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Last Barriers: Photographs of Wilderness in the Gulf Islands National Seashore
by Donald Muir BradburnRarely has a book of photography performed a more poignant and immediate service in preserving a natural Mississippi wonder. The Mississippi Gulf Coast barrier islands captured the heart and mind of Donald Muir Bradburn (1924–2012) in childhood. He became fascinated with the natural history and ornithology he witnessed. To him, the islands, especially Horn Island with its dark forests, high dunes, and deserted beaches, represented unbounded freedom and the ideal of a timeless world. Years later, when the National Park Service threatened to open the islands to “almost unlimited opportunities for camping, picnicking, water skiing, boating, bicycling, hiking, and bird watching,” Bradburn became an activist for preservation, focusing on saving Horn Island and Petit Bois Island as unchanged wilderness. In addition to supporting legislation that would keep both islands part of the National Wilderness System, Bradburn photographed the islands and their plants to show conservationist groups and individuals what was at stake and motivate them to join the fight. Eventually, through his efforts and those of others, Congress passed the National Parks and Recreation Act of 1978, which designated Horn and Petit Bois Islands as wilderness. For a time, the legislation saved a place shimmering with natural grace. After the fright and insult of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Bradburn’s photographs are an even more deeply felt act of preservation. Last Barriers: Photographs from the Gulf Islands National Seashore is a collection of 120 images taken of the Gulf Coast islands that preoccupied his life and photography. The large majority of these are of Horn Island long before Hurricane Katrina and include landscapes in various weather conditions and during different times of the day, flora and fauna, and various habitats, seen either close-up or from afar. Each is accompanied by a detailed caption stating the date taken, the biological information of the species and plants depicted, and landscape descriptions. In a personal essay, Bradburn movingly reflects on his attachment to these island wonders and records the history of the efforts to save them.
Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
by George PackerA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice"[George Packer's] account of America’s decline into destructive tribalism is always illuminating and often dazzling." —William Galston, The Washington PostAcclaimed National Book Award-winning author George Packer diagnoses America’s descent into a failed state, and envisions a path toward overcoming our injustices, paralyses, and dividesIn the year 2020, Americans suffered one rude blow after another to their health, livelihoods, and collective self-esteem. A ruthless pandemic, an inept and malign government response, polarizing protests, and an election marred by conspiracy theories left many citizens in despair about their country and its democratic experiment. With pitiless precision, the year exposed the nation’s underlying conditions—discredited elites, weakened institutions, blatant inequalities—and how difficult they are to remedy.In Last Best Hope, George Packer traces the shocks back to their sources. He explores the four narratives that now dominate American life: Free America, which imagines a nation of separate individuals and serves the interests of corporations and the wealthy; Smart America, the world view of Silicon Valley and the professional elite; Real America, the white Christian nationalism of the heartland; and Just America, which sees citizens as members of identity groups that inflict or suffer oppression. In lively and biting prose, Packer shows that none of these narratives can sustain a democracy. To point a more hopeful way forward, he looks for a common American identity and finds it in the passion for equality—the “hidden code”—that Americans of diverse persuasions have held for centuries. Today, we are challenged again to fight for equality and renew what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the art” of self-government. In its strong voice and trenchant analysis, Last Best Hope is an essential contribution to the literature of national renewal.
Last Boat Out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao's Revolution
by Helen ZiaThe dramatic real life stories of four young people caught up in the mass exodus of Shanghai in the wake of China’s 1949 Communist revolution—a heartrending precursor to the struggles faced by emigrants today. “A true page-turner . . . [Helen] Zia has proven once again that history is something that happens to real people.”—New York Times bestselling author Lisa See Shanghai has historically been China’s jewel, its richest, most modern and westernized city. The bustling metropolis was home to sophisticated intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and a thriving middle class when Mao’s proletarian revolution emerged victorious from the long civil war. Terrified of the horrors the Communists would wreak upon their lives, citizens of Shanghai who could afford to fled in every direction. Seventy years later, members of the last generation to fully recall this massive exodus have revealed their stories to Chinese American journalist Helen Zia, who interviewed hundreds of exiles about their journey through one of the most tumultuous events of the twentieth century. From these moving accounts, Zia weaves together the stories of four young Shanghai residents who wrestled with the decision to abandon everything for an uncertain life as refugees in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States. Benny, who as a teenager became the unwilling heir to his father’s dark wartime legacy, must decide either to escape to Hong Kong or navigate the intricacies of a newly Communist China. The resolute Annuo, forced to flee her home with her father, a defeated Nationalist official, becomes an unwelcome exile in Taiwan. The financially strapped Ho fights deportation from the U.S. in order to continue his studies while his family struggles at home. And Bing, given away by her poor parents, faces the prospect of a new life among strangers in America. The lives of these men and women are marvelously portrayed, revealing the dignity and triumph of personal survival. Herself the daughter of immigrants from China, Zia is uniquely equipped to explain how crises like the Shanghai transition affect children and their families, students and their futures, and, ultimately, the way we see ourselves and those around us. Last Boat Out of Shanghai brings a poignant personal angle to the experiences of refugees then and, by extension, today. “Zia’s portraits are compassionate and heartbreaking, and they are, ultimately, the universal story of many families who leave their homeland as refugees and find less-than-welcoming circumstances on the other side.”—Amy Tan, author of The Joy Luck Club
Last Bus to Wisdom: A Novel (Two Medicine Country)
by Ivan DoigThe final novel from a great American storyteller.Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig's beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an eleven-year-old's imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery for "female trouble" in the summer of 1951, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. There Donal is in for a rude surprise: Aunt Kate-bossy, opinionated, argumentative, and tyrannical--is nothing like her sister. She henpecks her good-natured husband, Herman the German, and Donal can't seem to get on her good side either. After one contretemps too many, Kate packs him back to the authorities in Montana on the next Greyhound. But as it turns out, Donal isn't traveling solo: Herman the German has decided to fly the coop with him. In the immortal American tradition, the pair light out for the territory together, meeting a classic Doigian ensemble of characters and having rollicking misadventures along the way.Charming, wise, and slyly funny, Last Bus to Wisdom is a last sweet gift from a writer whose books have bestowed untold pleasure on countless readers. From the Hardcover edition.
Last Call (FANTASY MASTERWORKS)
by Tim PowersTwenty years ago Scott Crane abandoned his career as a professional poker player and went into hiding, after a weird high-stakes game played with Tarot cards. But now the cards - and the supernatural powers behind them - have found him again.Crane's father killed gangster Bugsy Siegel in 1948 to become the Fisher King, and to keep that power he is determined to kill his son. Now Scott Crane must cross the Mojave Desert to his father's Perilous Chapel in Las Vegas, and take up the cards again for one last poker duel. And the stakes are the highest he's ever played for ... his soul.Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best novel, 1993
Last Call at Coogan's: The Life and Death of a Neighborhood Bar
by Jon MichaudThe uniquely inspiring story of a beloved neighborhood bar that united the communities it served.Coogan’s Bar and Restaurant opened in New York City’s Washington Heights in 1985 and closed its doors for good in the pandemic spring of 2020. Sometimes called Uptown City Hall, it became a staple of neighborhood life during its 35 years in operation—a place of safety and a bulwark against prejudice in a multi-ethnic, majority-immigrant community undergoing rapid change.Last Call at Coogan’s by Jon Michaud tells the story of this beloved saloon, from the challenging years of the late 80's and early 90's, when Washington Heights suffered from the highest crime rate in the city, to the 2010’s, when gentrification pushed out longtime residents and nearly closed Coogan's itself; only a massive community mobilization including local politicians and Lin-Manuel Miranda kept the doors open.This book touches on many serious issues facing the country today: race relations, policing, gentrification, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Along the way, readers will meet the bar’s owners and an array of its most colorful regulars, such as an aspiring actor from Kentucky who dreams of bringing a theater company to Washington Heights, a television reporter who loves karaoke, and a Puerto Rican community board manager who falls in love with an Irish cop from the local precinct. At its core, this is the story of one small business, the people who worked there, the customers they served, and the community they all called home.
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War
by Deborah CohenA prize-winning historian&’s revelatory account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism &“As intimate and gripping as a novel, this brilliant book vividly conveys what it felt like to live through the shocking crises of the thirties and forties.&”—Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers DrowningThey were an astonishing group: glamorous, gutsy, and irreverent to the bone. As cub reporters in the 1920s, they roamed across a war-ravaged world, sometimes perched atop mules on wooden saddles, sometimes gliding through countries in the splendor of a first-class sleeper car. While empires collapsed and fledgling democracies faltered, they chased deposed empresses, international financiers, and Balkan gun-runners, and then knocked back doubles late into the night. Last Call at the Hotel Imperial is the extraordinary story of John Gunther, H. R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson. In those tumultuous years, they landed exclusive interviews with Hitler and Mussolini, Nehru and Gandhi, and helped shape what Americans knew about the world. Alongside these backstage glimpses into the halls of power, they left another equally incredible set of records. Living in the heady afterglow of Freud, they subjected themselves to frank, critical scrutiny and argued about love, war, sex, death, and everything in between.Plunged into successive global crises, Gunther, Knickerbocker, Sheean, and Thompson could no longer separate themselves from the turmoil that surrounded them. To tell that story, they broke long-standing taboos. From their circle came not just the first modern account of illness in Gunther&’s Death Be Not Proud—a memoir about his son&’s death from cancer—but the first no-holds-barred chronicle of a marriage: Sheean&’s Dorothy and Red, about Thompson&’s fractious relationship with Sinclair Lewis. Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, this revelatory book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close.
Last Call at the Nightingale: A Mystery (The Nightingale Mysteries #1)
by Katharine SchellmanFirst in a captivating Jazz age mystery series from author Katharine Schellman, Last Call at the Nightingale beckons readers into a darkly glamorous speakeasy where music, liquor, and secrets flow."Schellman is at the top of her craft and delivers a murder mystery with clever twists and turns and memorable personalities."—Denny S. Bryce, Bestselling Author of Wild Women and the BluesNew York, 1924. Vivian Kelly's days are filled with drudgery, from the tenement lodging she shares with her sister to the dress shop where she sews for hours every day.But at night, she escapes to The Nightingale, an underground dance hall where illegal liquor flows and the band plays the Charleston with reckless excitement. With a bartender willing to slip her a free glass of champagne and friends who know the owner, Vivian can lose herself in the music. No one asks where she came from or how much money she has. No one bats an eye if she flirts with men or women as long as she can keep up on the dance floor. At The Nightingale, Vivian forgets the dangers of Prohibition-era New York and finds a place that feels like home.But then she discovers a body behind the club, and those dangers come knocking.Caught in a police raid at the Nightingale, Vivian discovers that the dead man wasn't the nameless bootlegger he first appeared. With too many people assuming she knows more about the crime than she does, Vivian finds herself caught between the dangers of the New York's underground and the world of the city's wealthy and careless, where money can hide any sin and the lives of the poor are considered disposable...including Vivian's own.
Last Call at the Savoy
by Brisa CarletonSet amongst the glittering backdrop of London's iconic Savoy hotel, a young woman is forced to confront her troubled past as she uncovers the story of the hotel&’s first female bartender who has been erased from the history books—"an exhilarating, tender read that will leave you smiling" (Fiona Davis, bestselling author). Six years ago, Cinnamon Scott was a young writer on the rise in New York City. But since the sudden loss of her parents, she's been stuck in place, retreating to a life of endless partying—made possible by the massive fortune she's inherited. Despite their tragic loss, she and her older sister Rosemary have always had each other to lean on. But now, with Rosie living in London and about to give birth to twins, Cinnamon feels more lost than ever. When Rosie is put on bedrest, Cinnamon flies to her sister's side, where she's temporarily living at The Savoy. Immediately swept away by the beauty and history of the legendary hotel and its famed American Bar, Cinnamon finds ample opportunity to distract herself. When the late shift bartender tells her the story of Ada Coleman, the woman who crafted the cocktail recipes The Savoy popularized in its famous handbook a century ago, Cinnamon is inspired by the bartender's vivid stories of Ada's fearlessness and can't understand why Ada's name is nowhere to be found. After meeting a handsome historian researching the hotel and realizing that Ada is likely to be once again overlooked, Cinnamon must decide if she can overcome her demons and stand up for Ada's story. And, along the way, she might just save her own story too.
Last Call for Bud Light: The Fall and Future of America's Favorite Beer
by Anson FrericksThe astonishing inside story of how Bud Light lost its position as the most popular beer in the United States from a longtime Anheuser-Busch executive. Anson Frericks, a former president at Anheuser-Busch—formerly the home of America&’s most popular brewery—watched as the company unraveled at the hands of globe-trotting financiers and progressive middle management. Rather than pursue shareholder profits, Anheuser-Busch suddenly became focused on stakeholder capitalism and the vague mandates of environment, social, and governance (ESG). This ill-advised change cumulated in the shocking evaporation of $30 billion in market cap after releasing an advertising campaign starring political activist Dylan Mulvaney. Now, Anheuser-Busch&’s evolution and its subsequent fallout is brought to light as never before with this ultimate insider&’s look. Compelling, candid, and eye-opening, Last Call for Bud Light is the unforgettable story of the downfall and future of an American icon.
Last Call for Liberty: How America's Genius for Freedom Has Become Its Greatest Threat
by Os GuinnessThe hour is critical. The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War.
Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition
by Daniel OkrentA brilliant, authoritative, and fascinating history of America's most puzzling era, the years 1920 to 1933, when the U.S. Constitution was amended to restrict one of America's favorite pastimes: drinking alcoholic beverages. From its start, America has been awash in drink. The sailing vessel that brought John Winthrop to the shores of the New World in 1630 carried more beer than water. By the 1820s, liquor flowed so plentifully it was cheaper than tea. That Americans would ever agree to relinquish their booze was as improbable as it was astonishing. Yet we did, and Last Call is Daniel Okrent's dazzling explanation of why we did it, what life under Prohibition was like, and how such an unprecedented degree of government interference in the private lives of Americans changed the country forever. Writing with both wit and historical acuity, Okrent reveals how Prohibition marked a confluence of diverse forces: the growing political power of the women's suffrage movement, which allied itself with the antiliquor campaign; the fear of small-town, native-stock Protestants that they were losing control of their country to the immigrants of the large cities; the anti-German sentiment stoked by World War I; and a variety of other unlikely factors, ranging from the rise of the automobile to the advent of the income tax. Through it all, Americans kept drinking, going to remarkably creative lengths to smuggle, sell, conceal, and convivially (and sometimes fatally) imbibe their favorite intoxicants. Last Call is peopled with vivid characters of an astonishing variety: Susan B. Anthony and Billy Sunday, William Jennings Bryan and bootlegger Sam Bronfman, Pierre S. du Pont and H. L. Mencken, Meyer Lansky and the incredible--if long-forgotten--federal official Mabel Walker Willebrandt, who throughout the twenties was the most powerful woman in the country. (Perhaps most surprising of all is Okrent's account of Joseph P. Kennedy's legendary, and long-misunderstood, role in the liquor business.) It's a book rich with stories from nearly all parts of the country. Okrent's narrative runs through smoky Manhattan speakeasies, where relations between the sexes were changed forever; California vineyards busily producing "sacramental" wine; New England fishing communities that gave up fishing for the more lucrative rum-running business; and in Washington, the halls of Congress itself, where politicians who had voted for Prohibition drank openly and without apology. Last Call is capacious, meticulous, and thrillingly told. It stands as the most complete history of Prohibition ever written and confirms Daniel Okrent's rank as a major American writer.
Last Canadian Beer: The Moosehead Story
by Harvey SawlerA look at the history of a family beer business and how they’ve managed to maintain strength in an increasingly competitive industry.Featuring important insights from the company’s current executives and employees, Last Canadian Beer: The Moosehead Story is not only a fascinating company history, but also a candid look at how a small New Brunswick business remains competitive in a difficult global marketplace. While other Canadian beer brands long ago sold out to American and European interests, Moosehead has remained fiercely independent.Last Canadian Beer is the remarkable story of a time-honored business, a complex family, and a beloved beer.
Last Chance Bride
by Jillian HartLast Chance At Love...The lonely bearer of a shameful secret, Libby Hodges needed to make a new start-in Montana Territory as Jacob Stone's mail-order bride and mother to his little girl. Hoping to meet a loving husband, she found instead a man shattered by by loss and wary of affection. Libby could read in his gentle gray eyes a desperate plea for the tenderness they both craved. But how could she claim the heart of a man who'd vowed never to give it away again, or tell her prospective groom that she carried another man's child?
Last Chance Cowboys: The Lawman
by Anna SchmidtFrom acclaimed author Anna Schmidt comes a sweeping historical Western romance about the unbreakable bonds of family, second chances, and a whole lot of heart in the Wild West."This is me, Addie," Jess murmured. "You and me, the way we always were." But it wasn't, no matter how much she wished it were true. They were different now. She would always love him... But can she trust him not to break her heart?Jess Porterfield fled to the big city after his father's sudden death, leaving behind his family ranch-and his childhood sweetheart. Now Jess has returned as the local lawman, determined to prove his worth...and win back the one woman he could never live without.Young frontier doctor Addie Wilcox was devastated when Jess left her behind. Now he's back and it's difficult to remember why she should keep her distance. But with the town's richest man set to see her hang for a crime she didn't commit, Addie must put her faith in the lawman who broke her heart-and trust that together they'll find their second chance at love."Readers wanting a good old fashioned Western romance need look no further than this one." -Dear Author for Last Chance Cowboys: The Drifter
Last Chance Cowboys: The Outlaw
by Anna Schmidt"A feisty heroine and a hero eager to make everything right. What more could a reader want?"—Leigh Greenwood, USA Today bestselling author of To Love and to Cherish for The Drifter"'Someone like me?' Is that how you see me, Amanda? As someone people should fear?""I don't know what to think," she said. "One minute you seem so dangerous, and the next you're sweet and caring and..."He took a step closer, his eyes sweeping her face. "And which do you want me to be?" His voice was low; it sent shivers down her spine."Both," she whispered, and lifted her face for a kiss.Amanda Porterfield longs to experience real adventure. So when she's offered a position in bustling Tucson, she leaps at the chance despite unknown dangers—dangers like the mysterious Seth Grover.As an undercover detective working to stop a gang of outlaws, Seth can't afford the distractions a woman like Amanda inspires. Yet when the fiercely intelligent beauty is thrust into the middle of a heist gone wrong, Seth will fight for a future that may never be theirs...even if it means risking everything he holds dear.Where the Trail Ends Series:Last Chance Cowboys: The Drifter (Book 1)Last Chance Cowboys: The Lawman (Book 2)Last Chance Cowboys: The Outlaw (Book 3)Last Chance Cowboys: The Rancher (Book 4)Praise for Anna Schmidt: "Readers wanting a good old fashioned Western romance need look no further than this one." —Dear Author for Last Chance Cowboys: The Drifter
Last Chance Cowboys: The Rancher
by Anna Schmidt"A feisty heroine and a hero eager to make everything right. What more could a reader want?" —LEIGH GREENWOOD, USA Today bestselling author for The Drifter"You can't be sure we're doing the right thing," she said.He drew closer to the barbed wire separating them. "It's impossible to know what's right. But it doesn't stop me from wanting you."The world is changing, and the West isn't as wild as it used to be. Trey Porterfield welcomes a new era of law and order—and the influx of settlers coming to the Arizona territory. But not everyone is willing to see the old ways change, and as the cattlemen and the herders take sides, a full-blown range war may be inevitable. There's only one way Trey can see to bring peace to his feuding neighbors. Marry the enemy.Nell Stokes is a young widow fighting just to stay alive. In Trey, she sees a chance to heal old wounds and start over. Love was never in the cards, yet as Trey and Nell fight to unite the feuding land, they'll discover a passion neither could have expected...and a danger far greater than either has ever known.Where the Trail Ends Series:Last Chance Cowboys: The Drifter (Book 1)Last Chance Cowboys: The Lawman (Book 2)Last Chance Cowboys: The Outlaw (Book 3)Last Chance Cowboys: The Rancher (Book 4) What People Are Saying About Anna Schmidt:"Readers wanting a good old fashioned Western romance need look no further than this one." —Dear Author for Last Chance Cowboys: The Drifter"The perfect read." —RT Book Reviews for Last Chance Cowboys: The Lawman"A plot twist that will leave readers speechless." —Fresh Fiction for Last Chance Cowboys: The Lawman
Last Chance For Freedom (Reading Level #3)
by Marcie M. StadelhofenGregory, a slave, travels the Underground Railroad to Canada to join Becky, the woman he loves, who has already traveled to freedom.
Last Chance Wife: His Substitute Mail-order Bride Baby On Her Doorstep Accidental Sweetheart Last Chance Wife
by Janette ForemanHer Secret SuitorWhen six-time mail-order bride Winifred Sattler is stranded in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, she’s grateful to find a temporary position at Mr. Ewan Burke’s business until she can return home. Ewan is handsome, but stuffy and serious—her complete opposite. Unlike her new anonymous correspondent, Mr. Businessman, who appreciates her bubbly optimism.To keep his mining company afloat, Ewan can’t be distracted by Winifred’s vivacious beauty. He needs a no-nonsense wife. Someone like Miss Thoroughly Disgruntled, the only respondent to his recent ad with whom he truly connected. In person, Winifred and Ewan don’t get along, but in their letters they’re falling in love. Will they discover a perfect match in each other?
Last Chance at the Lost and Found
by Marcia FinicalBunny LaRue was beautiful. Sex, drugs, and fun were plentiful. But as the years slip by life doesn't stay easy and Bunny must find the strength to confront her past and create a new future.
Last Chance for Justice: How Relentless Investigators Uncovered New Evidence Convicting the Birmingham Church Bombers
by T. K. ThorneRevealing the story of the reopening of the case of the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombing of 1963, this insider's account divulges the ins and outs of the investigation led by detective Ben Herren of the Birmingham Police Department and special agent Bill Fleming of the FBI. For more than a year, they analyzed the original FBI files on the bombing and activities of the Ku Klux Klan, then began a search for new evidence. Their first interview--with Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry--broke open the case, but not in the way they expected. Herren and Fleming unearthed lost evidence and convinced long-silent witnesses to tell their stories. With tenacity, humor, dedication, and some luck, the pair encountered the worst and best in human nature on their journey to find justice, and perhaps closure, for the citizens of Birmingham.
Last Chance for Victory: Robert E. Lee and the Gettysburg Campaign
by Bill Ward Scott BowdenAn award-winning, groundbreaking, and controversial reappraisal of the most written-about battle in American history.
Last Chapter
by Ernie Pyle"No man in this war has so well told the story of the American fighting man as American fighting men wanted it told," wrote Harry Truman. "He deserves the gratitude of all his countrymen."THIS is the final book of Ernie Pyle's war reporting. After Africa, Italy, and D-Day on the European continent, Pyle took it the hard way again. There was still the Pacific war to win, and where the fighting was Ernie had to go, soul-sick though he was with the thousands of scenes of death and destruction he had already witnessed.He was attached to the Navy early in 1945. In the Marianas first and then living with the boys who flew the B-29s over the Japanese homeland, Pyle was experiencing a side of the war that was new to him. Next he joined an aircraft carrier on the invasion of Okinawa. He made the landing with the Marines and saw Okinawa secured.Then his luck ran out. A Japanese bullet killed Ernie Pyle on April 17th, 1945 on Ie Shima, and Americans lost their greatest and best-loved correspondent. Millions mourned the going of this modest man who wrote of the war with all honesty and no pretensions, and whose writings will stand as one of the most vital records of the struggle. LAST CHAPTER is a brief, brave little book to complete that record permanently. There is a sixteen-page picture section and an index of names and places.
Last Charge of the Rough Rider: Theodore Roosevelt's Final Days
by William Hazelgrove William Elliott HazelgroveThere have been many books on Theodore Roosevelt, but there are none that solely focus on the last years of his life. Racked by rheumatism, a ticking embolism, pathogens in his blood, a bad leg from an accident, and a bullet in his chest from an assassination attempt, in the last two years of his life from April 1917 to January 6, 1919, he went from the great disappointment of being denied his own regiment in World War I, leading a suicide mission of Rough Riders against the Germans, to the devastating news that his son Quentin had been shot down and killed over France. Suffering from grief and guilt, marginalized by world events, the great glow that had been his life was now but a dimming lantern. But TR&’s final years were productive ones as well: he churned out several &“instant&” books that promoted U.S. entry into the Great War, and he was making plans for another run at the Presidency in 1920 at the time of his death. Indeed, his political influence was so great that his opposition to the policies of Woodrow Wilson helped the Republican Party take back the Congress in 1918. However, as William Hazelgrove points out in this book, it was Roosevelt&’s quest for the &“vigorous life&” that, ironically, may have led to his early demise at the age of sixty. "The Old Lion is dead,&” TR&’s son Archie cabled his brother on January 6, 1919, and so, too, ended a historic era in American life and politics.
Last Child
by Michael SpoonerA mixed-race girl must grow up quickly when danger threatens her world Rosalie's biggest problem used to be her own divided feelings. The constant tug-of-war between her white half and her Native American half is hard. She even has two names: Rosalie when she's at the fort with her father and Last Child when she's in the village with her mother. But now a steamboat has carried smallpox into Rosalie's world—and the Mandans have no resistance to the disease. Suddenly the name Last Child is all too real. Set during the smallpox epidemic of 1837, this is the powerful story of a mixed-race girl fighting her way into adulthood against all odds.