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Aviation researcher and historian Simine Short brings to light in colorful detail many previously overlooked facets of Chanute's professional and personal life. In the late nineteenth century, few considered engineering as a profession on par with law or medicine, but Chanute devoted much time and energy to the newly established professional societies that were created to set standards and serve the needs of civil engineers. Though best known for his aviation work, he became a key figure in the opening of the American continent by laying railroad tracks and building bridges, experiences that later gave him the engineering knowledge to build the first stable aircraft structure. Chanute also introduced a procedure to treat wooden railroad ties with an antiseptic that increased the wood’s lifespan in the tracks. Establishing the first commercial plants, he convinced railroad men that it was commercially feasible to make money by spending money on treating ties to conserve natural resources. He next introduced the date nail to help track the age and longevity of railroad ties.

A versatile engineer, Chanute was known as a kind and generous colleague during his career. Using correspondence and other materials not previously available to scholars and biographers, Short covers Chanute's formative years in antebellum America as well as his experiences traveling from New Orleans to New York, his apprenticeship on the Hudson River Railroad, and his early engineering successes. His multiple contributions to railway expansion, bridge building, and wood preservation established his reputation as one of the nation's most successful and distinguished civil engineers. Instead of retiring, he utilized his experiences and knowledge as a bridge builder in the development of motorless flight. Through the reflections of other engineers, scientists, and pioneers in various fields who knew him, Short characterizes Chanute as a man who believed in fostering and supporting people who were willing to learn. This well-researched biography cements Chanute's place as a preeminent engineer and mentor in the history of transportation in the United States and the development of the airplane.

Everyone knows Jack London for his tales of adventure in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. With his work translated into more than 100 languages, London is one of the most popular American writers in the world, alongside Mark Twain. Yet for the reader tackling The Call of the Wild or White Fang, or perhaps his most often-anthologized short story “To Build a Fire,” many misconceptions about his life confuse his legacy.

London in His Own Time is based on Jeanne Reesman’s nearly thirty-five years of archival research. The book offers surprising perspectives on Jack London’s many sides by family, friends, fellow struggling young writers, business associates, high school and college classmates, interviewers, editors, coauthors, visitors to his Sonoma Valley Beauty Ranch in Glen Ellen, California, and more.

People who have commented on and discussed the mercurial genius include Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, Ambrose Bierce, and Mary Austin, as well as his half-sister, Eliza London Shepard, and his first wife, Elizabeth Bess “Bessie” Maddern London. There are a few Klondike pals he kept in touch with, and some fellow writers such as Cloudesley Johns, but many of those closest to him truly demonstrate his wide range of friends: barman Johnny Heinold; his second wife, Charmian, whom he called “Mate Woman”; his daughters, Joan and Becky; his lover, Anna Strunsky; his closest friends, especially the poet George Sterling; his former crewmate on the Snark, Martin Johnson; and his valet/memoirist, Yoshimatsu Nakata. Reesman also includes dozens of entries from Bay-area socialists, friends in Hawai’i and the South Seas, fellow war correspondents, neigh­bors like Luther Burbank, and his long-time editor at Macmillan, George Brett.

A direct descendant of a tenth-century Viking marauder traces his lineage from medieval Iceland to the Dakota plains

Gary Goodman first heard that his 24x great-grandfather was a tenth-century Viking pirate and mercenary at a family reunion, when a cousin told him that they were the direct descendants of an Icelandic poet and cold-blooded killer named Egil Skallagrímsson. Also known as “Egil the Bastard,” Goodman’s forefather was the subject of Egil’s Saga, one of the great Icelandic epics of the early Middle Ages. Spurred by this revelation of his family’s lineage, Goodman set out to discover the route his ancestors had traveled from medieval Iceland to the North Dakota plains in the later 1800s.

Drawing on Egil’s Saga, family records, and travels through Iceland, England, and Ireland, Goodman traces his ancestral line from Iceland—the family’s homeland for over a thousand years until a volcanic eruption forced them to migrate—to the hardscrabble plains of the Dakota Territory. His panoramic view ranges from the Viking invasion of England in the early Middle Ages to the disappearance of a short-lived Icelandic settlement on the Mouse River in North Dakota in the late 1800s. Along the way, Goodman sketches the highlights of Egil’s Saga, making the centuries-old epic accessible to today’s readers.

With candor, dry wit, and some bemusement, Goodman shares his trip through history from the perspective of a descendant of an original Viking marauder. An innovative, time-bending family history, Longships and Sod Houses is a noteworthy saga in its own right.

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When Ray Didinger was a young sports columnist, his proud grandfather would tape his articles on the mirror of his Southwest Philadelphia bar and tell his customers, “Look what the kid wrote today.” That phrase is now the title of Didinger’s latest book, a fond look back on his award-winning career.

In Look What the Kid Wrote Today, Didinger reflects on walking the historic Merion golf course with Jack Nicklaus, shooting pool with Mean Joe Greene, touring Foxcatcher Farms with John du Pont and hanging out with Mark Wahlberg on the set of Invincible. He also writes about helping to heal the rift between the Philadelphia Eagles and arguably their greatest player, Chuck Bednarik. It is a story that went untold until now.

Didinger takes the reader through the many stages of his fifty-plus years in sports media, from his time as an Emmy Award-winning producer at NFL Films, which involved writing scripts for the likes of Tom Selleck, Gary Busey, and Oscar winner James Coburn. Now a playwright, Didinger also devotes a chapter to the 2025 premiere of his critically acclaimed production Spinner.

Candid and insightful, Look What the Kid Wrote Today is Didinger at his best.

If your childhood friends were Agapito, the bombastic, bilingual lion; Campamocha, the fix-it man; Caracoles, the restaurant owner; Uncle Andy, the shoe seller; Berta and Dyana, the life-size dolls; and Señorita Barrera, then you grew up watching Carrascolendas. This award-winning show, which originally aired on PBS in the 1970s and was subsequently broadcasted throughout the country in the 1980s and 1990s, was the first Spanish and English children's educational television program broadcast to national audiences in the United States.

In this engagingly written memoir, creator-producer Aida Barrera describes how the mythical world of Carrascolendas grew out of her real-life experiences as a Mexican American child growing up in the Valley of South Texas. She recalls how she drew on those early experiences to create television programming that specifically addressed the needs of Hispanic children, even as it remained accessible and entertaining to children of other cultural backgrounds.

In addition to her personal story, Barrera recounts the long-term struggles for network acceptance and funding that made the production of Carrascolendas something of a miracle. This off-camera story adds an important chapter to the history of Anglo-Mexican cultural politics during the 1970s. Given the fact that Latino characters are still under- and stereotypically represented on network television, Carrascolendas remains an important reminder of what is possible and what has been lost in authentically multicultural television programming.

An arresting memoir of love and unbending religion, toxicity and disease, and one family’s desperate wait for a miracle that never came.

Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn was the oldest of five children, a twelve-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, whose evangelical family eschewed public education for homeschooling, and wove improbable scientific theories into literal interpretations of the Bible. Then her father, a former air force pilot, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of thirty-eight, and, “it was like throwing gasoline on the Holy Spirit.” Stirred by her mother, the family committed to an extreme diet and sought deliverance from equally extreme sources: a traveling tent preacher, a Malaysian holy man, a local faith-healer who led services called “Miracles on 34th Street.”

What they didn’t know at the time was that their lives were entangled with a larger, less visible environmental catastrophe. Fire-fighting foams containing carcinogenic compounds had contaminated the drinking water of every military site where her father worked. Commonly referred to as “forever chemicals,” the presence of PFAS in West Texas besieged a landscape already burdened with vanishing water, taking up residence in wells and in the bloodstreams of people who lived there. An arresting portrait of the pernicious creep of decline, and a powerful cry for environmental justice, Loose of Earth captures the desperate futility and unbending religious faith that devastated a family, leaving them waiting for a miracle that would never come.

Returning to Chicago from France, Taft established a bustling studio and began a twenty-one-year career as an instructor at the Art Institute, succeeded by three decades as head of the Midway Studios at the University of Chicago. This triumphant era included ephemeral sculpture for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; a prolific turn-of-the-century period marked by the gold-medal-winning The Solitude of the Soul; the 1913 Fountain of the Great Lakes; the 1929 Alma Mater at the University of Illinois; and large-scale projects such as his ambitious program for Chicago's Midway with the monumental Fountain of Time. In addition, the book charts Taft's mentoring of women artists, including the so-called White Rabbits at the World's Fair, many of whom went on to achieve artistic success.

Lavishly illustrated with color images of Taft's most celebrated works, Lorado Taft: The Chicago Years completes the first major study of a great American artist.

Praise for Lost Eagles

"The pilot and observer stories selected have not previously seen much exposure. Not only are they interesting, but I found myself relishing getting to the next chapter to find out what Frederick Zinn was doing during the next stage of his life."
---Alan Roesler, founding member, League of World War I Aviation Historians, and former Managing Editor, Over the Front

Praise for Blaine Pardoe's previous military histories (which average 4.5-star customer reviews on Amazon.com):

Terror of the Autumn Skies: The True Story of Frank Luke, America's Rogue Ace of World War I

"This painstaking biography of World War I ace Frank Luke will earn Pardoe kudos . . . Pardoe has flown a very straight course in researching and recounting Luke's myth-ridden life. . . . Thorough annotation makes the book that much more valuable to WWI aviation scholars as well as for more casual air-combat buffs."
---Booklist

The Cruise of the Sea Eagle: The Amazing True Story of Imperial Germany's Gentleman Pirate

"This is a gem of a story, well told, and nicely laid out with photos, maps, and charts that cleverly illuminate the lost era of ‘gentlemen pirates' at sea . . . [German commerce raider Felix von Luckner's] legend lives on in this lively and readable biography."
---Admiral James Stavridis, U.S. Navy, Naval History

Few people have ever heard of Frederick Zinn, yet even today airmen's families are touched by this man and the work he performed in both world wars. Zinn created the techniques still in use to determine the final fate of airmen missing in action. The last line of the Air Force Creed reads, "We will leave no airman behind." Zinn made that promise possible.

Blaine Pardoe weaves together the complex story of a man who brought peace and closure to countless families who lost airmen during both world wars. His lasting contribution to warfare was a combination of his methodology for locating the remains of missing pilots (known as the Zinn system) and his innovation of imprinting all aircraft parts with the same serial number so that if a wreck was located, the crewman could be identified. The tradition he established for seeking and recovering airmen is carried on to this day.

Blaine Pardoe is an accomplished author who has published dozens of military fiction novels and other books, including the widely acclaimed Cubicle Warfare: Self-Defense Tactics for Today's Hypercompetitive Workplace; Terror of the Autumn Skies: The True Story of Frank Luke, America's Rogue Ace of World War I; and The Cruise of the Sea Eagle: The Amazing True Story of Imperial Germany's Gentleman Pirate.

Jacket photo: Frederick Zinn's Sopwith aircraft, which crashed during World War I. National Museum of the United States Air Force Archives. 

An English translation of a lost manuscript of reflections from former Czech dissident Václav Havel. 

In the fall of 1977, after the dramatic events of the “Year of Charter 77,” Václav Havel wrote a report recounting the first hours after the Charter 77 Declaration, the four months of investigative detention imposed on him by the communist regime, his release, and the agonizing self-examination that followed. In this text, the former dissident describes not only the investigation but also the Faustian guilt he felt after promising to scale back his political activities in exchange for his freedom. As he later recalled in a book-length interview with journalist Karel Hvíždala titled Dálkový výslech (Long-distance interrogation), he hid the roughly one-hundred-page manuscript somewhere, admitting: “I don’t know where it is anymore. Maybe I’ll find it someday.” He never did. The manuscript resurfaced only recently, discovered among the papers of his close friend Zdenek Urbánek. Fragmentary yet strikingly immediate, the text has been reconstructed and published by the Václav Havel Library, with the English translation appearing on the occasion of the world-renowned intellectual’s ninetieth birthday.

Leta E. Miller and Fredric Lieberman take readers into Harrison's rich world of cross-fertilization through an exploration of his outspoken stance on pacifism, gay rights, ecology, and respect for minorities--all major influences on his musical works. Though Harrison was sometimes accused by contemporaries of "cultural appropriation," Miller and Lieberman make it clear why musicians and scholars alike now laud him as an imaginative pioneer for his integration of Asian and Western musics. They also delve into Harrison's work in the development of the percussion ensemble, his use of found and invented instruments, and his explorations of alternative tuning systems. An accompanying compact disc of representative recordings allows readers to examine Harrison's compositions in further detail.

Louis Prima infused the grit and grace of Dixieland jazz with swing and big band sounds, the first whiffs of rock 'n' roll, and a vaudevillian stage presence. Garry Boulard pens the biography of the underrated jazz musician, Las Vegas mainstay, and popular entertainer.

A native of New Orleans, Prima was a Guy Lombardo protégé known as "The Italian Satchmo" who became the country's new jazz sensation at New York's Famous Door in the 1930s. He went on to success as a big band leader before virtually creating the lounge act as a Las Vegas nightclub staple. Employing and later marrying singer Keely Smith, Prima rode high with a series of hit songs and smash albums in the Fifties. But Boulard also looks past the over-the-top stage antics to restore Prima's legacy as an overlooked jazz musician and vocalist, and as a bandleader with an uncanny ability to fuse disparate styles into music that kept audiences cheering and dancing for decades.

Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo sees her mission as "channeling the hopes and dreams of a people." Clearly, political commitment has inspired her choice of subjects. With themes ranging from state repression to AIDS, Portillo's films include: Después del Terremoto, the Oscar-nominated Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead,The Devil Never Sleeps, and Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena.

The first study of Portillo and her films, this collection is collaborative and multifaceted in approach, emphasizing aspects of authorial creativity, audience reception, and production processes typically hidden from view. Rosa Linda Fregoso, the volume editor, has organized the book into three parts: interviews (by Fregoso and Kathleen Newman and B. Ruby Rich); critical perspectives (essays by Fregoso, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Sylvie Thouard, Norma Iglesias, and Barbara McBane); and production materials (screenplays, script notes, storyboards, etc.).

This innovative collection provides "inside" information on the challenges of making independent films. By describing the production constraints Portillo has surmounted, Fregoso deepens our appreciation of this gifted filmmaker's life, her struggles, and the evolution of her art.

This handsome volume combines interviews and photographs to document the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered parents and their children. It allows all of the family members to speak candidly about their lives, their relationships, and the ways in which they have dealt with the pressures of homophobia. Included in the book are people from a diverse array of racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds, representing a wide range of family structures. Together, they provide clear evidence that family roles and responsibilities need not be based on gender, and that children thrive in an atmosphere in which understanding, respect, and love transcend the prejudices of the day.

Winner, 1999 Missouri Conference on History Book Award

This fascinating biography of a marriage in the Gilded Age closely examines the dynamic flow of power, control, and love between Washington blue blood Violet Blair and New Orleans attorney Albert Janin. Based on their voluminous correspondence as well as Violet’s extensive diaries, it offers a thoroughly intimate portrait of a fifty-four-year union which, in many ways, conformed to societal strictures, yet always created its own definition of itself in order to fit the flux of needs of both husband and wife.

Central to their story is Violet’s fierce determination to maintain her autonomy within the patriarchic institution of marriage. An enduring belle who thought, talked, and acted with the assurance and self-confidence of one whose wishes demanded obedience, she rejected the Victorian ideal of women as silent, submissive consorts. Yet her feminism was a private one, not played out on a public stage but kept to the confines of her own daily life and marriage.

With abundant documentary evidence to draw upon, Laas ties this compelling story to broader themes of courtiship behavior, domesticity, gender roles, extended family bonds, elitism, and societal stereotyping. Deeply researched and beautifully written, Love and Power in the Nineteenth Century has the dual virtue of making an important historical contribution while also appealing to a broad popular audience.