The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since.Timothy Egan's critically acclaimed account rescues this iconic chapter of American history from the shadows in a tour de force of historical reportage. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, Egan does equal justice to the human characters who become his heroes, “the stoic, long-suffering men and women whose lives he opens up with urgency and respect" (New York Times).In an era that promises ever-greater natural disasters, The Worst Hard Time is “arguably the best nonfiction book yet" (Austin Statesman Journal) on the greatest environmental disaster ever to be visited upon our land and a...

Alexandra Aldrich, a direct descendant of the famous Astor dynasty, grew up in the servants' quarters of Rokeby, the forty-three-room Hudson Valley mansion built by her ancestors. Her childhood was one of bohemian neglect and real privation. But it was fairly stable until the summer of her tenth year, when her father took up with an alluring interloper, Giselle.Alexandra idolized her father, Rokeby's charismatic lord of misrule, who had attended elite private schools as a child but inherited only landed property, not money. To him, she says, "poverty was amusing, a delightful challenge." All of the family's resources--emotional and financial--went to the maintenance of the Astor house and legacy. If the family had sold the house and its 450 acres, they all would have been able to live comfortably. Instead, Alexandra and her parents lived precariously in the grand house, scavenging for the next meal. Her mother, an icy Polish artist, disguised her maternal...

Eight-year-old Alex Pruitt gets stuck at home with the chicken pox. There's nothing to do except play with his telescope, or mess around with the stupid toy car that his cranky neighbor gave him as payment for shoveling her driveway. Then Alex's mother is called to her office, leaving Alex home alone. That's when he looks through the telescope and sees burglars breaking into a neighbor's house! No one believes him, so when the burglars return, it's up to Alex to defend the neighborhood! Then he discovers a U. S. Air Force microchip in his toy car--and realizes that the burglars are really after him!

Subtitled "A Novel of Many Manners," Evelyn Waugh's famous first novel lays waste the "heathen idol" of British sportmanship, the cultured perfection of Oxford and inviolable honor code of English upper classes. Paul Pennyfeather, innocent victim of a drunken orgy, is expelled from Oxford College, which costs him a career in the church. He turns to teaching, frequently the last resort of failures, and at Llanabba Castle meets a friend, Beste-Chetwynde. But Margot, Beste-Chetwynde's mother, introduces him to the questionable delights of high society. Suddenly, and improbably, he is engaged to marry Margot. Just as they are about to say "I do," Scotland Yard arrives and arrests Peter for his involvement in Margot's white slave-trading ring.

A chilling memoir of the Tri-State Crematory incidentIn February 2002, hundreds of abandoned and decayed bodies were discovered at the Tri-State Crematory in rural Georgia, making it the largest mass desecration in modern American history. The perpetrator--a well-respected family man and a former hometown football star--had managed to conceal the horror for five years. Among the bodies found at the Tri-State Crematory was that of Brent Hendricks's father. To quell the psychic disturbance surrounding the desecration, Hendricks embarked on a pilgrimage to the crematory site in Georgia. In A Long Day at the End of the World, he reveals his very complicated relationship with the South as he tries to reconcile his love-hate feelings for the culture with his own personal and familial history there, and his fascination with the disturbed landscape. In achingly beautiful prose, Hendricks explores his fraught relationship with his father--not just the...