Those Who Have Borne the Battle: A History of America's Wars and Those Who Fought Them

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Above the River: The Complete Poems

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To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight

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"For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life."

So wrote a quiet young Ohioan in 1900, one in an ancient line of men who had wanted to fly -- men who wanted it passionately, fecklessly, hopelessly. But now, at the turn of the twentieth century, Wilbur Wright and a scattered handful of other adventurers conceived a conviction that the dream lay at last within reach, and in a headlong race across ten years and two continents, they competed to conquer the air. James Tobin, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography, has at last given this inspiring story its definitive telling.

For years Wright and his younger brother, Orville, experimented in utter obscurity, supported only by their exceptional family. Meanwhile, the world watched as the imperious Samuel Langley, armed with a rich contract from the U.S. War Department and all the resources of the Smithsonian Institution, sought to scale up his unmanned models to create the first manned flying machine. But while Langley became obsessed with flight as a problem of power, the Wrights grappled with it as a problem of balance. Thus their machines took two very different paths -- his toward oblivion, theirs toward the heavens.

As Tobin relates, the Wrights' 1903 triumph at Kitty Hawk, however hallowed in American lore, was ill-reported and disbelieved. So, while the two brothers struggled to transform their delicate contraption into a practical airplane, others moved to overtake them as the leading pioneers of flight. In France, rivals scoffed at the Wrightseven as they rushed to imitate them. At home, the great inventor Alexander Graham Bell seized the fallen banner of his friend Langley and thrust it into the hands of a circle of young daredevils, urging them to get into the air. From this group emerged the motorcyclist Glenn Curtiss, fastest man in the world, whose aerial challenge to Wilbur Wright culminated in an unforgettable showdown over New York harbor.

"To Conquer the Air" is a hero's tale of overcoming obstacles within and without that plumbs the depths of creativity and character. With a historian's accuracy and a novelist's eye, Tobin has captured the interplay of remarkable personalities at an extraordinary moment in our history. In the centennial year of human flight, "To Conquer the Air" is itself a heroic achievement.

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Address Unknown: The Homeless in America

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Homelessness in America has grown from a minor problem in isolated areas of a few big cities into a near epidemic. Today, scarcely any American city of any appreciable size lacks homeless people. Homeless shelters and programs have become as essential and as commonplace as police protection or water and sewage treatment. What to do for, with, or about the homeless is a nagging and complex social policy issue debated at all levels of government.

Address Unknown emphasizes the large-scale social and economic forces that have priced an increasingly large segment of the urban poor completely out of the housing market. Seen in this light, the problem of homelessness is that there are too many extremely poor people competing for too few aff ordable housing units. Th e nation would be facing a formidable homelessness problem even if there were no alcoholics, no drug addicts, no deinstitutionalized mentally ill people--no personal pathologies of any kind. Rather than a choice, homelessness is the result of housing markets that have very little to off er to extremely poor people.

The plight of the homeless is very visible, and Address Unknown is one of the fi rst major investigative studies into the nature and multiple causes of the problem. Wright considers demographic, economic, sociological, and social policy antecedents of homelessness. A hallmark is the delineation of the range of factors involved, including deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, urban renewal, the decrease in lower-skilled jobs, changing political priorities, and bureaucratic obstacles to providing existing social services to the homeless population.

James D. Wright is a professor in the department of sociology at the University of Central Florida. He has published seventeen books including Armed and Considered Dangerous and Under the Gun as well as many journal articles. His current research interests include violence, urban poverty and inequality, health and the homeless population, and the "divorce reform" movement.

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The Branch Will Not Break: Empty-Grave Extended Edition

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Pulitzer Prize-winning poet James Wright shines in the Empty-Grave Extended Edition of THE BRANCH WILL NOT BREAK.

This beautifully bound 6" by 9" trade paperback also contains a complete word-frequency report for readers that wish to delve further into interpretation.

The publisher has done everything possible to ensure the main body of text in this book matches its original 1963 release; this includes page size, vertical and horizontal alignment of each individual poem and its separate stanzas, verses that span multiple pages, and non-traditional use of white space.

In these forty-three poems the wordsmith weaves together visions of nature and the decay of American life in true form. Readers can further dig their teeth into interpretation and theme via the comprehensive Word Frequency Report available only in this Empty-Grave release.

Complete list of poems:
As I Step Over a Puddle at the End of Winter, I Think of an Ancient Chinese Governor
Goodbye to the Poetry of Calcium
In Fear of Harvests
Three Stanzas From Goethe
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
The Jewel
In the Face of Hatred
Fear Is What Quickens Me
A Message Hidden in an Empty Wine Bottle That I Threw into a Cully of Maple Trees One Night at an Indecent Hour
Stages on a Journey Westward
How My Fever Left
Miners In Ohio

Two Poems About President Harding
Eisenhower's Visit to Franco, 1959
In Memory of a Spanish Poet

The Undermining of the Defense Economy
Twilights
Two Hangovers
Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me
Two Horses Playing in the Orchard
By a Lake in Minnesota
Beginning
From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower
March
Trying to Pray
Two Spring Charms
Spring Images
Arriving in the Country Again
In the Cold House
Snowstorm in the Midwest
Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage of the Moon: Christmas, 1960
American Wedding
A Prayer to Escape From the Market Place
Rain
Today I Was Happy, So I Made this Poem
Mary Bly
To the Evening Star: Central Minnesota
I Was Afraid of Dying
A Blessing
Milkweed
A Dream of Burial

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Collected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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A collection of authentic, profound and beautiful poems.

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