Download or read book White Trash written by Nancy Isenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestseller A New York Times Notable and Critics’ Top Book of 2016 Longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction One of NPR's 10 Best Books Of 2016 Faced Tough Topics Head On NPR's Book Concierge Guide To 2016’s Great Reads San Francisco Chronicle's Best of 2016: 100 recommended books A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2016 Globe & Mail 100 Best of 2016 “Formidable and truth-dealing . . . necessary.” —The New York Times “This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.” —O Magazine In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg upends history as we know it by taking on our comforting myths about equality and uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash. “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters who boosted Trump all the way to the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg. The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds. Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity. We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.

Download or read book It s Not About the Truth written by Don Yaeger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-06-12 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mike Pressler walked into the bottomfloor meeting room of the Murray Building and, as he had done hundreds of times over a sixteen-year career at Duke University, prepared to address his men's lacrosse team. Forty-six players sat in theater-style chairs, all eyes riveted forward. It was 4:35 P.M. on Wednesday, April 5, 2006. The program's darkest hour had arrived in an unexpected and explosive announcement. Pressler, a three-time ACC Coach of the Year, informed his team that its season was canceled and he had "resigned," effective immediately. While his words reverberated off the walls, hysteria erupted. Players cried, confused over a course of events that had spun wildly out of control. What began as an off-campus team party with two hired strippers had accelerated into a rape investigation -- one that exposed prosecutorial misconduct, shoddy police work, an administration's rush to judgment, and the media's disregard for the facts -- dividing both a prestigious university and the city of Durham. Wiping away tears, Pressler demonstrated the steely resolve that helped him win more than two hundred games. For the next thirty minutes, Pressler put his personal situation aside and encouraged his players to stick together. He also made a bold promise: "One day, we will get a chance to tell the world the truth. One day." This is that day. Pressler, who has not done an interview since the saga began, has handed his private diary from those three weeks to New York Times bestselling author Don Yaeger, exposing vivid details, including the day Pressler was fired, when the coach asked Athletic Director Joe Alleva why the school "wasn't willing to wait for the truth" to come out. "It's not about the truth anymore," Alleva said to the coach in a signature moment that said it all. In addition to Pressler, Yaeger interviewed more than seventy-five key figures intimately involved in the case. The result is a tale that defies logic. "It is tough to be one of fifty people who believed a story when fifty million people believed something else," Pressler said. "This wasn't about the truth to many of the others involved. My story is all about the truth."

Download or read book The Untold Story of Everything Digital written by Tom Green and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Untold Story of Everything Digital: Bright Boys, Revisited celebrates the 70th anniversary (1949-2019) of the world "going digital" for the very first time—real-time digital computing’s genesis story. That genesis story is taken from the 2010 edition of Bright Boys: The Making of Information Technology, 1938-1958, and substantially expanded upon for this special, anniversary edition. Please join us for the incredible adventure that is The Untold Story of Everything Digital, when a band of misfit engineers, led by MIT's Jay Forrester and Bob Everett, birthed the digital revolution. The bright boys were the first to imagine an electronic landscape of computing machines and digital networks, and the first to blaze its high-tech trails.

Download or read book The Untold Story of Frankie Silver written by Perry Young and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2005-11 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Untold Story of Frankie Silver" Three days before Christmas, 1831, Frances Silver killed her husband, Charles, with an ax in their cabin in what is now Mitchell County, N.C. She chopped the body into pieces and burned some of it in the fireplace. Three months later, she was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. She was hanged at Morganton, N.C., on July 12, 1833. Frankie's story evolved into ballad and legend, fascinating generation after generation. Perry Deane Young, whose ancestors played a role in the case, began collecting material about it as a teenager. As a young man, he was startled to discover that much of the story he'd been told was actually false. He now has sifted through legend, myth and countless documents to tell the true story of one of Appalachia's best-known tales.

Download or read book Storm Kings written by Lee Sandlin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With 16 pages of black-and-white illustrations In Storm Kings, Lee Sandlin retraces America's fascination and unique relationship to tornadoes and the weather. From Ben Franklin's early experiments, to "the great storm debates" of the nineteenth century, to heartland life in the early twentieth century, Sandlin shows how tornado chasing helped foster the birth of meteorology, recreating with vivid descriptions some of the most devastating storms in America's history. Drawing on memoirs, letters, eyewitness testimonies, and numerous archives, Sandlin brings to life the forgotten characters and scientists that changed a nation and how successive generations came to understand and finally coexist with the spiraling menace that could erase lives and whole towns in an instant.

Download or read book Triumph written by Jeremy Schaap and published by HMH. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This New York Times–bestselling author’s account of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin offers a “vivid portrait not just of Owens but of ’30s Germany and America” (Sports Illustrated). At the 1936 Olympics, against a backdrop of swastikas and goose-stepping storm troopers, an African American son of sharecroppers won a staggering four gold medals, single-handedly falsifying Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy. The story of Jesse Owens at the Berlin games is that of an athletic performance that transcends sports. It is also the intimate and complex tale of one remarkable man’s courage. Drawing on unprecedented access to the Owens family, previously unpublished interviews, and archival research, Jeremy Schaap transports us to Germany and tells the dramatic tale of Owens and his fellow athletes at the contest dubbed the Nazi Olympics. With incisive reporting and rich storytelling, Schaap reveals what really happened over those tense, exhilarating weeks in a “snappy and dramatic” work of sports history (Publishers Weekly). “A remarkable job of tackling a complex subject and bringing it to life.” —John Feinstein “Add[s] even more luster to the indelibly heroic achievements of Jesse Owens.” —Ken Burns

Download or read book Eight Flavors written by Sarah Lohman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique culinary history of America offers a fascinating look at our past and uses long-forgotten recipes to explain how eight flavors changed how we eat. The United States boasts a culturally and ethnically diverse population which makes for a continually changing culinary landscape. But a young historical gastronomist named Sarah Lohman discovered that American food is united by eight flavors: black pepper, vanilla, curry powder, chili powder, soy sauce, garlic, MSG, and Sriracha. In Eight Flavors, Lohman sets out to explore how these influential ingredients made their way to the American table. She begins in the archives, searching through economic, scientific, political, religious, and culinary records. She pores over cookbooks and manuscripts, dating back to the eighteenth century, through modern standards like How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. Lohman discovers when each of these eight flavors first appear in American kitchens—then she asks why. Eight Flavors introduces the explorers, merchants, botanists, farmers, writers, and chefs whose choices came to define the American palate. Lohman takes you on a journey through the past to tell us something about our present, and our future. We meet John Crowninshield a New England merchant who traveled to Sumatra in the 1790s in search of black pepper. And Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old slave who lived on an island off the coast of Madagascar, who discovered the technique still used to pollinate vanilla orchids today. Weaving together original research, historical recipes, gorgeous illustrations and Lohman’s own adventures both in the kitchen and in the field, Eight Flavors is a delicious treat—ready to be devoured.

Download or read book At Dawn We Slept written by Gordon William Prange and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1982 with total page 920 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At 7:53 a.m., December 7, 1941, America's national consciousness and confidence were rocked as the first wave of Japanese warplanes took aim at the U.S. Naval fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. As intense and absorbing as a suspense novel, At Dawn We Slept is the unparalleled and exhaustive account of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. It is widely regarded as the definitive assessment of the events surrounding one of the most daring and brilliant naval operations of all time. Through extensive research and interviews with American and Japanese leaders, Gordon W. Prange has written a remarkable historical account of the assault that-sixty years later-America cannot forget.

Download or read book Get Real written by Mike Walker and published by Phoenix Books. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the olden days.... Roman Emperors threw Christians to the lions! Gladiators battled to the death! Mayans sacrificed virgins! Witches were burned at the stake! Today? We’ve got REALITY TV! The hot, new genre that suddenly snuck up and captured our imagination as: • Cops put us in prowl cars to pursue loonies, thugs and druggies! • Survivor trapped us on an island with naked, flaming fattie Richard Hatch! • American Idol gobbled up American TV—and spat out the bones! How did reality programming “hijack” TV? Read the eye-popping exposé that takes you straight to Reality Hell. Sex…Drugs…Dirty Tricks…and Scandals! Giggle as Paris Hilton & Nicole Richie get barf-y in the sticks and hump-y with the hicks…. Boggle at never-before-revealed secrets behind Simon Cowell’s manly man-boobs…. Gasp as wee Mini-Me takes a public pee…. And much, much more. REALITY TV! The Super Bowl of Voyeurism…. But JENNIFER ANISTON hates it! “I have no interest in that ‘Idol’ shit,” snarls Jen—who sneers that “humiliation and degradation” make contestants look like monkeys playing in poop. Jennifer’s disgust is a touchstone for this book—which is actually dedicated to her by the author. REALITY TV! Love it or hate it…. You know you want to watch!

Download or read book My Journey My Story written by Wendy Blaskovic and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2024-03-18 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In today’s world, we are constantly juggling expectations and trying to manage the many pressures we feel around us. We all have issues, struggles, and habits that we feel guilt or shame about. We all have beliefs and expectations of ourselves and life that hold us back. Society is also always pressuring us to look a certain way, live a certain way, and project happiness and joy through it all. Essentially, we are surrounded by expectation, which can make just being alive a complex, exhausting, and daunting task. For many of us, we are following a path that doesn’t quite fit right. What if you could live every day feeling like you are exactly where you should be? What does being authentic mean, look, and feel like to you? What would it take for you to unravel yourself and discover who you really are? It is this search for authentic living that so many of us seek but have trouble achieving. Wendy Blaskovic struggled with the same thing. She felt a separation between who she truly was and what she was being/doing on the outside. That disconnection manifested in many challenges along the way: an eating disorder, the abuse of drugs and alcohol, self-imposed isolation, overworking. The feeling of living the wrong life was what pushed her to discover who she truly was. As a life-long learner and educator herself, Wendy only truly unravelled from an unsatisfying life while she was writing her master’s thesis on the connection between living, being, and teaching authentically. My Journey. My Story. is a rather unique approach to self-discovery. In this book, she shares her thesis—her journey to healing—so that others may find the kernel within to nurture their own true selves. Though self-discovery is a solitary process, this book helps to reassure you that you are not alone.

Download or read book The Untold History of the Kings and Queens of England written by Brenda Ralph Lewis and published by Cavendish Square Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its reputation as the longest established in Europe, the history of the English monarchy is punctuated by scandal, murders, betrayals, plots, and treason. Since William the Conqueror seized the crown in 1066, England has seen three civil wars; six monarchs have been murdered or executed; the throne of England has been usurped four times, and won in battle three times; and personal scandals and royal family quarrels abound.

Download or read book The Cemetery of Untold Stories written by Julia Alvarez and published by Charco Press. This book was released on 2024-06-04 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary icon Julia Alvarez, the international bestselling author of In the Time of the Butterflies , returns with an inventive and emotional novel about storytelling that will be an instant classic.Alma Cruz, the celebrated writer at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories , doesn’t want to end up like her friend, a novelist who fought so long and hard to finish a book that it threatened her sanity. So when Alma inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, she has the beautiful idea of turning it into a place to bury her untold stories — literally. She creates a graveyard for the manuscript drafts and revisions, and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her.Alma wants her characters to rest in peace. But they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives. Filomena, a local woman hired as the groundskeeper, becomes a sympathetic listener as Alma’s characters unspool their secrets. Among them: Bienvenida, the abandoned wife of dictator Rafael Trujillo, consigned to oblivion by history, and Manuel Cruz, a doctor who fought in the Dominican underground and escaped to the United States.The characters defy their author: they talk back to her and talk to one another behind her back, rewriting and revising themselves. The Cemetery of Untold Stories asks: Whose stories get to be told, and whose buried? Finally, Alma finds the meaning she and her characters yearn for in the everlasting vitality of stories.Readers of Isabel Allende’s Violeta and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will devour Alvarez’s extraordinary new novel about beauty and authenticity, and will be reminded that the stories of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end.

Download or read book The Sultan and the Queen written by Jerry Brotton and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fascinating story of Queen Elizabeth’s secret outreach to the Muslim world, which set England on the path to empire, by The New York Times bestselling author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps We think of England as a great power whose empire once stretched from India to the Americas, but when Elizabeth Tudor was crowned Queen, it was just a tiny and rebellious Protestant island on the fringes of Europe, confronting the combined power of the papacy and of Catholic Spain. Broke and under siege, the young queen sought to build new alliances with the great powers of the Muslim world. She sent an emissary to the Shah of Iran, wooed the king of Morocco, and entered into an unprecedented alliance with the Ottoman Sultan Murad III, with whom she shared a lively correspondence. The Sultan and the Queen tells the riveting and largely unknown story of the traders and adventurers who first went East to seek their fortunes—and reveals how Elizabeth’s fruitful alignment with the Islamic world, financed by England’s first joint stock companies, paved the way for its transformation into a global commercial empire.

Download or read book Gosnell written by Ann McElhinney and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE OPENING IN THEATERS EVERYWHERE “This book is a public service.” — MICHELLE MALKIN, founder of Twitchy and author of Culture of Corruption “Every American needs to read Gosnell.” — DAVID DALEIDEN, the Center for American Progress reporter behind the undercover investigation of Planned Parenthood "Ann and Phelim courageously tell the heart wrenching, shocking story previously ignored, one that every American needs to read." — KATIE PAVLICH, Townhall Editor and Fox News Contributor. He is America’s most prolific serial killer. And yet Kermit Gosnell was no obvious criminal. Through desperate attempts to cover up the truth, the mainstream media revealed exactly how important Kermit Gosnell’s story is. National best seller Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer is a book that rocked America – and now it is a major motion picture! Masquerading as a doctor and an advocate for women’s reproductive health, Kermit Gosnell was purposefully ignored for years. Gosnell reveals that inside his filthy clinic, Gosnell murdered born-alive infants, butchered women, and made a chilling collection of baby feet. Meanwhile, pro-choice politicians kept health inspectors far away. Only when tenacious undercover detective Jim Wood followed a narcotics investigation straight into the clinic did Gosnell’s reign of horror finally come to an end…and the fight for justice begin. Written by investigative journalists Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer, this gripping story premiers October 12 as a major motion picture, starring Dean Cain as Detective Wood. Fans of the movie – and every pro-life American – should dive into this nationally bestselling book for a closer look into the shocking and gruesome crime of the century. Gosnell: The Untold Story of America’s Most Prolific Serial Killer reveals…. How Kermit Gosnell would eat cereal or snack on sandwiches – while performing abortions. How Gosnell carelessly allowed “that Indian woman,” Karnamaya Mongar, to die a bloody death. How Gosnell’s employees admitted to snipping the necks of hundreds of breathing babies. How Tom Ridge, a “pro-choice” Republican governor, put a stop to Pennsylvania Health Department inspections for seventeen years. How Sherry West, the clinic employee whose mental health problems, drug addiction, and Hepatitis C infection, were well known to Gosnell, overdosed, maltreated, and abused patients for years. How new mother and prosecutor Assistant District Attorney Christine Wechsler found herself having to cut open the skulls of forty-seven dead babies during the investigation. How the pro-abortion media blacked out what should have been the trial of the century – and how they were finally shamed into covering the case. Why Kermit Gosnell, unrepentant murderer, expects to be vindicated by history.

Download or read book The Heart of Everything That Is written by Bob Drury and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on Red Cloud's autobiography, which was lost for nearly a hundred years, to present the story of the great Oglala Sioux chief who was the only Plains Indian to defeat the United States Army in a war.

Download or read book Is This the Real Life written by Mark Blake and published by Aurum. This book was released on 2010-10-25 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Queen are unique among the great rock bands. It is nearly twenty years since frontman Freddie Mercury’s death brought the band to an end – yet their fanbase remains massive. They appeal equally to men and women. Their fans are just as likely to be teenagers too young to have been born when the band were still touring and making records (thanks not least to the huge success of the musical We Will Rock You). And their musical history is one of constant reinvention – from heavy metal and prog rock to disco pop, stadium anthems and even jazz influences. Now, Mark Blake, the experienced Mojo journalist who wrote Aurum’s bestselling book on Pink Floyd, has written the definitive history. Having already interviewed the surviving band members over the years, he has now tracked down dozens and dozens of new interviewees, from Queen’s first long-forgotten bass players to Freddie Mercury’s schoolmates in Isleworth, Middlesex, to trace Queen’s long career from their very first gawky performances in St Helens through their sensational stage-stealing appearance on Live Aid to the band’s collaboration with Paul Rodgers at the beginning of the century. Full of fascinating new revelations – especially about the improbable transformation of a shy Asian schoolboy called Bulsara into the outrageous-living hedonist that was Freddie Mercury - this is a book every Queen fan will want to have.

Download or read book Twisted written by Emma Dabiri and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Kirkus Best Book of the Year Stamped from the Beginning meets You Can't Touch My Hair in this timely and resonant essay collection from Guardian contributor and prominent BBC race correspondent Emma Dabiri, exploring the ways in which black hair has been appropriated and stigmatized throughout history, with ruminations on body politics, race, pop culture, and Dabiri’s own journey to loving her hair. Emma Dabiri can tell you the first time she chemically straightened her hair. She can describe the smell, the atmosphere of the salon, and her mix of emotions when she saw her normally kinky tresses fall down her shoulders. For as long as Emma can remember, her hair has been a source of insecurity, shame, and—from strangers and family alike—discrimination. And she is not alone. Despite increasingly liberal world views, black hair continues to be erased, appropriated, and stigmatized to the point of taboo. Through her personal and historical journey, Dabiri gleans insights into the way racism is coded in society’s perception of black hair—and how it is often used as an avenue for discrimination. Dabiri takes us from pre-colonial Africa, through the Harlem Renaissance, and into today's Natural Hair Movement, exploring everything from women's solidarity and friendship, to the criminalization of dreadlocks, to the dubious provenance of Kim Kardashian's braids. Through the lens of hair texture, Dabiri leads us on a historical and cultural investigation of the global history of racism—and her own personal journey of self-love and finally, acceptance. Deeply researched and powerfully resonant, Twisted proves that far from being only hair, black hairstyling culture can be understood as an allegory for black oppression and, ultimately, liberation.