For most people, a diagnosis of cystic fibrosis means the certainty of a life ended too soon. But for twin girls with the disease, what began as a family’s stubborn determination grew into a miracle.

            The tragedy of CF has been touchingly recounted in such books as Frank Deford’s Alex: The Life of a Child, but The Power of Two is the first book to portray the symbiotic relationship between twins who share this life-threatening disease through adulthood. Isabel Stenzel Byrnes and Anabel Stenzel tell of their lifelong struggle to pursue normal lives with cystic fibrosis while grappling with the realization that they will die young. Their story reflects the physical and emotional challenges of a particularly aggressive form of CF and tells how the twins’ bicultural heritage—Japanese and German—influenced the way they coped with these challenges.

            Born in 1972, seventeen years before scientists discovered the genetic mutation that causes CF, Isabel and Anabel endured the daily regimen of chest percussion, frequent doctor visits, and lengthy hospitalizations. But they tell how, in the face of innumerable setbacks, their deep-seated dependence on each other allowed them to survive long enough to reap the benefits of the miraculous lung transplants that marked a crossroads in their lives: “We have an old life—one of growing up with chronic illness—and a new life—one of opportunities and gifts we have never imagined before.” In this memoir, they pay tribute to the people who shaped their experience.

            The Power of Two is an honest and gripping portrayal of day-to-day health care, the impact of chronic illness on marriage and family, and the importance of a support network to continuing survival. It conveys an important message to both popular and professional readers as it addresses key psychosocial issues in chronic illness throughout the sufferer’s lifespan and illuminates the human side of advances in biotechnology.

            Even as gene therapy and stem cell research increase the chances for eradicating CF, this stirring account portrays its effects on one family that refused to give up. These two remarkable sisters have much to teach about the power of perseverance—and about the ultimate power of hope.

“It’s almost like ballet. Preflight. Starting. Warm-up. The voices from the control tower—the instructions. Taxiing. The rush down the runway. Airborne. There are names for every move. The run-up. Position and hold. Every move needs to be learned, practiced, made so familiar you feel the patterns in every other thing you do. It’s technical, yes. But there is a grace to getting metal and bone into the sky.”

Prairie Sky is a celebration of curiosity and a book for explorers. In this collection of contemplative essays, Scott Olsen invites readers to view the world from a pilot’s seat, demonstrating how, with just a little bit of altitude, the world changes, new relationships become visible, and new questions seem to rise up from the ground.

Whether searching for the still-evident shores of ancient lakes, the dustbowl-era shelterbelt supposed to run the length of the country, or the even more elusive understandings of physics and theology, Olsen shares the unique perspective and insight allowed to pilots.

Prairie Sky explores the reality as well as the metaphor of flight: notions of ceaseless time and boundless space, personal interior and exterior vision, social history, meteorology, and geology. Olsen takes readers along as he chases a new way of looking at the physical world and wonders aloud about how the whole planet moves in interconnected ways not visible from the ground. While the northern prairie may call to mind images of golden harvests and summer twilight such images do not define the region. The land bears marks left by gut-shaking thunderstorms, hard-frozen rivers, sweeping floods, and hurricane-size storms. Olsen takes to the midwestern sky to confront the ordinary world and reveals the magic--the wondrous and unique sights visible from the pilot’s seat of a Cessna.

Like Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s classic work Wind, Sand and Stars, Olsen’s Prairie Sky reveals the heart of what it means to fly. In the grand romantic tradition of the travel essay, it opens the dramatic paradoxes of self and collective, linear and circular, the heart and the border.

In this thorough and detailed study, Richard Douglass-Chin examines collectively for the first time the autobiographies of nineteenth-century African American women evangelists, along with their eighteenth-century forerunner "Belinda." By studying how black women evangelists employed dialogue created by socioeconomic conditions, the author shows how their writings form the groundwork for a contemporary womanist literature rooted in spirituality. Arguing that the writings have their own unique figurations and forms that develop and alter over time, Douglass-Chin claims that the changing black female spiritual narrative traces an important line in the ongoing traditions of black women's writing, a line that has only now begun to be reclaimed and validated. Through references to the writings of black male autobiographers Frederick Douglass, Richard Allen, Daniel Payne, and John Jea as well as the works of white female autobiographers Harriet Livermore and Phoebe Palmer, Douglass-Chin is able to make valuable comparisons.

Preacher Woman Sings the Blues begins with the study of black evangelists Belinda, Jarena Lee, and Zilpha Elaw, continuing with Rebecca Cox Jackson, Sojourner Truth, Julia Foote, Amanda Smith, Elizabeth, and Virginia Broughton. The author's discussion of Zora Neale Hurston focuses on how Hurston operates as a connection between early black women evangelist writers and black women writing in America today. He ends with the works of Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Toni Cade Bambara.

By examining the early traditions prefiguring contemporary African American women's texts and the impact that race and gender have on them, Douglass-Chin shows how the nineteenth-century black women's works are still of utmost importance to many African American women writers today. Preacher Woman Sings the Blues makes a valuable contribution to literary criticism and theoretical analysis and will be welcomed by scholars and students alike.

Over the past century, three nationally significant histories have vied for space and place in Independence, Missouri. Independence was declared Zion by Joseph Smith, served as a gathering and provisioning point for trails west, and was called home by President Harry S. Truman for sixty-four years. Historian Jon E. Taylor has integrated research from newspapers, public documents, oral histories, and private papers to detail how the community has preserved and remembered these various legacies.

Truman’s legacy would appear to have been secured in Independence via three significant designations—his presidential library opened there in 1957, his neighborhood was designated a national historic landmark in 1972, and his home was declared a national historic site in 1982. However, Taylor argues that Truman’s seeming dominance in the community’s memory is in fact endangered by competition from the other aspects of the town’s historical heritage.

Taylor considers the role Mormon history has played in the city's history and chronicles how the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints returned to Independence to fulfill Joseph Smith's dream of creating Zion in the city, a situation that impacted neighborhoods near the Truman home.  Taylor also examines the city's fascination with the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California trails, detailing how that history was lost and remembered and is now immortalized on the Independence square and in the National Frontier Trails Museum.

In the 1980s, the city council reduced the size of the Truman Heritage District, created to maintain Truman’s association with his neighborhood, after church opposition. At the same time, city officials pushed to make Independence a major tourist destination, a move largely dependent upon the city capitalizing on its association with Truman. These inconsistent policies and incongruous goals have led to innumerable changes in the landscape Truman enjoyed during his legendary morning walks.

 A President, a Church, and Trails West chronicles one city’s struggle to preserve its history and the built environment. Taylor places the role of preservation in Independence not only within the larger context of preservation in the United States but also within the context of American environmental history. This volume is sure to appeal to anyone interested in public history, historic preservation, history and memory, and local history.

At the age of twenty-five, Primo Levi was sent to Hell. Levi, an Italian chemist from Turin, was one of many swept up in the Holocaust of World War II and sent to die in the German concentration camp in Auschwitz. Of the 650 people transported to the camp in his group, only 15 men and 9 women survived. After Soviet liberation of the camp in 1945, Levi wrote books, essays, short stories, poetry, and a novel, in which he painstakingly described the horrors of his experience at Auschwitz. He also spent the rest of his life struggling with the fact that he was not among those who were killed.

In Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, Frederic D. Homer looks at Primo Levi's life but, more important, shows him to be a significant political philosopher. In the course of his writings, Levi asked and answered his most haunting question: can someone be brutalized by a terrifying experience and, upon return to "ordinary life," recover from the physical and moral destruction he has suffered? Levi used this question to develop a philosophy positing that although man is no match for life, he can become better prepared to contend with the tragedies in life.

According to Levi, the horrors of the world occur because of the strength of human tendencies, which make relationships between human beings exceedingly fragile. He believed that we are ill-constituted beings who have tendencies toward violence and domination, dividing ourselves into Us and Them, with very shallow loyalties. He also maintained that our only refuge is in education and responsibility, which may counter these tendencies. Homer calls Levi's philosophy "optimistic pessimism."

As Homer demonstrates, Levi took his past experiences into account to determine that goodwill and democratic institutions do not come easily to people. Liberal society is to be earned through discipline and responsibility toward our weaknesses. Levi's answer is "civilized liberalism." To achieve this we must counter some of our most stubborn tendencies.

Homer also explores the impact of Levi's death, an apparent suicide, on the way in which his work and theories have been perceived. While several critics discount Levi's work because of the nature of his death, Homer argues that his death is consistent with his philosophy. A book rich in brutally honest philosophy, Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival compels one to look at serious questions about life, tragedy, optimism, solidarity, violence, and human nature.

Prisons and Patriots provides a detailed account of forty-one Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans), known as the Tucsonians, who were imprisoned for resisting the draft during WWII. Cherstin Lyon parallels their courage as resisters with that of civil rights hero Gordon Hirabayashi, well known for his legal battle against curfew and internment, who also resisted the draft. These dual stories highlight the intrinsic relationship between the rights and the obligations of citizenship, particularly salient in times of war.

Lyon considers how wartime civil disobedience has been remembered through history—how soldiers have been celebrated for their valor while resisters have been demonized as unpatriotic. Using archival research and interviews, she presents a complex picture of loyalty and conflict among first-generation Issei and Nisei. Lyon contends that the success of the redress movement has made room for a narrative that neither reduces the wartime confinement to a source of shame nor proffers an uncritical account of heroic individuals.

Taylor explores aspects of himself that have affected his work. He delves into the creation of Aureole and From Sea to Shining Sea, from their initial inception to the ways in which specific dancers influenced the choreography, including such notables as Pina Bausch, Laura Dean, David Parsons, Twyla Tharp, Dan Wagoner, Senta Driver—all of whom went on to form their own companies—and others—Bettie de Jong, Nicholas Gunn, and Carolyn Adams—who remained as much a part of the Taylor style as the choreography itself. Taylor writes with sincerity, wit, and charm of his associations with Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins, Anthony Tudor, George Balanchine, and many others.

In this vivid memoir, Laxalt recalls his service during WWII as a code officer in the Belgian Congo. In this remote jungle outpost, a secret war was being fought for control of the world’s future. Deep in the Congo lay a mine that produced a little-known substance called uranium, and for reasons no one then understood, the Allies and the Germans were struggling ferociously to control this mine and its ore. The cloth edition is a limited numbered, signed edition.

A Promise at Sobibór is the story of Fiszel Bialowitz, a teenaged Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi gas chambers. Between April 1942 and October 1943, about 250,000 Jews from European countries and the Soviet Union were sent to the Nazi death camp at Sobibór in occupied Poland. Sobibór was not a transit camp or work camp: its sole purpose was efficient mass murder. On October 14, 1943, approximately half of the 650 or so prisoners still alive at Sobibór undertook a daring and precisely planned revolt, killing SS officers and fleeing through minefields and machine-gun fire into the surrounding forests, farms, and towns. Only about forty-two of them, including Fiszel, are known to have survived to the end of the war.
    Philip (Fiszel) Bialowitz, now an American citizen, tells his eyewitness story here in the real-time perspective of his own boyhood, from his childhood before the war and his internment in the brutal Izbica ghetto to his harrowing six months at Sobibór—including his involvement in the revolt and desperate mass escape—and his rescue by courageous Polish farmers. He also recounts the challenges of life following the war as a teenaged displaced person, and his eventual efforts as a witness to the truth of the Holocaust.
    In 1943 the heroic leaders of the revolt at Sobibór, Sasha Perchersky and Leon Feldhendler, implored fellow prisoners to promise that anyone who survived would tell the story of Sobibór: not just of the horrific atrocities committed there, but of the courage and humanity of those who fought back. Bialowitz has kept that promise.

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association for School Libraries

Best Books for High Schools, selected by the American Association for School Libraries

Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the Public Library Association

The Promise of Failure is part memoir of the writing life, part advice book, and part craft book; sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching, but always honest. McNally uses his own life as a blueprint for the writer’s daily struggles as well as the existential ones, tackling subjects such as when to quit and when to keep going, how to deal with depression, what risking something of yourself means, and ways to reenergize your writing through reinvention. 

What McNally illuminates is how rejection, in its best light, is another element of craft, a necessary stage to move the writer from one project to the next, and that it’s best to see rejection and failure on a life-long continuum so that you can see the interconnectedness between failure and success, rather than focusing on failure as a measure of self-worth. As brutally candid as McNally can sometimes be, The Promise of Failure is ultimately an inspiring book—never in a Pollyannaish self-help way. McNally approaches the reader as a sympathetic companion with cautionary tales to tell. Written by an author who has as many unpublished books under his belt as published ones, The Promise of Failure is as much for the newcomer as it is for the established writer. 

Winner of the 2006 Booker Worthen Literary Prize and the 2004 Ragsdale Award.

Sidney Sanders McMath was a pivotal figure not only in Arkansas history but in the history of the Democratic Party and of American law. Still vibrant and engaged in his nineties, he sets out his story in full for the first time: how he rose and fell in public office, and rose again as a lawyer seeking justice for ordinary people.

McMath divides his story into four parts. In the first, he describes how his early life in rural Arkansas sparked his commitment to people. The second section describes his service to democracy in the military, including his commission in the U.S. Marines, a battlefield promotion in the Pacific and other honors, and his subsequent advancement to the rank of major general.

The revealing third section details McMath’s extraordinary life in politics, starting with his explosive debut in 1945, when he and other recent veterans dethroned one of Arkansas’s most powerful and corrupt political machines. Later, as a two-term governor, he fulfilled this promise of reform and modernization: he brought the first roads and electricity to rural areas, fought the poll tax, and built the state’s first medical center. He also helped change the party’s rules so that black citizens could vote in primaries. McMath describes how he worked with President Truman to keep the segregationist Dixiecrats from taking over the Democratic Party—and the presidency.

But here his story takes a dramatic turn: political opponents alleged bribery in his highway program, and although no indictments were handed down, McMath’s political career ended. Arguing his case for the first time in fifty years, he sets the facts straight.

McMath turned to the practice of law to fight for the people he had represented as governor. In the concluding section of the book he describes some of his most important cases, examples of how he put his life’s experience, knowledge, and integrity in the service of those who had few resources. These stories show exactly why he has been honored with membership in such exclusive groups as the Inner Circle of Advocates as well as the presidency of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers.

Promises Kept shows us the excitement and the hard choices of real democracy, offering compelling human stories, new information on past conflicts, and the crucial perspective of a man at the center of history.

Nearly everyone in the archaeological community read Taylor’s book at the time, and despite the negative reaction, many were influenced by it. Few young scholars dared to directly engage and build on his “conjunctive approach,” yet his suggested methods nevertheless began to be adopted and countless present-day authors highlight his impact on the 1960s formation of the “New Archaeology.” In

Prophet, Pariah, and Pioneer, peers, colleagues, and former students offer a critical consideration of Taylor’s influence and legacy. Neither a festschrift nor a mere analysis of his work, the book presents an array of voices exploring Taylor and his influence, sociologically and intellectually, as well as the culture of American archaeology in the second half of the twentieth century.

Protecting the Empire’s Frontier tells stories of the roughly eighty officers who served in the 18th (Royal Irish) Regiment of Foot, which served British interests in America during the crucial period from 1767 through 1776. The Royal Irish was one of the most wide-ranging regiments in America, with companies serving on the Illinois frontier, at Fort Pitt, and in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with some companies taken as far afield as Florida, Spanish Louisiana, and present-day Maine. When the regiment was returned to England in 1776, some of the officers remained in America on staff assignments. Others joined provincial regiments, and a few joined the American revolutionary army, taking up arms against their king and former colleagues.

Using a wide range of archival resources previously untapped by scholars, the text goes beyond just these officers’ service in the regiment and tells the story of the men who included governors, a college president, land speculators, physicians, and officers in many other British regular and provincial regiments. Included in these ranks were an Irishman who would serve in the U.S. Congress and as an American general at Yorktown; a landed aristocrat who represented Bath as a member of Parliament; and a naval surgeon on the ship transporting Benjamin Franklin to France. This is the history of the American Revolutionary period from a most gripping and everyday perspective.

An epilogue covers the Royal Irish’s history after returning to England and its part in defending against both the Franco-Spanish invasion attempt and the Gordon Rioters. With an essay on sources and a complete bibliography, this is a treat for professional and amateur historians alike.

Elizabeth Warder Crozer Campbell and her husband, William Campbell, found themselves forced to move to the Mojave Desert in 1924, its dry climate proving to be the best for William’s frail lungs burned by mustard gas in World War I. They camped at Twentynine Palm Oasis in what is now Joshua Tree National Park, homesteaded nearby, and became a central part of that early community. Life in the remote, stark landscape contrasted sharply with Elizabeth’s early years of wealth and privilege in Pennsylvania. Her resilient spirit made the best of what at first seemed like a bleak situation: she became an amateur archaeologist and explored the desert. A keen observer and independent thinker, she soon hypothesized that prehistoric people had lived in the California deserts along the shores of late  Pleistocene lakes and waterways much earlier than was then believed. She devised a means for testing her hypothesis and found evidence to support it. Her interpretations, however, conflicted with the archaeological paradigm of the day and she was dismissed by formally trained archaeologists. Even so, she and her husband continued their work, convinced of the accuracy of her findings. Four decades later the archaeological establishment validated and accepted her ideas. Campbell’s research ultimately revolutionized archaeological thought, forming the basis of today’s landscape archaeology. 

When philosopher Bernard Rollin was six years old, he visited an animal shelter and was told about unwanted dogs being put to sleep. The event shaped his moral outlook and initiated his concern for how animals were treated. In his irreverent memoir, Putting the Horse before Descartes, Rollin provides an account of how he came to educate himself and others about the ethical treatment of animals and work toward improvements in animal welfare.

Rollin describes, in witty, often disarming detail, how he became an outspoken critic of how animals were being treated in veterinary and medical schools as well as in research labs. Putting the Horse before Descartes showcases the passionate animal advocate at his best. He recalls teaching veterinary students about ethical issues. He also recalls face-offs with ranchers and cowboys about branding methods and roping competitions in rodeos. In addition, he describes his work to legally mandate more humane conditions for agricultural and laboratory animals. As public concern about animal welfare and the safety of the food supply heighten, Rollin carries on this work all over the world—in classrooms, lecture halls and legislatures, meetings of agricultural associations and industrial settings, as well as in print.

Putting the Horse before Descartes, ultimately, is more than a memoir. Rollin offers a wide-ranging discussion of ethical issues in many settings and he testifies to the myriad ways that people of good conscience accept their ethical responsibility in regard to animals.

Given the tensions and demands of medicine, highly successful physicians and surgeons rarely achieve equal success as prose writers.  It is truly extraordinary that a major, international pioneer in the controversial field of transplant surgery should have written a spellbinding, and heart-wrenching, autobiography.

Thomas Starzl grew up in LeMars, Iowa, the son of a newspaper publisher and a nurse.  His father also wrote science fiction and was acquainted with the writer Ray Bradbury.  Starzl left the family business to enter Northwestern University Medical School where he earned both and M.D. and a PhD.  While he was a student, and later during his surgical internship at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, he began the series of animal experiments that led eventually to the world’s first transplantation of the human liver in 1963.

Throughout his career, first at the University of Colorado and then at the University of Pittsburgh, he has aroused both worldwide admiration and controversy.  His technical innovations and medical genius have revolutionized the field, but Starzl has not hesitated to address the moral and ethical issues raised by transplantation.  In this book he clearly states his position on many hotly debated issues including brain death, randomized trials for experimental drugs, the costs of transplant operations, and the system for selecting organ recipients from among scores of desperately ill patients.

There are many heroes in the story of transplantation, and many “puzzle people,” the patients who, as one journalist suggested, might one day be made entirely of various transplanted parts.  They are old and young, obscure and world famous.  Some have been taken into the hearts of America, like Stormie Jones, the brave and beautiful child from Texas.  Every patient who receives someone else’s organ - and Starzl remembers each one - is a puzzle.  “It was not just the acquisition of a new part,” he writes.  “The rest of the body had to change in many ways before the gift could be accepted.  It was necessary for the mind to see the world in a different way.”  The surgeons and physicians who pioneered transplantation were also changed: they too became puzzle people.  “Some were corroded or destroyed by the experience, some were sublimated, and none remained the same.”