Wiest, Andy: The Vietnam War 1956-1975 (Essential Histories). Osprey 2002
The Vietnam War was arguably the most important event, or series of events, of the "American Century." America entered the brutal conflict certain of its Cold War doctrines and certain of its moral mission to save the world from the advance of communism. As this book explains, however, the war was not at all what the United States expected. Outnumbered and outgunned the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces resorted to a guerrilla war based on the theories of Mao Zedong of China. This was war reduced to its most basic level - find the enemy and kill him.
Worster, Donald: Dust Bowl – The Southern Plains In The 1930s. Oxford 1979.
In the mid 1930s, North America's Great Plains faced one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in world history. Donald Worster's classic chronicle of the devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells the story of the Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms. Now, twenty-five years after his book helped to define the new field of environmental history, Worster shares his more recent thoughts on the subject of the land and how humans interact with it. In a new afterword, he links the Dust Bowl to current political, economic and ecological issues--including the American livestock industry's exploitation of the Great Plains, and the on-going problem of desertification, which has now become a global phenomenon. He reflects on the state of the plains today and the threat of a new dustbowl. He outlines some solutions that have been proposed, such as "the Buffalo Commons," where deer, antelope, bison and elk would once more roam freely, and suggests that we may yet witness a Great Plains where native flora and fauna flourish while applied ecologists show farmers how to raise food on land modeled after the natural prairies that once existed.
YOUNG, Gavin: From Sea To Shining Sea – A Present-Day Journey Into America’s Past.Hutchinson 1995.
Gavin Young' s North American odyssey took him from Central Park and the old Atlantic whaling ports all the way to a tiny cabin in the Yukon, where Jack London heard 'the call of the wild'. Whether sleuthing through riot-racked Los Angeles in the footsteps of Philip Marlowe, crossing the Arizona Desert on Route 66 like Steinbeck's Depression-era migrant workers or searching for the characters of Cannery Row in Monterey, Young brilliantly uses the past to illuminate the present.
Younge, Gary: No Place Like Home – A Black Briton’s Journey Through The American South. Picador 1999.
In 1997 Gary Younge explored the American South by retracing the route of the original Freedom Riders of the 1960s. His road trip was a remarkable socio-cultural adventure for an outsider. He was British, journalistically curious, and black. As he traveled by Greyhound bus through the former Confederate states, he experienced an awakening. He felt culturally tied to this strange yet familiar place. Though a Briton by birth and the child of emigrants from Barbados, he felt culturally alien in his native land. In Dixie, however, he met African Americans whose racial distinctiveness was similar to his own. To local blacks he looked like a brother, while sounding intriguingly foreign. As he assessed their political rise in the South, he noted too how African American tradition seemed static and unchanged. It was a refreshing whiff of "home." Awakened to his own identity as a black in a predominantly white society and absorbed by a sense of southern myth and racial history, he produced this account, a blend of travel writing, historical research, wit, and social commentary. His probing examination of the Southland gives fresh perspective on race relations in America.
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