Catalog Search Results
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.7 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
An intimate journey across and in search of America, as told by one of its most beloved writers, in a deluxe centennial edition
In September 1960, John Steinbeck embarked on a journey across America. He felt that he might have lost touch with the country, with its speech, the smell of its grass and trees, its color and quality of light, the pulse of its people. To reassure himself, he set out on a voyage of rediscovery of the American identity,...
In September 1960, John Steinbeck embarked on a journey across America. He felt that he might have lost touch with the country, with its speech, the smell of its grass and trees, its color and quality of light, the pulse of its people. To reassure himself, he set out on a voyage of rediscovery of the American identity,...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.6 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
Sarah Vowell exposes the glorious conundrums of American history and culture with wit, probity, and an irreverent sense of humor. With Assassination Vacation, she takes us on a road trip like no other--a journey to the pit stops of American political murder and through the myriad ways they have been used for fun and profit, for political and cultural advantage. From Buffalo to Alaska, Washington to the Dry Tortugas, Vowell visits locations immortalized...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 10 - AR Pts: 68
Language
English
Formats
Description
The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (Martin Chuzzlewit) was serialized between 1843 and 1844, and is considered to be one of Charles Dickens's last picaresque novels. Raised by his grandfather and namesake, Martin Chuzzlewit is disinherited after revealing his love for his nursemaid, Mary. With no fortune, Martin apprentices himself to the greedy architect Seth Pecksniff and befriends Tom Pinch. Although Dickens considered Martin Chuzzlewit...
Author
Series
Works volume 7
Language
English
Description
Regarded by Charles Dickens as his best novel upon publication, "Martin Chuzzlewit" relates a tale of familial selfishness and eventual moral redemption. First published serially from 1842 to 1844, it is the story of young Martin Chuzzlewit, who has been raised by his grandfather. He has fallen in love with his grandfather's ward and caretaker, the young orphan Mary Graham. Martin's grandfather does not approve and young Martin alienates himself from...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The author of ‘Murder City” and “Down by the River” reflects on the destructive nature of American culture.
Cultivated from the fierce ideas seeded in “Blood Orchid, Blues for Cannibals” is an elegiac reflection on death, pain, and a wavering confidence in humanity's own abilities for self-preservation. After years of reporting on border violence, sex crimes, and the devastation of the land, Bowden struggles to make sense of the many ways...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Abraham Lincoln was our greatest president and perhaps the most influential American who ever lived. But what is his place in our country today? In Land of Lincoln, Andrew Ferguson packs his bags and embarks on a journey to the heart of contemporary Lincoln Nation, where he encounters a world as funny as it is poignant, and a population as devoted as it is colorful. In small-town Indiana, Ferguson drops in on the national conference of Lincoln presenters,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Take the off ramp to the world of Hank Stuever, a truly original writer who captures the humorous and haunting rhythms of modern American lives
Hank Stuever's funny, touching reports take us to everyday places where the increasingly unusual realities of today's world run rampant. Stuever--twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize--calls this terrain the American Elsewhere. He finds it by bypassing Big News and taking off ramps to places where seemingly...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the author of Baseball 100
"A fascinating account of a man who outlasted the ignorance of a nation and persevered to become a beloved figure...One of the best baseball books in years, filled with depth style and clarity." -Cleveland Plain Dealer
An award-winning sports columnist and a baseball legend tour the country to recapture the joys and wonders of two of America's greatest pastimes
When legendary Negro League player Buck O'Neil asked...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.3 - AR Pts: 11
Language
English
Formats
Description
Whether he's fighting fires, passing a kidney stone, hammering down I-80 in an 18-wheeler, or meditating on the relationship between cowboys and God, Michael Perry draws on his rural roots and footloose past to write from a perspective that merges the local with the global. Ranging across subjects as diverse as lot lizards, Klan wizards, and small-town funerals, Perry's writing in this wise and witty collection of essays balances earthiness with poetry,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Sarah Vowell travels through the American past and, in doing so, investigates the dusty, bumpy roads of her own life. In this insightful and funny collection of personal stories Vowell -- widely hailed for her inimitable narratives on public radio's This American Life -- ponders a number of curious questions: Why is she happiest when visiting the sites of bloody struggles like Salem or Gettysburg? Why do people always...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A fascinating account of the greatest road trip in American history.
On July 7, 1919, an extraordinary cavalcade of sixty-nine military motor vehicles set off from the White House on an epic journey. Their goal was California, and ahead of them lay 3,250 miles of dirt, mud, rock, and sand. Sixty-two days later, they arrived in San Francisco, having averaged just five miles an hour. Known as the First Transcontinental Motor Train, this trip was an...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
For more than fifteen years, bestselling author and historian Hampton Sides has traveled widely across the continent exploring the America that lurks just behind the scrim of our mainstream culture. In these two dozen pieces, collected here for the first time, Sides gives us a fresh, alluring, and at times startling America brimming with fascinating subcultures and bizarre characters who could live nowhere else. Following Sides, we crash the redwood...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The book about America de Tocqueville might have written had he spent some time in the nation's smoking sections
Using two cross-country trips on Amtrak as her narrative vehicles, British writer Jenny Diski connects the humming rails taking her into the heart of America with the track-like scars leading back to her own past. As she did in the highly acclaimed Skating to Antarctica, Diski has created a seamless and seemingly effortless amalgam of...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.5 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Formats
Description
A journalist visits five of America's disaster-zone towns and the devoted residents who chose to stay despite hellish conditions.
As a young reporter, Jake Halpern became obsessed with stories about "some outlandish and often hellish place inhabited by a handful of stalwarts who refused to leave." His fellow reporters joked with him and nicknamed him the Bad Homes Correspondent. But, the more he learned about these people, the more he was drawn to...
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: LG - BL: 3.9 - AR Pts: 1
Language
English
Formats
Description
Dr. Horatio Jackson wasn't necessarily a betting man. But in 1903, he overheard a stranger saying that it was just not possible to drive across the United States in one of those unreliable, newfangled automobiles. Jackson disagreed - he believed in the future of the automobile. So he made a $50 bet with the man that he could drive a car from San Francisco to New York. Jackson bought a used Winton automobile, hired a mechanic named Crocker, packed...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Part political disquisition, part travel journal, part self-exploration, Seek is a collection of essays and articles in which Denis Johnson essentially takes on the world.
And not an obliging, easygoing world either; but rather one in which horror and beauty exist in such proximity that they might well be interchangeable. Where violence and poverty and moral transgression go unchecked, even unnoticed. A world of such wild, rocketing energy that, grasping...