The congruence of four people who have taken different paths to find meaning in their lives.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Illustrations -- A Note on the Language -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Heroic Liaison Pilots of World War II and the Amazing Piper Cub L-4 -- Prologue -- 1 The Pineapple Soldier -- 2 Ninety-Day Wonders and Fair-Haired Boys -- 3 Kauai to Fortification Point -- 4 Tornado Task Force -- 5 Luzon: Lingayen to the Hills -- 6 Over the Hills to Baguio -- 7 Sashaying Around Up North -- Epilogue -- Appendix: History and Specifications of the J-3 Piper Cub -- Notes -- Further Reading -- Index.

Dora Hand was in a deep sleep. Her bare legs were exposed despite her thick blankets, and a mass of long, auburn hair stretched over her pillow and flowed off the side of her flimsy mattress. A framed, charcoal portrait of an elderly couple hung above her bed on the faded wallpaper and kept company with her slumber. The air outside the window next to the picture was still and cold. The distant sound of voices, back-slapping laughter, profanity, and a piano's tinny, repetitious melody wafted down the main thoroughfare in Dodge City, Kansas, and into the small room. Dodge was an all-night town, "the wickedest little city in America." The streets and saloons were always busy. Residents learned to sleep through the giggling, growling, and gunplay of the cowboys and their paramours for hire. Dora’s dreams were seldom disturbed by the commotion, but the smack of a pair of bullets cutting through the walls of the tiny room cut through the routine nightly noises. The first bullet stuck in the dense plaster partition. The second struck Dora on the right side, just under her arm. There was no time for her to object to the injury; no moment for her to cry out or recoil in pain. In the near distance, a horse squealed and its galloping hooves echoed off the street and faded away. Future legends of the Old West, Charlie Bassett, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and Bill Tilghman were the lawmen who patrolled the unruly streets. When a cattle baron’s son fled town after the shooting of the popular saloon singer named Dora Hand, the four men--all experts with a gun who knew the harsh, desertlike surrounding terrain--hunted him down like "Thunder Over the Prairie." The posse's ride across the desolate landscape to seek justice influenced the men's friendship, their careers, and their feelings about the justice system. This account of that event is a fast-paced, cinematic glimpse into the Old West that was.

This is the moving story of high school students in an isolated village at the top of Alaska starting a football team. Against long odds the Whalers had to practice and play in extreme conditions and travel hundreds of miles from home when they went on the "road," flying for each game.They ended their first season victorious, while maintaining their subsistence hunter-gather culture.

Note: This eBook file contains many richly detailed full-color images and makes use of unconventional page layouts. Because of this, readers will be required to zoom in on each page to read the text and see the finer detail of the artwork. [It has not been optimized for devices that display only in black and white.] From the National Book Award finalist Lauren Redniss, author of Radioactive, comes a dazzling fusion of storytelling, visual art, and reportage that grapples with weather in all its dimensions: its danger and its beauty, why it happens and what it means. WINNER OF THE PEN/E. O. WILSON LITERARY SCIENCE WRITING AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, KIRKUS REVIEWS, AND SHELF AWARENESS Weather is the very air we breathe—it shapes our daily lives and alters the course of history. In Thunder & Lightning, Lauren Redniss tells the story of weather and humankind through the ages. This wide-ranging work roams from the driest desert on earth to a frigid island in the Arctic, from the Biblical flood to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Redniss visits the headquarters of the National Weather Service, recounts top-secret rainmaking operations during the Vietnam War, and examines the economic impact of disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Drawing on extensive research and countless interviews, she examines our own day and age, from our most personal decisions—Do I need an umbrella today?—to the awesome challenges we face with global climate change. Redniss produced each element of Thunder & Lightning: the text, the artwork, the covers, and every page in between. She created many of the images using the antiquated printmaking technique copper plate photogravure etching. She even designed the book’s typeface. The result is a book unlike any other: a spellbinding combination of storytelling, art, and science. Praise for Thunder & Lightning “[An] aesthetically charged and deeply researched account . . . a wild rainstorm of a book, pelting the reader with ideas and inspiration.”—Nature “A gorgeous and illuminating illustrated study of weather in all its tempestuous variety . . . Redniss’s combo of fact, folklore, and vibrant etched copperplate prints enthralls.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Eerily beautiful . . . Contains plenty of scientific explanation (including more than a few nods toward global warming), but also far-flung personal stories that illuminate the beauty, wonder and chaos inherent in the elements.”—The New York Times “Magical . . . Redniss has . . . shown us how human beings live with nature—fighting, coexisting, taming, predicting via leech barometer and radar and intuition.”—The New York Times Book Review “[A] twenty-first-century genius . . . The reader willing to put herself fully in Redniss’s hands will be rewarded with a delicious feeling of being enveloped by a phenomenon that eclipses the chiming trivialities of daily life.”—Elle “Redniss is one of the most creative science writers of our time—her combination of beautiful artwork, reporting, and poetic prose brings science to life in ways that words alone simply cannot.”—Rebecca Skloot “Redniss combines her own dual punch of expressive art and impressive erudition to give an entirely new take on all that happens above our heads.”—Adam Gopnik “A strange and wonderful thing, the work of a first-class mind that refuses to submit to any categories or precedent.”—Dave Eggers

In post-apocalyptic America, Selah Chavez is crouched in long grass on a shore littered with the rusted metal remnants of a once-great city. It is the day before her eighteenth Born Remembrance, and she is hunting, though many people refuse to eat animal flesh, tainted by radiation during the Time of Sorrows. What Selah's really after are Landers, mysterious people from a land across the big water who survive the delirium-inducing passage in small boats that occasionally crash against the shoreline. She knows she should leave the capture to the men, but Landers bring a good price from the Company and are especially prized if they keep the markings they arrive with. Everything falls to pieces when the Lander Selah catches is stolen by her brothers--and Selah wakes up the next morning to find the Lander's distinctive mark has suddenly appeared on her own flesh. Once the hunter, Selah is now one of the hunted, and she knows only one person who can help her--Bohdi Locke, the Lander her brothers hope to sell. With evocative descriptions of a strange new world that combines elements of scientific advances, political intrigue, and wilderness survival, Bonnie S. Calhoun weaves a captivating tale of a world more like our own than we may want to admit.