A book to challenge the status quo, spark a debate, and get people talking about the issues and questions we face as a country!

This masterfully assembled volume, arranged chronologically, reveals American poets' shifting, conflicting reactions to the war and highlights their efforts to shape U.S. policies and define American attitudes. In his introduction, Mark W. Van Wienen describes the rapid, politically charged responses possible in a culture attuned to poetry. His historical and biographical notes provide a sturdy framework for the study of poetry's role in social activism and change during the "war to end war." The most complete resource of its kind, Rendezvous with Death brings together poetry originally published in little magazines, labor journals, newspapers, and wartime anthologies. Alight with sorrow, grace, silliness, satire, pride, and anger, works by IWW members, sock poets, pacifists, and protestors take their places next to those by Edith Wharton, Alan Seeger, Wallace Stevens, James Weldon Johnson, Amy Lowell, and Claude McKay.

WAR POET is a biography of American poet, Alan Seeger, killed at the battle of the Somme in July 1916 and author of "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," the favorite poem of President John F. Kennedy and one of the most powerful and memorable war poems of all time. When first published in the fall of 1916, Seeger became an instant hero in America and, in Europe, many compared him to the martyred British poet Rupert Brooke. His death was seen by many as "one of the most romantic incidents of the war" and declared his poetry "the authentic voice of ... war's ennobling glory." Theodore Roosevelt called Seeger a "gallant, gifted young man ... A dreamer of dreams, whose deeds made his death nobly good." Even after the Great War ended the memory of Seeger and his poem did not die, with literary allusions to his work and his "rendezvous with death" making their way into the works of such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. With a single poem, Alan Seeger entered the pantheon of history's greatest war poets. Even now, over one hundred years later, it is a work of power and magic which still resonates through generation after generation of Americans. Drawing on new and important archival material, Michael Hill, author of "Elihu Washburne: Diary and Letters of America's Minister to France During the Siege and Commune of Paris", paints a noble and poignant portrait of this little known but fascinating American poet.

Savages, like wild animals, prey on the unsuspecting. It's been almost fourteen years since Ian Christian served his country during the Vietnam War and he's now living a tranquil life with a newfound love. He is working as a successful advertising executive when he receives a disturbing phone call from the widow of an old friend. Apparently, his friend, Roland "The Snake" Cummings has died under suspicious circumstances, thrusting Ian into a fight for survival. The more he investigates, the more he comes to believe Roland was killed by an old enemy-an enemy they have in common. After a murderous three-week spree, this assassin surfaces in Ian's hometown of Minneapolis, where he plans to kill the ex-army sergeant. Ian is one step ahead, though; he wins the first duel of wits, but he's nowhere near safe yet. He'll need the assistance of FBI Agent Ralph Yorkshire to stop this killer for good. Ian and Ralph lure the assassin to a small-town farm in Iowa, where they set a trap. It appears their trap has worked, but maybe not. Someone is still hunting Ian - someone who wants to see him dead. In this prequel to File 871, Ian finds himself moving closer and closer to the truth. A deadly game of cat and mouse begins-and only time will tell who is the hunter and who is the hunted.

[The solemnity of Seeger's work] is thoroughgoing, not a mere literary formality. Alan Seeger, as one who knew him can attest, lived his whole life on this plane, with impeccable poetic dignity; everything about him was in keeping. - T. S. Eliot In this first modern biography of famed "Great War" poet Alan Seeger, Chris Dickon uses previously untapped papers and archives to reveal Seeger as a complex, enigmatic, and fatalistic genius confronting with robust, romantic intensity both his art and the war in which he found himself. From Seeger's affluent childhood in New York and Mexico, to his college days at Harvard with friend John Reed, to Bohemian Greenwich Village and finally the Left Bank of Paris, and his last year in the trenches of Northern France ... Dickon's masterful book tells the tale of Seeger's short life with great depth, clarity, and sympathy. Perhaps most importantly, Dickon shows the expatriate American Seeger as an avid soldier for France long before the time when the United States finally entered the war. In doing so, Dickon not only delivers an eloquent narrative of Seeger's works and days, but also expertly places him in the context of both his time and ours.

HISTORICAL MYSTERIES. A man's body is hauled from the Thames dressed like a commoner but with the face of a gentleman, yet no one has come forward to claim the body. Blackstone enters the world of the aristocracy and tramps the dangerous streets of London's Little Russia- both where English law and order are not welcome.