Recommendations based on "As I Lay Dying"

If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.

"Sets out to give an honest and thorough account of this extraordinary man and does so. . . . Arguably the best [biography of Stonewall]." ―Washington Post Book World The charismatic Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, who began his military career in the Mexican War, earned his great fame in the Civil War in a series of brilliantly fought battles. He was given the name Stonewall at the First Battle of Bull Run, when his brigade faced overwhelming odds but held the line. Byron Farwell's engrossing narrative reveals Stonewall Jackson both as a military genius and as a quirky, dark personality radically different from the storybook version that grew up after Jackson's untimely death at Chancellorsville in 1863.

Augustus

Essays on Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the working lives of two writers accompanying short stories about the lower class in America.

Until the U.S. Army claimed 300-plus square miles of hardscrabble land to build Fort Hood in 1942, small communities like Antelope, Pidcoke, Stampede, and Okay scratched out a living by growing cotton and ranching goats on the less fertile edges of the Texas Hill Country. While a few farmers took jobs with construction crews at Fort Hood to remain in the area, almost the entire population—and with it, an entire segment of rural culture—disappeared into the rest of the state.In Harder than Hardscrabble, oral historian Thad Sitton collects the colorful and frequently touching stories of the pre-Fort Hood residents to give a firsthand view of Texas farming life before World War II. Accessible to the general reader and historian alike, the stories recount in vivid detail the hardships and satisfactions of daily life in the Texas countryside. They describe agricultural practices and livestock handling as well as life beyond work: traveling peddlers, visits to towns, country schools, medical practices, and fox hunting. The anecdotes capture a fast-disappearing rural society—a world very different from today's urban Texas.

George MacDonald Fraser's famous Flashman series appearing for the first time in B-format with an exciting new series style, ready to please his legions of old fans and attract armies of new ones. In this volume of The Flashman Papers, Flashman, the arch-cad and toady, matches his wits, his talents for deceit and malice, and above all his speed in evasion against the most brilliant European statesman and against the most beauiful and unscrupulous adventuress of the era. From London gaming-halls and English hunting-fields to European dungeons and throne-rooms, he is involved in a desperate succession of escapes, disguises, amours and (when he cannot avoid them) hand-to-hand combats. All the while, the destiny of a continent rests on his broad and failing shoulders.

From the bestselling author Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG comes an autobiographical account of his exploits as a World War II pilot! Superb stories, daring deeds, fantastic adventures! Learn all about Roald Dahl's encounters with the enemy, his worldwide travels, the life-threatening injuries he sustained in a plane accident, and the rest of his sometimes bizarre, often unnerving, and always colorful adventures. Told with the same irresistible appeal that has made Roald Dahl one of the world's best-loved writers, Going Solo brings you directly into the action and into the mind of this fascinating man.

A brief biography of the artist and sculptor accompanies fifteen color reproductions and critical interpretations of his work.

When it was first published, critic after critic called this brilliant study of rock 'n' roll and American culture the best book on the subject. Now, firmly established as a classic, the fourth edition features a completely new introduction as well as an entirely updated discography that includes CDs for the first time.

Graham Peck (1914-1968) made his first trip to China in 1935 and served with the U.S. Office of War Information in China throughout the 1940s. His memoir, Two Kinds of Time, first published in 1950, is witty and eloquent in both its words and the drawings with which it is lovingly illustrated. Long out of print in its unabridged version, this engagingly written eye-witness narrative of China on the eve of revolution remains an important source of historical and political information. Robert A. Kapp's new Introduction analyzes the book's original contribution and highlights its relevance to issues in the twenty-first century world.