5550 books match the query 'Biography & Autobiography' and 22 start with y

cover of Yankee Warhorse: A Biography of Major General Peter Osterhaus

Yankee Warhorse

A Biography of Major General Peter Osterhaus

Mary Bobbit Townsend

University of Missouri Press, 2021

A German-born Union officer in the American Civil War, Maj. Gen. Peter Osterhaus served from the first clash in the western theater until the final surrender of the war. Osterhaus made a name for himself within the army as an energetic and resourceful commander who led his men from the front. He was one of the last surviving Union major general and military governor of Mississippi in the early days of Reconstruction.
This first full-length study of the officer documents how, despite his meteoric military career, his accomplishments were underreported even in his own day and often misrepresented in the historical record. Mary Bobbitt Townsend corrects previous errors about his life and offers new insights into his contributions to major turning points in the war at Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and Atlanta, as well as other battles.
Townsend draws on battle reports not found in the Official Records, on personal papers, and on other nonpublished material to examine Osterhaus’s part in the major battles in the West as well as in minor engagements. She tells how he came into his own in the Vicksburg campaign and proved himself through skill with artillery, expertise in intelligence gathering, and taking the lead in hostile territory—blazing the trail down the west side of the river for the entire Union army and then covering Grant’s back for a month during the siege. At Chattanooga, Osterhaus helped Joe Hooker strategize the rout at Lookout Mountain; at Atlanta, he led the Fifteenth Corps, the largest of the four corps making Sherman's March to the Sea. Townsend also documents his contributions in the battles of Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge, Arkansas Post, Port Gibson, Ringgold Gap, and Resaca and shows that he played a crucial role in Canby’s Mobile Bay operations at the end of the war.
In addition to reporting Osterhaus’s wartime experiences, Townsend describes his experiences as a leader in the 1848–1849 Rebellion in his native Germany, his frustration during his term as Mississippi’s governor, and his stint as U.S. consul to France during the Franco-Prussian War.
Osterhaus stood out from other volunteer officers in his understanding of tactics and logistics, even though his careful field preparation led to criticism by historians that he was unduly cautious in battle. Yankee Warhorse sets the record straight on this important Civil War general as it opens a new window on the war in the West.
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cover of Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

Yazoo

Integration in a Deep-Southern Town

Willie Morris

University of Arkansas Press, 2012

In 1970 Brown v. Board of Education was sixteen years old, and fifteen years had passed since the Brown II mandate that schools integrate "with all deliberate speed." Still, after all this time, it was necessary for the U.S. Supreme Court to order thirty Mississippi school districts--whose speed had been anything but deliberate--to integrate immediately. One of these districts included Yazoo City, the hometown of writer Willie Morris. Installed productively on "safe, sane Manhattan Island," Morris, though compelled to write about this pivotal moment, was reluctant to return to Yazoo and do no less than serve as cultural ambassador between the flawed Mississippi that he loved and a wider world. "I did not want to go back," Morris wrote. "I finally went home because the urge to be there during Yazoo's most critical moment was too elemental to resist, and because I would have been ashamed of myself if I had not." The result, Yazoo, is part reportage, part memoir, part ethnography, part social critique--and one of the richest accounts we have of a community's attempt to come to terms with the realities of seismic social change. As infinitely readable and nuanced as ever, Yazoo is available again, enhanced by an informative foreword by historian Jenifer Jensen Wallach and a warm and personal afterword on Morris's writing life by his widow, JoAnne Prichard Morris.
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cover of Year of Plenty: A Family's Season of Grief

Year of Plenty

A Family's Season of Grief

B.J. Hollars

University of Wisconsin Press, 2024

In November 2020, B.J. Hollars answered a call from his father-in-law while teaching. “When will you be home?” Steve asked. “I have news.” 

So began the Hollars family’s year of plenty—a cancer diagnosis on top of the ongoing COVID pandemic, then feelings of falling short as parents, partners, and people. While Hollars traces his family’s daily devastations alongside his father-in-law’s decline, he recounts the small mercies along the way: birthdays, campfires, fishing trips, kayaking, and fireflies. As he, his wife, Meredith, and their three young children grapple with how best to say goodbye to the person they love, they are forced to reassess their own lives. How can we make the most of our time, they wonder, when time feels so short?

Written in vignettes and accompanied by photographs and family interviews, Year of Plenty provides a poignant and unflinching account of how death separates us not only from the people we love but from places and memories too. Hollars explores how death’s all-consuming weight has the potential to fracture—rather than strengthen—even those relationships we think we know the best. Ultimately, he cracks wide personal moments from his own life and allows the world to peer in.
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cover of Year of the Pig: Hunting Feral Hogs

Year of the Pig

Hunting Feral Hogs

Mark J. Hainds

University of Alabama Press, 2011

Exploring the ecology, culture, and challenge of America’s most controversial wild hogs.

What happens when a conservation-minded forester decides to spend an entire year hunting feral hogs across ten states? You get a book that’s equal parts adventure, ecology, and laugh-out-loud grit. In Year of the Pig, Mark J. Hainds straps on rifles, bows, and even a knife (yes, really) to tackle one of North America’s most destructive invasive species. Along the way, he delivers unforgettable stories from Alabama swamps to Hawaiian volcanoes, mixing adrenaline with insight into why pigs are an ecological nightmare and a hunter’s dream.

In it real-world and armchair hunters will find: 
• Authentic Adventures: Belly-crawling through privet thickets, stalking pigs in palmetto jungles, and chasing razorbacks in the Ozarks. 
• Ecological Wisdom: Learn how hogs impact forests, farms, and fragile ecosystems—and why hunting them matters. 
• Humor & Humanity: From near-misses to triumphs, Hainds’ candid storytelling will keep you grinning (and maybe craving barbecue).

Hunters seeking real-world thrills, conservationists fighting invasive species, outdoor enthusiasts who savor gritty tales, and anyone who enjoys a good laugh with their environmental education. Perfect for reading—or gifting to that friend who thinks “hog hunting” is just a Southern stereotype. Spoiler: It’s not.

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cover of Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel's National Poet

Yehuda Amichai

The Making of Israel's National Poet

Nili Scharf Gold

Brandeis University Press, 2008

Yehuda Amichai is one of the twentieth century’s (and Israel’s) leading poets. In this remarkable book, Nili Scharf Gold offers a profound reinterpretation of Amichai’s early works and reconstructs his poetic biography. Her close reading of his oeuvre, untapped notebooks, and a cache of unpublished letters to a woman identified as Ruth Z. that Gold discovered convincingly demonstrates how the poet’s German past infused his work, despite his attempts to conceal it as he adopted an Israeli identity.
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cover of Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World: Testimonios on Violence

Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World

Testimonios on Violence

Roberto Cintli Rodríguez; Foreword by Patrisia Gonzales

University of Arizona Press, 2019

In Nahuatl yolqui is the idea of a warrior brought back from the dead. For author and activist Roberto Cintli Rodríquez, it describes his own experience one night in March 1979 after a brutal beating at the hands of L.A. sheriffs.

Framed by Rodríguez’s personal testimony of police violence, this book offers a historia profunda of the culture of extralegal violence against Red-Black-Brown communities in the United States. In addition to Rodríguez’s story, this book includes several short essays from victims and survivors that bring together personal accounts of police brutality and state-sponsored violence. This wide-ranging work touches on historical and current events, including the Watts rebellion, the Zoot Suit Riots, Operation Streamline, Standing Rock, and much more.

From the eyewitness accounts of Bartolomé de las Casas to the protestors and allies at Standing Rock, this book makes evident the links between colonial violence against Red-Black-Brown bodies to police violence in our communities today. Grounded in the stories of the lives of victims and survivors of police violence, Yolqui, a Warrior Summoned from the Spirit World illuminates the physical, spiritual, and epistemic depths and consequences of racialized dehumanization.

Rodríguez offers us an urgent, poignant, and personal call to end violence and the philosophies that permit such violence to flourish. Like the Nahuatl yolqui, this book is intended as a means of healing, offering a footprint going back to the origins of violence, and, more important, a way forward.

With contributions by Raúl Alcaraz-Ochoa, Citalli Álvarez, Tanya Alvarez, Rebekah Barber, Juvenal Caporale, David Cid, Arianna Martinez Reyna, Carlos Montes, Travis Morales, Simon Moya Smith, Cesar Noriega, Kimberly Phillips, Christian Ramirez, Michelle Rascon Canales, Carolyn Torres, Jerry Tello, Tara Trudell, and Laurie Valdez.
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cover of Yooper Talk: Dialect as Identity in Michigan's Upper Peninsula

Yooper Talk

Dialect as Identity in Michigan's Upper Peninsula

Kathryn A. Remlinger

University of Wisconsin Press, 2019

Yooper Talk is a fresh and significant contribution to understanding regional language and culture in North America. The Upper Peninsula of Michigan—known as "the UP"—is historically, geographically, and culturally distinct. Struggles over land, labor, and language during the last 150 years have shaped the variety of English spoken by resident Yoopers, as well as how they are viewed by outsiders.

Drawing on sixteen years of fieldwork, including interviews with seventy-five lifelong residents of the UP, Kathryn Remlinger examines how the idea of a unique Yooper dialect emerged. Considering UP English in relation to other regional dialects and their speakers, she looks at local identity, literacy practices, media representations, language attitudes, notions of authenticity, economic factors, tourism, and contact with immigrant and Native American languages. The book also explores how a dialect becomes a recognizable and valuable commodity: Yooper talk (or "Yoopanese") is emblazoned on t-shirts, flags, postcards, coffee mugs, and bumper stickers.

Yooper Talk explains linguistic concepts with entertaining examples for general readers and also contributes to interdisciplinary discussions of dialect and identity in sociolinguistics, anthropology, dialectology, and folklore.
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cover of You Better Go See Geri: An Odawa Elder’s Life of Recovery and Resilience

You Better Go See Geri

An Odawa Elder’s Life of Recovery and Resilience

Frances “Geri” Roossien

Oregon State University Press, 2021

Born into an Odawa family in Michigan in 1932, Frances “Geri” Roossien lived a life that was both ordinary and instructive. As a child, she attended Holy Childhood Boarding School; as an adult, she coped with her trauma through substance abuse; and in recovery she became a respected elder who developed tribally centered programs for addiction and family health, including the first Native American Recovery Group.

While a graduate student, Andrea Riley Mukavetz was invited into Geri’s home to listen to her stories and assist in compiling and publishing a memoir. Geri wanted her stories to serve as a resource, form of support, and affirmation that Indigenous people can be proud of who they are and overcome trauma. Geri hoped to be a model to current and future generations, and she believed strongly that more Indigenous people should become substance abuse counselors and work with their communities in tribally specific ways.

Geri died in 2019, but Riley Mukavetz carried on the work. This book presents Geri’s stories, lightly edited and organized for clarity, with an introduction by Riley Mukavetz that centers Geri’s life and the process of oral history in historical and theoretical context.
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cover of You Can Crush the Flowers: A Visual Memoir of the Egyptian Revolution

You Can Crush the Flowers

A Visual Memoir of the Egyptian Revolution

Bahia Shehab

Gingko, 2021

Part visual history, part memoir, You Can Crush the Flowers is a chronicle of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath, as it manifested itself not only in the art on the streets of Cairo but also through the wider visual culture that emerged during the revolution. Marking the ten-year anniversary of the revolution, celebrated Egyptian-Lebanese artist Bahia Shehab tells the stories that inspired both her own artwork and the work of her fellow revolutionaries. Shehab narrates the events of the revolution as they unfolded, describing on one hand the tactics deployed by the regime to drive protesters from the street—from the use of tear gas and snipers to brute force, intimidation techniques, and virginity tests—and on the other hand the retaliation by the protesters online and on the street in marches, chants, street art, and memes. Throughout this powerful and moving account, which includes over one hundred images, Shehab responds to all these aspects of the revolution as both artist and activist. The result bears witness to the brutality of the regime and pays tribute to the protestors who bravely defied it.

 
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cover of You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body

You Feel So Mortal

Essays on the Body

Peggy Shinner

University of Chicago Press, 2014

Feet, bras, autopsies, hair—Peggy Shinner takes an honest, unflinching look at all of them in You Feel So Mortal, a collection of searing and witty essays about the body: her own body, female and Jewish; those of her parents, the bodies she came from; and the collective body, with all its historical, social, and political implications. What, she asks, does this whole mess of bones, muscles, organs, and soul mean? Searching for answers, she turns her keen narrative sense to body image, gender, ethnic history, and familial legacy, exploring what it means to live in our bodies and to leave them behind.
 
Over the course of twelve essays, Shinner holds a mirror up to the complex desires, fears, confusions, and mysteries that shape our bodily perceptions. Driven by the collision between herself and the larger world, she examines her feet through the often-skewed lens of history to understand what makes them, in the eyes of some, decidedly Jewish; considers bras, breasts, and the storied skills of the bra fitter; asks, from the perspective of a confused and grieving daughter, what it means to cut the body open; and takes a reeling time-trip through myth, culture, and history to look at women’s hair in ancient Rome, Laos, France, Syria, Cuba, India, and her own past. Some pieces investigate the body under emotional or physical duress, while others use the body to consider personal heritage and legacy. Throughout, Shinner writes with elegance and assurance, weaving her wide-ranging thoughts into a firm and fascinating fabric.
 
Turning the category of body books on, well, its ear, You Feel So Mortal offers a probing view of our preoccupation with the body that is both idiosyncratic and universal, leaving us with the deep satisfaction of our shared humanity.
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cover of You May Take the Witness

You May Take the Witness

By Clinton Giddings Brown

University of Texas Press, 1955

When Clinton Giddings Brown (1882–1964) retired from a long and successful career as a trial lawyer in San Antonio, Texas, fishing on the Gulf Coast was out—by doctor’s orders. So he sat on the front gallery of his house in San Antonio and fished with a lead pencil in the richly stocked memories of his professional life. “Some days I didn’t get a nibble, but some mornings they were biting fine.”

The resultant and delightful catch is the story of a full, merry, and successful life. From the day in 1906 when “Mr. Clint” hung out his shingle in a little office over his father’s bank, through the long succession of “fine scraps, rough and tumble, no holds barred,” which were the jury cases he tried for defendant corporations in personal-injury damage suits, there was not much about the law and about human nature that he did not have the opportunity to learn.

The first client in the little office was Charlie Ross, a Pullman porter who wanted to make sure that the title on his new house was clear. The fee was $15, and Charlie was his friend for life. In the pages that follow the reader will meet many other unforgettable characters, including Dr. John Brinkley, the man who made a million dollars a year from his goat-gland operation until Dr. Morris Fishbein called him a “quack”; old Jim Wheat, who killed a white man, and Jim’s little grandson Lige, who knew what God would do to him if he told lies in court; Bosco, who forgot his complete paralysis when the lady lure came into the picture; and pretty little Mary, whom the jury loved.

Brown was elected district attorney for Bexar County, Texas, in 1913 and became mayor of San Antonio the following year; in the latter office he served two terms, resigning to join the Army in the First World War. On his return from France he was invited to work with a law firm that represented many large corporations, among them the Public Service Company, which ran San Antonio’s streetcar and bus lines, and the Southern Pacific Railroad. Soon made a partner, he remained with the firm until his retirement, and through a quarter of a century tried about as many jury cases as any other attorney in the city.

You May Take the Witness is a book for anyone who has ever felt the fascination of courtrooms and trials, and who has not? It is also a book in which lawyers will find an excellent refresher course for both mind and spirit. Here are invaluable tips on all the ins-and-outs of jury trial, not from the flat dimensions of a law-school text but from the full, real world of actual trials and the men and women involved. Brown tells how to handle witnesses and to pick juries, when to object and when not to object. The most important lesson of all, he says, is to value the jury and be an honest person before them. “The jury is decent, so you be decent, and ‘be yourself.’”

It is clear that Clinton Giddings Brown succeeded as a lawyer because he succeeded as a human being, just as it is clear that he knows how to tell story after fine story because he enjoyed living each episode of his life to its fullest.

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cover of You Were Never in Chicago

You Were Never in Chicago

Neil Steinberg

University of Chicago Press, 2012

In 1952 the New Yorker published a three-part essay by A. J. Liebling in which he dubbed Chicago the "Second City." From garbage collection to the skyline, nothing escaped Liebling's withering gaze. Among the outraged responses from Chicago residents was one that Liebling described as the apotheosis of such criticism: a postcard that read, simply, "You were never in Chicago."

Neil Steinberg has lived in and around Chicago for more than three decades—ever since he left his hometown of Berea, Ohio, to attend Northwestern—yet he remains fascinated by the dynamics captured in Liebling's anecdote. In You Were Never in Chicago Steinberg weaves the story of his own coming-of-age as a young outsider who made his way into the inner circles and upper levels of Chicago journalism with a nuanced portrait of the city that would surprise even lifelong residents.

Steinberg takes readers through Chicago's vanishing industrial past and explores the city from the quaint skybridge between the towers of the Wrigley Building, to the depths of the vast Deep Tunnel system below the streets. He deftly explains the city's complex web of political favoritism and carefully profiles the characters he meets along the way, from greats of jazz and journalism to small-business owners just getting by. Throughout, Steinberg never loses the curiosity and close observation of an outsider, while thoughtfully considering how this perspective has shaped the city, and what it really means to belong. Intimate and layered, You Were Never in Chicago will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of all Chicagoans, be they born in the city or forever transplanted.

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cover of You, Me, and the Violence

You, Me, and the Violence

Catherine Taylor

The Ohio State University Press, 2017

“Things puppets can do to us: charm, deceive, captivate, fool, trick, remind, amuse, distract, bore, repulse, annoy, puzzle, transport, provoke, fascinate, stand in for, kill.” In You, Me, and the Violence, Catherine Taylor ponders the nature of personal and political autonomy, focusing on the surprising juxtaposition of puppetry and military drones. In a book at once politically significant and narratively engaging, Taylor blends genres to question the roles of individuals within society and expose the gritty and emotional underpinnings of the seemingly mechanical process of a remote soldier.
From conversations with her own brother about his military experiences to Punch and Judy, from the original tale of Pinocchio to the radio chatter of soldiers in active drone operation, Taylor writes about family, power, and the “theater” of war in a voice both sly and sobering, heartbreaking and hopeful.
 
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cover of Young Bob: A Biography of Robert M. La Follette, Jr.

Young Bob

A Biography of Robert M. La Follette, Jr.

Patrick J. Maney

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2002

United States senator "Young Bob" La Follette entered politics as a young reformer in the shadow of his legendary father, "Fighting Bob" La Follette. He made his own mark as a key architect of Roosevelt’s New Deal and as a champion of labor rights and civil liberties. But in 1946 he was unexpectedly unseated by Joseph McCarthy, whose rise to Cold War notoriety foreshadowed La Follette’s despair and suicide in 1953. This new edition updates the only full scale biography of La Follette,Jr., the first to exploit his voluminous collection of personal papers. Patrick J. Maney makes clear that Young Bob’s story is as relevant today as it was when he died. His life stands as dramatic evidence of how one of the most respected politicians of his time bridged the political spectrum and was admired by both liberals like FDR and Harry Truman and conservatives like Robert Taft and Richard Nixon.

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cover of Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811-1851

Young Charles Sumner and the Legacy of the American Enlightenment, 1811-1851

Anne-Marie Taylor

University of Massachusetts Press, 2001

An outspoken abolitionist, a founder of the Free Soil and Republican parties, and a leading member of the U. S. Senate for more than twenty years, Charles Sumner (1811–1874) has always figured prominently in histories of the American Civil War. For the most part, however, he has been depicted as a psychologically troubled extremist, a fanatical opponent of slavery whose self-righteousness was matched only by his arrogance.

In this book, Anne-Marie Taylor challenges that long-standing view, offering in its stead the portrait of a man animated more by principle than by impulse or ambition. According to Taylor, Sumner's reform-minded politics, including his fervent commitment to put an end to slavery, must be understood in the context of a young nation still struggling to live up to the Enlightenment ideals embraced by its founders and embodied in its Constitution.

Focusing on the first forty years of Sumner's life, before he took public office, Taylor traces the evolution of his character and thought among Boston's cultural elite. His belief in the virtues of cosmopolitanism, in the dignity of the human intellect and conscience, and in the possibility of a cultivated and just society, all find their roots in an education steeped in Enlightenment principles. At the same time, as a child of New England Puritanism and Revolutionary republicanism, Sumner was raised to believe in the moral obligation of the individual to work for the common good.

As Taylor shows in this richly drawn biography, much of the triumph and tragedy of Sumner's story—the energy of his idealism as well as the poignancy of his eventual disappointment— derives from the overpowering sense of duty and national destiny imbued by his upbringing.
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cover of Young John Muir: An Environmental Biography

Young John Muir

An Environmental Biography

Steven J. Holmes

University of Wisconsin Press, 1999

As a founder of the Sierra Club and promoter of the national parks, as a passionate nature writer and as a principal figure of the environmental movement, John Muir stands as a powerful symbol of connection with the natural world. But how did Muir’s own relationship with nature begin? In this pioneering book, Steven J. Holmes offers a dramatically new interpretation of Muir’s formative years, one that reveals the agony as well as the elation of his earliest experiences of nature.
    From his childhood in Scotland and Wisconsin through his young adulthood in the Midwest and Canada, Muir struggled—often without success—to find a place for himself both in nature and in society. Far from granting comfort, the natural world confronted the young Muir with a full range of practical, emotional, and religious conflicts. Only with the help of his family, his religion, and the extraordinary power of nature itself could Muir in his late twenties find a welcoming vision of nature as home—a vision that would shape his lifelong environmental experience, most immediately in his transformative travels through the South and to the Yosemite Valley.
    More than a biography, The Young John Muir is a remarkable exploration of the human relationship with wilderness. Accessible and engaging, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the individual struggle to come to terms with the power of nature.
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cover of Young Man From The Provinces: A Gay Life Before Stonewall

Young Man From The Provinces

A Gay Life Before Stonewall

Alan Helms

University of Minnesota Press, 2003

An insider’s account of gay high society in pre-Stonewall New York City—now back in print!

Young, intelligent, and handsome, Alan Helms left a brutal midwestern childhood for New York City in 1955. Denied a Rhodes scholarship because of his sexual orientation, he soon became an object of desire in a gay underground scene frequented by, among many others, Noel Coward, Leonard Bernstein, and Marlene Dietrich. In this unusually vivid and sensitive account, Helms describes the business of being a sex object and its psychological and physical toll.

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cover of Young Men and Fire

Young Men and Fire

Norman Maclean

University of Chicago Press, 1992

On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

Young Men and Fire won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.

"A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living.... Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic."—from New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992

"A treasure: part detective story, part western, part tragedy, part elegy and wholly eloquent ghost story in which the dead and the living join ranks cheerfully, if sometimes eerily, in a search for truth and the rest it brings."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune

"An astonishing book. In compelling language, both homely and elegant, Young Men and Fire miraculously combines a fascinating primer on fires and firefighting, a powerful, breathtakingly real reconstruction of a tragedy, and a meditation on writing, grief and human character.... Maclean's last book will stir your heart and haunt your memory."—Timothy Foote, USA Today

"Beautiful.... A dark American idyll of which the language can be proud."—Robert M. Adams, The New York Review of Books

"Young Men and Fire is redolent of Melville. Just as the reader of Moby Dick comes to comprehend the monstrous entirety of the great white whale, so the reader of Young Men and Fire goes into the heart of the great red fire and comes out thoroughly informed. Don't hesitate to take the plunge."—Dennis Drabelle, Washington Post Book World

"Young Men and Fire is a somber and poetic retelling of a tragic event. It is the pinnacle of smokejumping literature and a classic work of 20th-century nonfiction."—John Holkeboer, The Wall Street Journal

"Maclean is always with the brave young dead. . . . They could not have found a storyteller with a better claim to represent their honor. . . . A great book."—James R. Kincaid, New York Times Book Review
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cover of Young Men and Fire: Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

Young Men and Fire

Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

Norman Maclean

University of Chicago Press, 2017

A devastating and lyrical work of nonfiction, Young Men and Fire describes the events of August 5, 1949, when a crew of fifteen of the US Forest Service’s elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of the men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy in Young Men and Fire, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Alongside Maclean’s now-canonical A River Runs through It and Other Stories, Young Men and Fire is recognized today as a classic of the American West. This twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Maclean’s later triumph—the last book he would write—includes a powerful new foreword by Timothy Egan, author of The Big Burn and The Worst Hard Time. As moving and profound as when it was first published, Young Men and Fire honors the literary legacy of a man who gave voice to an essential corner of the American soul.
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cover of Your Own Will Leave You: My Mother's Dementia

Your Own Will Leave You

My Mother's Dementia

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

Temple University Press, 2026

“Memory’s barriers are without barriers,” writes Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee in the opening of his touching and thoughtful memoir, Your Own Will Leave You. Bhattacharjee eloquently reflects on family, care, and memory as he chronicles his experiences with his elderly mother who suffers from dementia. Working from his journal, Bhattacharjee ruminates on the ways we understand dementia and memory as well as end-of-life issues. He is not only a loving son, but also an Indian with a universal sensibility who turns to ancient and contemporary thinkers that inform his perspective.

Bhattacharjee focuses on the last months of his mother’s life and her changing demeanor—her stubbornness, humor, and vulnerability. He traces her interactions with family members, neighbors, and caregivers, while also addressing burden-of-care issues. Recounting his moments of grief and guilt with candor, Bhattacharjee also re-evaluates how Western culture prejudices popular perceptions of mental illness.

Lyrical, penetrating, occasionally aphoristic, and full of insights, Your Own Will Leave You is a heartfelt, and at times heartbreaking, memoir and a warm elegy for the author’s late mother. 

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cover of Yours Till Death: Civil War Letters of John W. Cotton

Yours Till Death

Civil War Letters of John W. Cotton

John Cotton

University of Alabama Press, 1951

Letters from a Confederate soldier to his wife during the Civil War.

Yours Till Death: Civil War Letters of John W. Cotton offers a rare and deeply personal window into the lived experience of the American Civil War through the words of an ordinary Confederate soldier. Composed of letters written by John W. Cotton to his wife in Coosa County, Alabama, this collection preserves an unfiltered, intimate record of wartime life from 1862 to 1865, revealing both the hardships of military service and the enduring ties of family and home.

Cotton, a yeoman farmer who enlisted in the Confederate Army in the spring of 1862, writes with directness and honesty about his daily experiences as he moves through the major campaigns of the war, including service in Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, and South Carolina. His correspondence captures not only the movements and conditions of military life—guard duty, illness, shortages, and shifting morale—but also the emotional landscape of a soldier separated from his family. His letters are filled with concern for his wife, children, and farm, illustrating the constant tension between duty to country and responsibility to home. 

More than a military chronicle, Yours Till Death is also a valuable portrait of rural Southern life during wartime. Cotton’s references to crops, weather, labor, and household concerns provide insight into how families on the home front coped with absence, uncertainty, and economic strain. These details illuminate the broader social and agricultural context of the Confederacy, offering readers a richer understanding of how war reshaped everyday life for civilians as well as soldiers. 

The letters, preserved and edited by historian Lucille Griffith, retain the immediacy and authenticity of Cotton’s voice. Written without the benefit of hindsight, they convey the evolving attitudes, anxieties, and hopes of a man living through one of the most turbulent periods in American history. As such, they serve as an important primary source for scholars and students, complementing official histories with the perspective of an individual whose experiences reflect those of countless others who lived and fought during the Civil War.

Yours Till Death will appeal to readers interested in Civil War studies, Southern history, and personal narratives of wartime experience. By bringing together themes of conflict, family, survival, and resilience, this collection transforms historical events into a deeply human story—one that reminds us that the past is best understood not only through battles and politics, but through the voices of those who lived it.
 

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cover of Yun Dong-ju: A Critical Biography

Yun Dong-ju

A Critical Biography

Song WooHye

Rutgers University Press, 2026

Historian and novelist Song WooHye chronicles the life of Yun Dong-ju (1917-1945), one of the most beloved and important poets in the modern Korean literary canon, widely considered Korea's "National Poet". Beginning with the history of the North Gando region (now Yanbian, China), where Yun was born, and ending with facts behind the publication of his only and posthumous poetry collection, Sky, Wind, Star, and Poem, this critical biography elucidates who Yun Dong-ju really was, with factual descriptions of the bleak and turbulent period of Japan’s colonization of Korea.
 
While first working on the book in the 1980s, Song had interviewed the poet’s surviving relatives and friends, most of whom have since passed away. Without her interviews, these important first-hand accounts would have been lost. Song had an added advantage of an “insider,” as she is a niece of Song Mong-gyu, who was the poet’s first cousin and inseparable friend for life. Incorporating newly discovered materials and using interviews with the beloved poet's family and friends, this biography is the most comprehensive, definitive biography of Yun Dong-ju to date, now available in English for the first time.
 

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea). 

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