Mercer's belles

Sample

Paul F. Pinsky

"From New York to Los Angeles, Chicago to San Antonio, inner city to penthouse row, pristine park to post-industrial wasteland, the author cycles the streets and paths of fifty of America's largest urban outposts. Part bike-travelogue, part journey through urban history, Biking Through the 'Hoods provides a panoramic, yet ground level, picture of urban America, past and present. You don't need to be an urban cyclist to appreciate Biking Through the 'Hoods, but if you are one, you'll recognize the trials and travails, and occasional triumphs, of navigating the nation's car-dominated cityscapes on two wheels."--P. [4] of cover.

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Caroline C. Leighton

First person account of Western travel. Between 1865 and 1881 the author travelled extensively along the northwest coast describing localities, natural history, native customs and missionary activities. Her comments on the Chinese community in San Francisco are particularly interesting.

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Lesley Hazleton

Leaving her home in Seattle in mid-summer to drive "the long way round" to the Detroit auto show, Lesley Hazleton embarks on a five-month journey to visit the holy places for cars - where they are raced, displayed, crashed, tested, and made - as she seeks to understand our deep fascination with automobiles. A committed environmentalist in thrall to the internal combustion engine, Hazleton explores her own worship of speed during assaults on the landspeed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats; negotiates the famed off-road Rubicon Trail across the Sierras; finds the exact spot where James Dean died in his Porsche Spyder; and attends a crash conference in Albuquerque, where her discovery that "when metal and flesh collide, metal always wins," sheds light on our erotic fascination with the automobile. She crushes cars in a Houston junkyard; works the nightshift at the Saturn plant in Tennessee; and in Detroit, turns away from the glitz and gleam of new metal to watch what happens when a car is driven into a million pounds of concrete. Along the way she corresponds with a class of eight-year-olds, befriends a priest who fixes his parishioners' cars, and encounters people and places where cars are created, worshiped, celebrated, and even feared. Halfway through this extraordinary adventure, Hazleton's father, the man who taught her to drive, dies suddenly, and her trip becomes a journey of grief and memory, a deeply personal odyssey that after thirteen thousand miles almost costs her her own life on an ice-bound highway. What begins as a romance takes her deep into the heartland of obsession, evolving into a meditation on life and death as she delves into the soul of a nation and its machine.

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Willie Morris

"This book, finished a few weeks before his death in August 1999, circles back home where he started. To live it and discover it one more time, he and his son David Rae take us on a trip through contemporary Mississippi." "Who could express so ardently a comprehension of the Mississippi landscape? Who could capture so unerringly the state's contrasting and often contradictory faces? For his readers the answer is Willie Morris. For Morris it is his photographer son.". "Surveying the familiar yet always strangely evocative panorama that became his literary terrain, My Mississippi contemplates the realities of the present day, assesses the most vital concerns of the citizens, gauges how the state has changed, and beholds what Mississippi is like at the beginning of a new century. This southern homeland to which Morris returned after terminating his career as a New York editor remained for him a tantalizing mystery, the touchstone for all his thoughts, and one of the last unique places in America. For Morris, despite its flaws, Mississippi is beloved."--BOOK JACKET.