Eskimos and Explorers

Sample

David Thomson

"At once examining and experiencing Nevada, Thomson finds its people, its landscape, and the unexpected questions it inspires equally provocative. He shows us the historical Nevada - a classic Wild West, attracting Spanish missionaries, Mormons, uprooted Native Americans, explorers, and silver miners - and the contemporary influx of cultists, druggies, survivalists, and fortune hunters whose quests lead directly to the gaming table."--BOOK JACKET. "We see Nevada as a place of no-holds-barred experimentation, both social (gambling, prostitution, easy divorce, no taxes) and scientific (nuclear testing and storage of nuclear waste). We see suburbanites rubbing shoulders with sybarites; the natural beauty of Lake Tahoe, shadowed by the financial edifice of tourism; criminals, entertainers, and hotel impresarios sharing dreams of glory (and the memory of Bugsy Siegel and Frank Sinatra)."--BOOK JACKET. "In Nevada is a revelation of the gambler's mix of hope and anxiety, of the isolation and closeness, the beauty and banality, the fact and fancy, at the heart of the state - and the state of mind - of Nevada."--BOOK JACKET.

Sample

Bland Simpson

Simpson mixes personl experience, travel narrative, oral history and natural history to produce an intriguing portrait of the Great Dismal Swamp and its people.

Sample

Eric Ross

"Eric Ross uses his fictional character, Ian Alexander Bell Robertson, to recount the story of life in the Canadas during 1841. ... Throughout the book, Ross has interspersed snippets of information and illustrations to supplement Robertson's writings. Scrupulously researched and easily accessible, Full of Hope and Promise will interest anyone wishing to know more about everyday life in Upper and Lower Canada at the time of the 1841 Union."--Jacket.

Sample

Harriet Martineau

"This new abridgement of the original 1838 edition offers a view of Jacksonian America. Here are Martineau's condemnation of slavery and her championship of abolition and women's rights; her incisive portraits of Jackson, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Garrison, Emerson, and the Beechers; her observations of American schools, asylums, colleges, and prisons; and her eyewitness accounts of a presidential assassination attempt, a lynch mob, a slave auction, a Quaker wedding, and a Harvard commencement. Historian Daniel Feller, author of The Jacksonian Promise, introduces the narrative, identifies the major characters, and provides an index for easy use."--BOOK JACKET.