Heart Spring Mountain


Book Description

In this evocative first novel, a young woman returns to her rural Vermont hometown in the wake of a devastating storm to search for her missing mother and unravel a powerful family secret It’s August 2011, and Tropical Storm Irene has just wreaked havoc on Vermont, flooding rivers and destroying homes. One thousand miles away—while tending bar in New Orleans—Vale receives a call and is told that her mother, Bonnie, has disappeared. Despite a years-long estrangement from Bonnie, Vale drops everything and returns home to look for her. Though the hometown Vale comes back to is not the one she left eight years earlier, she finds herself falling back into the lives of the family she thought she’d long since left behind. As Vale begins her search, the narrative opens up and pitches back and forth in time to follow three generations of women—a farming widow, a back-to-the-land dreamer, and an owl-loving hermit—as they seek love, bear children, and absorb losses. All the while, Vale’s search has her unwittingly careening toward a family origin secret more stunning than she ever imagined. Written with a striking sense of place, Heart Spring Mountain is an arresting novel about returning home, finding hope in the dark, and of the power of the land—and the stories it harbors—to connect and to heal. It’s also an absorbing exploration of the small fractures that can make families break-and the lasting ties that bind them together.




Douglas MacArthur


Book Description

A new, definitive life of an American icon, the visionary general who led American forces through three wars and foresaw his nation’s great geopolitical shift toward the Pacific Rim—from the Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author of Gandhi & Churchill Douglas MacArthur was arguably the last American public figure to be worshipped unreservedly as a national hero, the last military figure to conjure up the romantic stirrings once evoked by George Armstrong Custer and Robert E. Lee. But he was also one of America’s most divisive figures, a man whose entire career was steeped in controversy. Was he an avatar or an anachronism, a brilliant strategist or a vainglorious mountebank? Drawing on a wealth of new sources, Arthur Herman delivers a powerhouse biography that peels back the layers of myth—both good and bad—and exposes the marrow of the man beneath. MacArthur’s life spans the emergence of the United States Army as a global fighting force. Its history is to a great degree his story. The son of a Civil War hero, he led American troops in three monumental conflicts—World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. Born four years after Little Bighorn, he died just as American forces began deploying in Vietnam. Herman’s magisterial book spans the full arc of MacArthur’s journey, from his elevation to major general at thirty-eight through his tenure as superintendent of West Point, field marshal of the Philippines, supreme ruler of postwar Japan, and beyond. More than any previous biographer, Herman shows how MacArthur’s strategic vision helped shape several decades of U.S. foreign policy. Alone among his peers, he foresaw the shift away from Europe, becoming the prophet of America’s destiny in the Pacific Rim. Here, too, is a vivid portrait of a man whose grandiose vision of his own destiny won him enemies as well as acolytes. MacArthur was one of the first military heroes to cultivate his own public persona—the swashbuckling commander outfitted with Ray-Ban sunglasses, riding crop, and corncob pipe. Repeatedly spared from being killed in battle—his soldiers nicknamed him “Bullet Proof”—he had a strong sense of divine mission. “Mac” was a man possessed, in the words of one of his contemporaries, of a “supreme and almost mystical faith that he could not fail.” Yet when he did, it was on an epic scale. His willingness to defy both civilian and military authority was, Herman shows, a lifelong trait—and it would become his undoing. Tellingly, MacArthur once observed, “Sometimes it is the order one disobeys that makes one famous.” To capture the life of such an outsize figure in one volume is no small achievement. With Douglas MacArthur, Arthur Herman has set a new standard for untangling the legacy of this American legend. Praise for Douglas MacArthur “This is revisionist history at its best and, hopefully, will reopen a debate about the judgment of history and MacArthur’s place in history.”—New York Journal of Books “Unfailingly evocative . . . close to an epic . . . More than a biography, it is a tale of a time in the past almost impossible to contemplate today as having taken place, with MacArthur himself as a figure perhaps too remote to understand, but all the more important to encounter.”—The New Criterion “With Douglas MacArthur: American Warrior, the prolific and talented historian Arthur Herman has delivered an expertly rendered, compulsively readable account that does full justice to MacArthur’s monumental achievements without slighting his equally monumental flaws.”—Commentary




The Ghost Mountain Boys


Book Description

A harrowing portrait of a largely forgotten campaign that pushed one battalion to the limits of human suffering. Despite their lack of jungle training, the 32nd Division’s “Ghost Mountain Boys” were assigned the most grueling mission of the entire Pacific campaign in World War II: to march over the 10,000-foot Owen Stanley Mountains to protect the right flank of the Australian army during the battle for New Guinea. Reminiscent of the classics like Band of Brothers and The Things They Carried, The Ghost Mountain Boys is part war diary, part extreme-adventure tale, and—through letters, journals, and interviews—part biography of a group of men who fought to survive in an environment every bit as fierce as the enemy they faced. Theirs is one of the great untold stories of the war. “Superb.” —Chicago Sun-Times “Campbell started out with history, but in the end he has written a tale of survival and courage of near-mythic proportions.” —America in WWII magazine “In this compelling and sprightly written account, Campbell shines a long-overdue light on the equally deserving heroes of the Red Arrow Division.” —Military.com




Twelve Ordinary Men


Book Description

You don't have to be perfect to do God's work. Look no further than the twelve disciples, whose many weaknesses are forever preserved throughout the pages of the New Testament. Join bestselling author John MacArthur in Twelve Ordinary Men as he draws principles from Christ's careful, hands-on training of the original disciples for today's modern disciple, you! Jesus chose ordinary men--fishermen, tax collectors, political zealots--and turned their weakness into strength, producing greatness from people who were otherwise unremarkable. The twelve disciples weren't the stained-glass saints we imagine. On the contrary, they were truly human, all too prone to mistakes, misstatements, wrong attitudes, lapses of faith, and bitter failure. Simply put, they were flawed people, just like us. But under Jesus' teaching and touch, they became a force that forever changed the world. MacArthur takes you into the inner circle of the disciples--their selection, their training, their personalities, and their incredible impact. As MacArthur took a closer look at the lives of the twelve disciples, he found himself asking difficult questions along the way, including: Why did Jesus pick each of the twelve disciples? How did Jesus teach them everything he could in just eighteen short months? Can the lessons that Jesus taught the disciples can still influence our faith today? In Twelve Ordinary Men, you'll learn that disciples are living proof that God's strength is made perfect in weakness. As you get to know the men who walked with Jesus, you'll see that if he can accomplish his purposes through them, he can do the same through you.




How Strange a Season


Book Description

Award-winning short story writer Megan Mayhew Bergman's debut novel--a beautiful and engrossing tale of a southern family, set outside of Charleston in the 1920s and 1930s, with an unforgettable young heroine. Win Spangler and Helena Glass met on the dunes at a beach resort in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1919. Helena, a skilled shooter and former beauty queen, was born and raised on a moss-draped former rice plantation, and her family is devoted to preserving their crumbling heritage. Win is a medical school dropout with a sizeable inheritance, eager to make his mark on southern culture. When Helena seduces Win, their lives become inextricably bound. Their daughter Sally Anne is born at Glass Manor and her father nicknames her Skip, because he hopes any misfortune will pass her by. But her mother is unstable and her father is unsatisfied, and Skip grows up lonely and isolated. She is drawn to the families down the road on Nightingale Lane, where the field workers and servants live, and develops a unique friendship with a boy named Ase. When Skip is thirteen years old her father invites a disquieting doctor to set up a private laboratory on the property, and his pioneering surgical experiments lead to disastrous consequences, forcing Skip to question everything she knows about family, love, and legacy. Author Megan Mayhew Bergman has been hailed "a top-notch emerging writer" (The Boston Globe) and a writer of "intense, richly imagined tales" (Maureen Corrigan, NPR), and brings her formidable storytelling talents to bear in Nightingale Lane, with its rich cast of characters and lush, evocative prose. Atmospheric and steeped in southern lore, Nightingale Lane explores the power of wronged women, the cost of inheritance, and the reconciliation of past and present.




Dear General MacArthur


Book Description

This work compiles some 120 letters from Japanese citizens to General Douglas MacArthur during the postwar occupation of Japan (1945-1952). These letters evoke the unfiltered voices of people of all classes and occupations during the tremendous upheaval of the early postwar period.







Safe in the Arms of God


Book Description

"Is my baby in heaven?" This is the most important question a grieving parent can ask. And even if the little one is someone else's child, the issue remains: What happens to children?those unborn, stillborn, or youngsters?when they die? Can you hope to see them again? Can you let go of your fear and guilt? Can God's love soothe a wound so jagged? With scriptural authority and the warmth of a pastor's heart, bestselling author John MacArthur examines the breadth of the entire Bible and reveals in this compelling book the Heavenly Father's care for every life. "I have sat by the grave of our daughter and son and wondered out loud if my belief that Hope and Gabriel are in heaven has any solid scriptural support. John MacArthur offers truth from God's Word that puts the doubts of any grieving parent to rest. Safe in the Arms of God reveals that confidence of heaven for the child you love is based on much more than mere sentimentality; it is revealed in the Word of God and reflective of the very heart of God." ?Nancy Guthrie, author of Holding On to Hope




Half Wild


Book Description

“This heartbreakingly honest and authentic fiction will make you weep over, laugh at, and finally cheer for, mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, lovers and losers, and the human race in general. Half Wild is American fiction, and American literature, at its very best.”—Howard Frank Mosher, author of The Great Northern Express and Northern Borders Spanning nearly forty years, the stories in Robin MacArthur’s formidable debut give voice to the dreams, hungers, and fears of a diverse cast of Vermonters—adolescent girls, aging hippies, hardscrabble farmers, disconnected women, and solitary men. Straddling the border between civilization and the wild, they all struggle to make sense of their loneliness and longings in the stark and often isolating enclaves they call home—golden fields and white-veiled woods, dilapidated farmhouses and makeshift trailers, icy rivers and still lakes rouse the imagination, tether the heart, and inhabit the soul. In “Creek Dippers,” a teenage girl vows to escape the fate that has trapped her eccentric mother. In “God’s Country,” an elderly woman is unexpectedly reminded of a forbidden youthful passion and the chance she did not take. Returning to her childhood house when her mother falls ill, a daughter grapples with her own sense of belonging in “The Women Where I’m From.” With striking prose powerful in its clarity and purity, MacArthur effortlessly renders characters—men and women, young and old—cleaved to the fierce and beautiful land that has defined them.




Resting Places


Book Description

In its third edition, this massive reference work lists the final resting places of more than 14,000 people from a wide range of fields, including politics, the military, the arts, crime, sports and popular culture. Many entries are new to this edition. Each listing provides birth and death dates, a brief summary of the subject's claim to fame and their burial site location or as much as is known. Grave location within a cemetery is provided in many cases, as well as places of cremation and sites where ashes were scattered. Source information is provided.




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