BiblioVault - Books about Life

Oak Origins

From Acorns to Species and the Tree of Life

Andrew L. Hipp

University of Chicago Press

From ancient acorns to the forests of the future, the story of how oaks evolved and the many ways they shape our world.

An oak begins its life with the precarious journey of a pollen grain, then an acorn, then a seedling. A mature tree may shed millions of acorns, but only a handful will grow. One oak may then live 100 years, 250 years, or even 13,000 years. But the long life of an individual is only a part of these trees’ story.

With naturalist and leading researcher on the deep history of oaks Andrew L. Hipp as our guide, Oak Origins is a sweeping evolutionary history, stretching back to a population of trees that lived more than fifty million years ago. We travel to ancient tropical Earth to see the ancestors of the oaks evolving in the shadows of the dinosaurs. We journey from the once-warm Arctic forests of the oaks’ childhood to the montane cloud forests of Mexico and the broadleaved evergreen forests of southeast Asia. We dive into current research on oak genomes to see how scientists study genes moving between species and how oaks evolve over generations—and tens of millions of years. Finally, we learn how oak evolutionary history shapes the forests we know today, and how it may even shape the forests of the future.

Oaks are familiar to almost everyone and beloved. They are embedded in our mythology. They have fed us, housed us, provided wood for our ships and wine barrels and homes and halls, planked our roads, and kept us warm. Every oak also has the potential to feed thousands of birds, squirrels, and mice, and host countless insects, mosses, fungi, and lichens. But as Oak Origins makes clear, the story of the oaks’ evolution is not just the story of one important tree. It is the story of the Tree of Life, connecting all organisms that have ever lived on Earth, from oaks’ last common ancestor to us.

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Ojibwe, Activist, Priest

The Life of Father Philip Bergin Gordon, Tibishkogijik

Tadeusz Lewandowski

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

Born in Wisconsin, Philip Bergin Gordon—whose Ojibwe name Tibishkogijik is said to mean Looking into the Sky—became one of the first Native Americans to be ordained as a Catholic priest in the United States. Gordon's devotion to Catholicism was matched only by his dedication to the protection of his people. A notable Native rights activist, his bold efforts to expose poverty and corruption on reservations and his reputation for agitation earned him the nickname "Wisconsin's Fighting Priest."
Drawing on previously unexplored materials, Tadeusz Lewandowski paints a portrait of a contentious life. Ojibwe, Activist, Priest examines Gordon's efforts to abolish the Bureau of Indian Affairs, his membership in the Society of American Indians, and his dismissal from his Ojibwe parish and exile to a tiny community where he'd be less likely to stir up controversy. Lewandowski illuminates a significant chapter in the struggle for Native American rights through the views and experiences of a key Native progressive.

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On Any Given Sunday

A Life of Bert Bell

Robert S. Lyons, Foreword by Don Shula

Temple University Press, 2009

Bert Bell, a native of Philadelphia, has been called the most powerful executive figure in the history of professional football. He was responsible for helping to transform the game from a circus sideshow into what has become the most popular spectator sport in America. In On Any Given Sunday, the first biography of this important sports figure, historian Robert Lyons recounts the remarkable story of how de Benneville “Bert” Bell rejected the gentility of a high society lifestyle in favor of the tougher gridiron, and rose to become the founder of the Philadelphia Eagles and Commissioner of the National Football League.

Bell, who arguably saved the league from bankruptcy by conceiving the idea for the annual player draft, later made the historic decision to introduce “sudden death” overtime—a move that propelled professional football into the national consciousness. He coined the phrase “on any given sunday” and negotiated the league’s first national TV contract. Lyons also describes in fascinating detail Bell’s relationships with leading figures ranging from such Philadelphia icons as Walter Annenberg and John B. Kelly to national celebrities and U.S. Presidents. He also provides insight into Bell’s colorful personal life—including his hell-raising early years and his secret marriage to Frances Upton, a golden name in show business.

On Any Given Sunday is being published on the 50th anniversary of Bell’s death.

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On Christopher Street

Life, Sex, and Death after Stonewall

Michael Denneny

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Through the eyes of publishing icon Michael Denneny, this cultural autobiography traces the evolution of the US’s queer community in the three decades post-Stonewall.

The Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s have been captured in minute detail, and rightly memorialized in books, on tv, and in film as pivotal and powerful moments in queer history. Yet what about the moments in between—the tumultuous decade post-Stonewall when the queer community’s vitality and creativity exploded across the country, even as the AIDS crisis emerged?

Michael Denneny was there for it all. As a founder and editor of the wildly influential magazine Christopher Street and later as the first openly gay editor at a major publishing house, Denneny critically shaped publishing around gay subjects in the 1970s and beyond. At St. Martin’s Press, he acquired a slew of landmark titles by gay authors—many for his groundbreaking Stonewall Inn Editions—propelling queer voices into the mainstream cultural conversation. On Christopher Street is Denneny’s time machine, going back to that heady period to lay out the unfolding geographies and storylines of gay lives and capturing the raw immediacy of his and his contemporaries’ daily lives as gay people in America. Through forty-one micro-chapters, he uses his journal writings, articles, interviews, and more from the 1970s and ‘80s to illuminate the twists and turns of a period of incomparable cultural ferment.

One of the few surviving voices of his generation, Denneny transports us back in time to share those vibrant in-between moments in gay lives—the joy, sorrow, ecstasy, and energy—across three decades of queer history.

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On Life

A Critical Edition

Leo Tolstoy, Edited by Inessa Medzhibovskaya, Translated from the Russian by Michael Denner and Inessa Medzhibovskaya

Northwestern University Press, 2019

In the summer of 1886, shortly before his fifty-eighth birthday, Leo Tolstoy was seriously injured while working in the fields of his estate. Bedridden for over two months, Tolstoy began writing a meditation on death and dying that soon developed into a philosophical treatise on life, death, love, and the overcoming of pessimism. Although begun as an account of how one man encounters and laments his death and makes this death his own, the final work, On Life, describes the optimal life in which we can all be happy despite our mortality.

After its completion, On Life was suppressed by the tsars, attacked by the hierarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church, and then censored by the Stalinist regime. This critical edition is the first accurate translation of this unsung classic of Russian thought into English, based on a study of manuscript pages of Tolstoy's drafts, and the first scholarly edition of this work in any language. It includes a detailed introduction and annotations, as well as historical material, such as early drafts, documents related to the presentation of an early version at the Moscow Psychological Society, and responses to the work by philosophers, religious leaders, journalists, and ordinary readers of Tolstoy's day.

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On the Origins of Life and Its Infectious Nature

Life in a Cosmic Context

José Quintáns

University of Chicago Press, 2013

An account of life's emergence from inanimate ordinary matter and the logic of its evolution over the last four billion years, emphasizing the essential contributions of infectious events to shape its course.

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On the Porch

Life and Music in Terlingua, Texas

W. Chase Peeler

University of Texas Press, 2021

In sunbaked Terlingua, Texas (pop., a few hundred), residents joke that there is a musician under every rock. Located ten miles from Mexico in one of the remotest corners of the United States, the town had a recording studio before it had a school, a well-stocked grocery store, or even a water utility. Open jam sessions are a daily ritual, and some songwriters make a living from their craft despite being thousands of miles from New York or Nashville. Why does such a tiny and isolated place ring with singing and guitars?

Based on more than two years of on-the-ground research, On the Porch tells the story of this small but remarkable community. Chase Peeler invites us into the music, introducing us to a cast of characters as unique as the town itself. He reveals how novices and experts perform together—a rarity in contemporary America. He recounts the devastation brought on by a border closure and describes how music is once again uniting people across the Rio Grande. He considers the impact of gentrification in an off-the-grid paradise, and how this threatens to transform a precarious musical ecosystem. On the Porch is a celebration of human musicality, of the role that music plays and can play in our lives, both in Terlingua and beyond.

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One Colonial Woman's World

The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit

Michelle Marchetti Coughlin

University of Massachusetts Press, 2012

This book reconstructs the life of Mehetabel Chandler Coit (1673–1758), the author of what may be the earliest surviving diary by an American woman. A native of Roxbury, Massachusetts, who later moved to Connecticut, she began her diary at the age of fifteen and kept it intermittently until she was well into her seventies. A previously overlooked resource, the diary contains entries on a broad range of topics as well as poems, recipes, folk and herbal medical remedies, religious meditations, and financial accounts. An extensive collection of letters by Coit and her female relatives has also survived, shedding further light on her experiences.

Michelle Marchetti Coughlin combs through these writings to create a vivid portrait of a colonial American woman and the world she inhabited. Coughlin documents the activities of daily life as well as dramas occasioned by war, epidemics, and political upheaval. Though Coit's opportunities were circumscribed by gender norms of the day, she led a rich and varied life, not only running a household and raising a family, but reading, writing, traveling, transacting business, and maintaining a widespread network of social and commercial connections. She also took a lively interest in the world around her and played an active role in her community.

Coit's long life covered an eventful period in American history, and this book explores the numerous—and sometimes surprising—ways in which her personal history was linked to broader social and political developments. It also provides insight into the lives of countless other colonial American women whose history remains largely untold.

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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

A Critical Companion

Alexis Klimoff

Northwestern University Press, 1996

This companion to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's enduring classic about a day in the life of a Soviet gulag work camp includes a general introduction discussing the work in the context of the author's oeuvre as well as its place within the Russian literary tradition. Also included are fascinating primary sources and background materials, an annotated bibliography, and discussions of the work by leading scholars Robert Louis Jackson, Richard Tempest, and Dariusz Tolczyk. Combining scholarship with accessibility, this critical companion--part of the acclaimed AATSEEL series--illuminates a great work of literature and will enhance its appreciation by students and teachers.

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One Long Tune

The Life and Music of Lenny Breau

Ron Forbes-Roberts

University of North Texas Press, 2006

One Man's Music

The Life and Times of Texas Songwriter Vince Bell

Vince Bell

University of North Texas Press, 2009

One More Warbler

A Life with Birds

By Victor Emanuel, with S. Kirk Walsh

University of Texas Press, 2017

Victor Emanuel is widely considered one of America’s leading birders. He has observed more than six thousand species during travels that have taken him to every continent. He founded the largest company in the world specializing in birding tours and one of the most respected ones in ecotourism. Emanuel has received some of birding’s highest honors, including the Roger Tory Peterson Award from the American Birding Association and the Arthur A. Allen Award from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. He also started the first birding camps for young people, which he considers one of his greatest achievements.

In One More Warbler, Emanuel recalls a lifetime of birding adventures—from his childhood sighting of a male Cardinal that ignited his passion for birds to a once-in-a-lifetime journey to Asia to observe all eight species of cranes of that continent. He tells fascinating stories of meeting his mentors who taught him about birds, nature, and conservation, and later, his close circle of friends—Ted Parker, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, Roger Tory Peterson, and others—who he frequently birded and traveled with around the world. Emanuel writes about the sighting of an Eskimo Curlew, thought to be extinct, on Galveston Island; setting an all-time national record during the annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count; attempting to see the Imperial Woodpecker in northwestern Mexico; and birding on the far-flung island of Attu on the Aleutian chain. Over the years, Emanuel became a dedicated mentor himself, teaching hundreds of young people the joys and enrichment of birding. “Birds changed my life,” says Emanuel, and his stories make clear how a deep connection to the natural world can change everyone’s life.

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The One Voice of James Dickey

His Letters and Life, 1942-1969

Edited & Commentary by Gordon Van Ness

University of Missouri Press, 2003

In The One Voice of James Dickey, Gordon Van Ness skillfully documents James Dickey’s growth from a callow teen interested primarily in sports to a mature poet who possessed literary genius and who deliberately advanced himself and his career. The letters from 1942 through 1969 depict Dickey gradually establishing a self-identity, deciding to write, struggling to determine a subject matter and style, working determinedly to gain initial recognition, and eventually seeking out the literary establishment to promote himself and his views on poetry. The letters also portray a complex personality with broad interests, acute intelligence, and heightened imagination as well as a deep need to re-create his past and assume various roles in the present.

From Dickey’s extensive correspondence, Van Ness has selected not only those letters that best reveal the chronological development of Dickey’s career and his conscious efforts to chart its course, but also those that portray his other interests and depict the various features of his personality. The letters are grouped by decade, with each period placed in perspective by a critical introduction. The introductory sections offer a psychological understanding of Dickey’s personality by identifying the needs and fears that affected his actions. They also explain the American literary and cultural scene that Dickey confronted as he matured. Together, the letters and commentary yield a sense of Dickey’s complex personality—both the man as a writer and the writer as a man—while arguing that he remained “one voice.”

Because how a writer writes—the appearance of a writer’s words on a page—makes a statement, the letters are reproduced here without alterations. There are no silent deletions or revisions; the original spelling and punctuation have been preserved. Dickey’s letters gathered in The One Voice of James Dickey portray a poet’s consciousness, chronicling its growth and revealing its breadth. They do not contain the whole truth, but they are what we have.

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The One Voice of James Dickey

His Letters and Life, 1970-1997

Edited & Commentary by Gordon Van Ness

University of Missouri Press, 2005

This book completes and complements the first volume of the letters and life of James Dickey. Picking up where the previous volume left off, The One Voice of James Dickey: His Letters and Life, 1970–1997 chronicles Dickey’s career from the unparalleled success of his novel Deliverance in 1970 through his poetic experimentation in such books as The Eye Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy and Puella until his death in 1997. A prolific correspondent, Dickey tried to write at least three letters a day, and these letters provide a unique way for Gordon Van Ness to portray the vast and varied panorama of Dickey’s life.

The letters are grouped by decade largely because Dickey’s life was so very different in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The chapter titles and their progression, as in the first volume, reflect Dickey’s sense that his life and career were a kind of warfare and that he was on a mission. A final section, “Debriefings,” offers a concise overview of Dickey’s full career. In earlier chapters, letters to people as varied as Saul Bellow, Arthur Schlesinger, and Robert Penn Warren indicate Dickey’s belief that this correspondence was a valuable networking tool, likely to open up new opportunities, while other letters, such as ones to Dickey’s oldest son, Christopher, expose the tender aspects of the author’s character.

No other critical study so well projects the development of Dickey’s career while simultaneously exhibiting the diversity of his interests and the often-conflicting sides of his personality. In the strictest sense, this volume is not a life-in-letters, but it does provide a general sense of Dickey’s comings, goings, and doings. Van Ness’s selection of letters suggests an acute understanding of Dickey, and his editorial commentary examines and reveals Dickey’s brilliance.

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One Voice Rising

The Life of Clifford Duncan

Clifford Duncan with Linda Sillitoe, Photographs by George R. Janecek

University of Utah Press, 2019

One Voice Rising is a memoir by Ute healer, elder, and historian Clifford Duncan, as told to Anglo writer, Linda Sillitoe. Duncan (1933–2014) was an inspiring leader and a powerful medicine man, and he was, as Sillitoe wrote, “simultaneously one of the most bicultural and traditional American Indians in the West.” Duncan here covers both personal and tribal history during a crucial period in the tribe’s development. His discussions with Sillitoe offer a unique look at individual and societal issues, including the Native American Church, powwows and tribal celebrations, and interactions with the larger world. George Janecek’s photographs of Clifford Duncan and his world expand the impact of Duncan’s words.

“Everything was Indian then, when I was a boy. They had to explain to us about the white man's side. Now everything is in the white man's world and we teach Indian ways.”
—Clifford Duncan (from the book)

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Open the Door

The Life and Music of Betty Carter

William R. Bauer

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Betty Carter's lifelong influence on the music world is unparalleled. Her contributions to music as a jazz singer, composer, arranger, and teacher have fostered a generation of musicians and fans.
This book looks at Betty Carter's contribution to the music world and delves behind the scenes to show Carter's growth as a businesswoman who took charge of her career.
Drawing upon revealing interviews with Carter, the author shows how ever-changing shifts in the music industry affected the singer's life and influenced her music. Bauer shows through his analysis of her musical examples how Carter absorbed various musical influences, from Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday to Miles Davis, and made them her own. From her apprenticeship with Gladys Hampton, Carter grew to become a shrewd dealer who learned to do her own contracting, A&R, and marketing and distribution. By chronicling one of jazz's great singers and composers, the book sheds light on how early jazz musicians got their work to the public and how this process has changed during the past fifty years.
William R. Bauer is Assistant Professor of Music at Rutgers University-Newark, where he directs the Rutgers Newark Student Jazz Ensemble, MOSAIC, and teaches in the Jazz History and Research program. He has written several articles about jazz vocal performance and scat singing, as well as various aspects of music education. His compositions have been performed throughout the United States and in Europe and include works for the theater and dance.

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Organ Pipe

Life on the Edge

Text by Carol Ann Bassett; Photographs by Michael Hyatt

University of Arizona Press, 2004

Deep in the heart of the Sonoran Desert lies an oasis of ebony mountains, golden poppies, stately saguaros—and the organ pipe cactus, "a prickly octopus turned on its head."

A terrain where one learns to pay attention to the details: the tracks of a sidewinder in the sand, the tiny eggs of a cactus wren, the flash of a vermilion flycatcher against the azure sky.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument lies in southwestern Arizona on the Mexican border. It is an isolated park that for Carol Ann Bassett has long been a place of solitude—a silent refuge where she often camped out alone to capture the natural rhythms of the desert. Photographer Michael Hyatt hiked through Organ Pipe to visually document its subtle beauty in the Ajo Mountains and the valley of the Ajo, and at Quitobaquito, a rare desert oasis.

Few visitors may brave Organ Pipe during summer, when the temperature can reach 120 degrees, but for Bassett and Hyatt the searing heat is but a harbinger of rain, when normally dry arroyos surge with rust-colored water and desert tarantulas come out to mate. Bassett introduces readers to Organ Pipe’s cultural heritage as well: Spanish missionaries, Anglo settlers, and the Tohono O’odham and the Hia Ced O’odham people who still travel there to gather cactus fruit during Hasan Bakmasad, "saguaro moon." She also considers the changes taking place throughout the park, including the onrush of immigrants passing through in search of better lives in the United States.

This small, lyrical book is a sensitive reflection on the heart of the Sonoran Desert. It reminds us of the beauty to be found in unexpected places—and of our intimate connection with the wild.

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The Ornaments of Life

Coevolution and Conservation in the Tropics

Theodore H. Fleming and W. John Kress

University of Chicago Press, 2013

The average kilometer of tropical rainforest is teeming with life; it contains thousands of species of plants and animals. As The Ornaments of Life reveals, many of the most colorful and eye-catching rainforest inhabitants—toucans, monkeys, leaf-nosed bats, and hummingbirds to name a few—are an important component of the infrastructure that supports life in the forest. These fruit-and-nectar eating birds and mammals pollinate the flowers and disperse the seeds of hundreds of tropical plants, and unlike temperate communities, much of this greenery relies exclusively on animals for reproduction.

Synthesizing recent research by ecologists and evolutionary biologists, Theodore H. Fleming and W. John Kress demonstrate the tremendous functional and evolutionary importance of these tropical pollinators and frugivores. They shed light on how these mutually symbiotic relationships evolved and lay out the current conservation status of these essential species. In order to illustrate the striking beauty of these “ornaments” of the rainforest, the authors have included a series of breathtaking color plates and full-color graphs and diagrams.

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Orwell

Life and Art

Jeffrey Meyers

University of Illinois Press, 2010

This remarkable volume collects, for the first time, essays representing more than four decades of scholarship by one of the world's leading authorities on George Orwell. In clear, energetic prose that exemplifies his indefatigable attention to Orwell's life work, Jeffrey Meyers analyzes the works and reception of one of the most widely read and admired twentieth-century authors.

Orwell: Life and Art covers the novelist's painful childhood and presents accounts of his autobiographical writings from the beginning of his career through the Spanish Civil War. Meyers continues with analyses of Orwell's major works, including Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, as well as his style, distinctive satiric humor, and approach to the art of writing. Meyers ends with a scrupulous examination of six biographies of Orwell, including his own, that embodies a consummate grasp and mastery of both the art of biography and Orwell's life and legacy.

Writing with an authority born of decades of focused scholarship, visits to Orwell's homes and workplaces, and interviews with his survivors, Meyers sculpts a dynamic view of Orwell's enduring influence on literature, art, culture, and politics.

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Osler's A Way of Life and Other Addresses, with Commentary and Annotations

Sir William Osler

Duke University Press, 2001

Sir William Osler (1849–1919) had a long and distinguished career as a physician and professor at McGill University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Johns Hopkins University, and finally, as the Regius Chair in Medicine at Oxford University. Over the course of his professional life, Osler gave many addresses—mostly to medical students—on medical ethics, medicine and the humanities, the relationship between the medical practitioner and the patient, and, as the titular essay makes clear, on the “way of life” he advocated for the ethical physician. He remains an inspiration to many contemporary medical practitioners; there are active Osler Societies throughout the world.
While Osler’s talks were frequently published during his lifetime and they have been published individually and in different compilations since his death, none contain the over 1500 annotations that appear here, notes that serve to explain the many philosophical, biblical, historical, and literary allusions contained in Osler’s writings.
This thoroughly explicated selection of Sir William Osler’s writings will be cherished by physicians, medical students, nurses, philosophers, theologians, and ethicists in this—and future—generations.

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The Other California

The Great Central Valley In Life And Letters

Gerald W. Haslam

University of Nevada Press, 1993

Oildale native, Gerald Haslam, doesn’t like it when folks dismiss the Central Valley as boring and flat. In this collection of essays, he argues that it is California’s heartland and economic hub. In addition, the valley has produced a crop of gifted writers. These nineteen essays range from reminiscences of childhood and adolescence to a portrait of Mexican-Americans and their position in the Valley’s society to a moving essay about having the author’s aging father come to live with the family. Even if you have never lived in the Valley, reading this book will give you an entirely new perspective the next time you drive into it.

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The Other Jersey Shore

Life on the Delaware River

Michael Aaron Rockland

Rutgers University Press, 2024

River otters, black bears, and red foxes drink from its clear waters. Prickly pear cacti grow from the red shale cliffs that overlook it, while on the river near Bordentown lies the archeological remnants of a sprawling estate built by the former King of Spain, Napoleon’s brother, who lived there for almost twenty years. You might imagine this magical and majestic waterway is located in some faraway land. But in fact, it’s the backbone and lifeblood of the Garden State: the Delaware River.

The Other Jersey Shore takes readers on a personal tour of the New Jersey portion of the Delaware River and its surroundings. You will learn about the role that the river played in human history, including Washington’s four crossings of the Delaware during the Revolutionary War. And you will also learn about the ecological history of the river itself, once one of the most polluted waterways in the country and now one of the cleanest, providing drinking water for 17 million people. Michael Aaron Rockland, a long-time New Jersey resident, shows readers his very favorite spots along the Delaware, including the pristine waterfalls and wilderness in the Delaware Water Gap recreation area. Along the way, he shares engrossing stories and surprising facts about the river that literally defines western New Jersey.

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The Other Toscanini

The Life and Works of Hector Panizza

De Fillippi Sebastiano

University of North Texas Press, 2019

Overweight Sensation

The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman

Mark Cohen

Brandeis University Press, 2013

Allan Sherman was the Larry David, the Adam Sandler, the Sacha Baron Cohen of 1963. He led Jewish humor and sensibilities out of ethnic enclaves and into the American mainstream with explosively funny parodies of classic songs that won Sherman extraordinary success and acclaim across the board, from Harpo Marx to President Kennedy. In Overweight Sensation, Mark Cohen argues persuasively for Sherman’s legacy as a touchstone of postwar humor and a turning point in Jewish American cultural history. With exclusive access to Allan Sherman’s estate, Cohen has written the first biography of the manic, bacchanalian, and hugely creative artist who sold three million albums in just twelve months, yet died in obscurity a decade later at the age of forty-nine. Comprehensive, dramatic, stylish, and tragic, Overweight Sensation is destined to become the definitive Sherman biography.

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The Ozarks

Land and Life

Milton D. Rafferty

University of Arkansas Press, 2001

The Ozark Mountains reach into Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, forming a region with great natural beauty and a distinctive cultural and historical landscape. This comprehensive volume, a fully updated edition of a beloved classic, reaches into history, anthropology, economics, and geography to explore the complex relationships between the Ozarks' people and land through times of profound change. Drawing on more than thirty years of research, field observations, and interviews, Rafferty examines this subject matter through a range of topics: the settlement patterns and material cultures of Native Americans, French, Scotch-Irish, Germans, Italians, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians in the region; population growth; the guerrilla warfare and battles of the Civil War; the cultural transformations wrought by railroads, roads, mass media, and modern communication systems; the discovery, development, and decline of the great mining districts; the various forms of agriculture and the felling of the region's vast forests; and the built landscape, from log cabins to Victorian mansions to strip malls. This new edition also explores the new and potent forces which have reshaped the region over the last twenty years: tourism and the growing service industry, suburbanization, rapid population growth and retirement living, and agribusiness. Lavishly illustrated with historic and contemporary photographs, maps, and charts.

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