For every man and woman, there is a moment still remembered when they left the things of their childhood, when the world presented itself to them in its full splendor and awfulness and they walked out of the garden, into the wider world. Bloom: Stories of the Drama of Coming of Age collects those flashing seconds of maturity and loss, of wonder and disappointment, liberation and responsibility, as they've been written by the greatest names in world literature. With the help of writers ranging from Barbara Kingsolver, Russell Banks, Sherwood Anderson, and Lorrie Moore, to Arundhati Roy, Gregor...

In this brilliantly imagined and neatly plotted Civil War novel (Boston Globe), two battle-scarred companies-one Union, one Confederate-embark on a series of baseball games amid the carnage at Spotsylvania. Wonderfully conceived and eloquently executed (Caleb Carr). Maps.
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Steven Armour is a man at a crossroad. But life takes a dramatic turn for Steven when, on a whim, he joins a local group of Civil War re-enactors. Assigned to immerse himself in the life of Private John Trow, Steven soon finds that his weekends at the living history village on Connecticut's Mt Riga let him escape his everyday disappointments.

The day Walter White was buried in 1955 the New York Times called him the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington. For more than two decades, White, as secretary of the NAACP, was perhaps the nation's most visible and most powerful African-American leader. He won passage of a federal anti-lynching law, hosted one of the premier salons of the Harlem Renaissance, created the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education, and initiated the campaign demanding that Hollywood give better roles to black actors. Driven by ambitions for himself and...

A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture
Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America from Chess Records to Playboy, McDonald s to the University of Chicago. Populated with an...