Among the most stirring works of labor history ever written, this autobiography of Mother Jones (née Mary Harris) chronicles the life of a woman who was considered a saint by many, and by others, «the most dangerous woman in America.» A forceful and picturesque figure in the American labor movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Mother Jones was a born crusader.Widowed at the age of 30 when her husband and four yo ...
Hailed by the New York Herald as “an oasis in the desert of works on foreign travel,” The Innocents Abroad was a great success when first published, and it remained the bestselling of all Twain’s works throughout his lifetime. It shows the author at the height of his literary power as he records razor-sharp, often hilarious, observations of the people he meets and places he visits during a trip to Europe and the Hol ...
"We sai1ed for America, and there made certain preparations. This took but little time. Two members of my family elected to go with me. Also a carbuncle. The dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is out of place in a dictionary." — Following the EquatorSo begins this classic piece of travel writing, brimming with Twain's celebrated brand of ironic, tongue-in-cheek humor. Written just before the turn of the cen ...
Return to an era when Zanzibar was ruled by sultans, and enter a vanished world of harems, slave trading, and court intrigues. In this insider's story, a sultan's daughter who fled her gilded cage offers a compelling look at nineteenth-century Arabic and African royal life. After years of exile in Europe, the former princess wrote this fascinating memoir as a legacy for her children and a warm reminiscence of her island home.Born Salam ...
Although he was an acute literary critic, a voluminous contributor to Blackwood's and other journals, and a perceptive writer on history, biography, and economics, Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859) is best known for his Confessions of an English Opium Eater.First published in installments in the London Magazine in 1821, the work recounts De Quincey's early years as a precocious student of Greek, his flight from grammar school and ...
For many years, Ana Maria Spagna has stayed put, mostly, in a small mountain valley at the head of a glacier-carved lake. You�re so lucky to live there, people say. She is lucky. But she is also restless. In Uplake she takes road trips, flies to distant cities, fantasizes about other people�s lives, and then returns home again to muse on rootedness, yearning, commitment, ambition, wonder, and love. These engaging, reflectiv ...
Even from upside-down in his recently flipped truck, Frank Soos reveals himself to be ruminative, grappling with the limitations of language to express the human condition. Moving quickly—skiing in the dark or taking long summer bike rides on Alaska highways—Soos combines an active physical life with a dark and difficult interior existence, wrestling the full span of “thinking and doing” onto the page with surprising lightness. His meditations m ...
No type of building–pyramid, skyscraper, palace–presents so many challenges as the design, construction and sustenance of a botanic garden. John Trexler's Tower Hill: The First Twenty-five Years traces the metamorphosis of a venerable urban horticultural institution, the Worcester County Horticultural Society founded in 1842, into the ever-evolving Tower Hill Botanic Garden which opened in 1986. Located on a hill in B ...
Charles W. Gehrke was unflinching. Determined. Persistent. He grew up among the poorest of the poor, yet carried only happy memories of those early years. Out of necessity he learned the value of hard work, as he and his brother helped support their family, even as children–but he never complained and never stopped working until his final days on this earth. He learned the importance of family, also at a tender age. They looked out for ...