The age of Milton

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James W. Taylor

"In this book, based on recently released files from the British Public Record Office, James Taylor covers the history of the 1st Royal Irish Rifles from 1914 to 1919. The battalion (comprised of men from all backgrounds, both north and south) arrived at the front in November 1914, and was involved in the famous Christmas truce of that year. For the next four years it fought almost continuously at places such as Neuve Chapelle, Fromelles, Somme, Pilkem Ridge, Langemarck and Passchendaele, suffering horrific casualties." "In addition to its narrative, the book gives biographical details on nearly 300 officers, including medical officers and chaplains (this information, unfortunately, generally is not available for the enlisted men). A series of appendices complete the picture. Apart from the awards and casualty lists, there are details of the 301 men who were court-martialled, including a transcript of the trial of the only member to be executed."--Jacket.

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Robert Olmstead

Robert Olmstead has peopled his fiction with the laconic, rough-hewn farmers, loggers, and hired hands of rural New England mountain towns where getting drunk, getting into fights, and getting thrown out of bars are the normal rites of passage. In Stay Here with Me he draws directly from his own experience as he journeys back to his youth on his grandfather's dairy farm in New Hampshire to confront the ghosts that continue to afflict him. Authentic, intimate, and intense, Stay Here with Me is about coming of age and leaving home, about the acts of rebellion that free the body even as they bind the soul to a place forever. Olmstead lays bare the acute pain of his father's alcoholism and the shattering decline of his grandfather, the family patriarch. With delicate sensuality, he traces the flowering of his love for a woman who "walks like light would walk if it could." And throughout, there is the land where his family has worked and lived and died for six generations, land at once richly abundant and cruelly demanding.

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Loraine Fletcher

Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) was born into the landed gentry and married off at 15, on the insistence of a hostile stepmother, to a wastrel from a West Indian family whose money came from the slave trade. When her husband's fecklessness forced her to support herself and their nine surviving children alone, she at once became a celebrated poet and novelist. Writing at the time of the French Revolution, she wanted change in England too and commented sharply on the injustice of England's class system, on the legalized looting of Empire and the legal prostitution of arranged marriages. Her Elegiac Sonnets with their lonely landscapes greatly influenced William Wordsworth, while Jane Austen devoured her satirical fiction and adapted her plots and settings for novels of her own. Her personality comes across vividly from her letters, published here for the first time, and from Loraine Fletcher's sympathetic, scholarly narrative.

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Perry C. Bramlett

"John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was a brilliant writer who continues to leave his imaginative imprint on the mind and hearts of readers. He was once called the "creative equivalent of a people," and for more than sixty years his Middle-earth tales have captivated and delighted readers of all ages from all over the world. The Hobbit has long been recognized as a children's fantasy classic, and the heroic romance the Lord of the Rings has been called the most influential story of all time. These stories have sold over 150 million copies worldwide and have been translated into over forty languages, and they, along with works such as the Silmarillion and the History of Middle-Earth, have convinced scores of readers and critics that Tolkien is the master writer of fantasy. Whether you've been a fan for years or you've just recently been hooked by the blockbuster Lord of the Rings movies, "I Am in Fact a Hobbit" is an excellent starting point into the life and work of J.R.R. Tolkien. Book jacket."--Jacket.