Catalog Search Results
1) Roughing it
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English
Description
Mark Twain's semi-autobiographical travel memoir, "Roughing It" was written between 1870-1871 and subsequently published in 1872. Billed as a prequel to "Innocents Abroad", in which Twain details his travels aboard a pleasure cruise through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867, "Roughing It" conversely documents Twain's early days in the old wild west between the years 1861-1867. Employing his characteristically humoristic wit and flare for regional dialect,...
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C. F. McGlashan was the newspaper editor and publisher of the local daily in Truckee, California, the closest town to the Donner Pass. Over the course of an eighteen-month period, McGlashan interviewed the survivors of the Donner Party, gathered artifacts, and amassed an enormous amount of secondary information. He published his findings as serialized articles in his paper, which were later published in book form. Detailed and engaging, History of...
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835—1910), more commonly known under the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, lecturer, publisher and entrepreneur most famous for his novels "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876) and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884). First published in 1897, Twain's travel book "Following the Equator - A Journey Around the World" chronicles his 1895 tour of the British Empire when he was 60 years old. Fundamentally...
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The inimitable Erma Bombeck, returns from abroad with a suitcase full of delightfully witty stories and a passport photo bad enough to cancel most vacations. In this uproarious best-seller, she unleashes her wit on the sublime rituals it takes just to get out the door, and keep the vacation enjoyable once you reach your destination.
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English
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Draws from newspaper memoirs and letters of survivors to tell the story of the Donner Party, who, encouraged by reports of an easy short-cut through the Sierra Nevada mountains, set out from Illinois in 1846 with dreams of the good life in California and become trapped by a blizzard that claims over thirty lives.
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Mercy Falls novels volume 3
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English
Description
In 1910, New York socialite Olivia resists an arranged, socially advantageous marriage. The mysterious death of her sister Eleanor in Northern California is an unhappy but convenient excuse to go West. On the way, she is nearly drowned, and decides to hide her identity when she arrives in Mercy Falls.
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English
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This anecdotal record of a young man's encounter with the Chinese and their way of life offers unique insights to readers. Salzman had majored in Chinese literature at Yale, and his first job after graduation in 1982 was teaching English to students and teachers at Hunan Medical College in Changsha. He met this considerable challenge with sensitivity, humor, and imagination, and was quickly regarded with respect and affection. Salzman had studied...
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English
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Based on true events, this compelling survival story by award-winning novelist Jane Kirkpatrick is full of grit and endurance. Beset by storms, bad timing, and desperate decisions, 8 women, 17 children, and one man must outlast winter in the middle of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1844.
1844. The Stevens-Murphy company left Missouri to be the first wagons into California through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Mostly Irish Catholics, the party sought...
11) Mr. Tucket
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English
Description
In 1848, while on a wagon train headed for Oregon, fourteen-year-old Francis Tucket is kidnapped by Pawnee Indians and then falls in with a one-armed trapper who teaches him how to live in the wild. Fourteen-year-old Francis Tucket is heading west on the Oregon Trail with his family by wagon train. When he receives a rifle for his birthday, he is thrilled that he is being treated like an adult. But Francis lags behind to practice shooting and is captured...
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From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the twentieth century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as 'the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date'-The Boston Globe, Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and...
14) Dreadnought
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Series
Clockwork century volume 3
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English
Description
Mercy Lynch is just a frustrated nurse who wants to see her father before he dies. But she'll have to survive both Union intrigue and Confederate opposition if she wants to make it off the Union-operated, Tacoma-bound "Dreadnought" alive.
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In August 1914, explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew set sail from England for Antarctica, where Shackleton hoped to be the first man to cross the uncharted continent on foot. Five months later, the Endurance-just a day's sail short of its destination-became locked in an island of ice, and its destiny and men became locked in history. For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted until it was finally crushed, and Shackleton and his men drifting...
16) Trail of secrets
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Wagon train matches volume 2
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English
Description
"Stella is the oldest of three sisters and she's got a long history of being the one to protect and provide for her family. When a dangerous threat sent the Fairfax sisters on a wagon train journey west, Stella knew her best bet was to disguise herself as a man to keep herself and her sisters safe. Collin Mason has secrets of his own. And his family isn't short on drama either, not with his troublemaking twin and an older brother about to get hitched....
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It has been nearly five decades since Shirley MacLaine commenced her brave and public commitment to chronicling her personal quest for spiritual understanding. Now Shirley is back - with her most breathtakingly powerful and unique book yet. The Camino is the story of a riveting odyssey that began with a pair of anonymous handwritten letters imploring Shirley to make a difficult pilgrimage along the Santiago de Compostela Camino in Spain. Throughout...
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"It's February, 1852, and all around Chicago, Maggie sees the postings soliciting 'eligible women' to travel to the gold mines of Goosetown. A young seamstress with a small daughter and several painful secrets, she has nothing to lose. So she joins forty-three other women and two pious reverends on the dangerous 2,000-mile journey west. None of them are prepared for the hardships they face on the trek through the high plains, mountains, and deserts,...
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This extraordinary book is the result of Saul Bellow's sojourn in Israel in 1975. A personal record of his stay—his experiences and impressions—as well as a meditation, it crackles with wit and controversy on America's relationship with this embattled country. Using quick sketches and vignettes, Bellow captures the personal opinions, passions, and dreams of several Israelis, and he also adds to these his own reflections on being Jewish in the...