Ordinary schoolboy Charley leads a normal life: do homework, spend time with Tom, and listen to her mother. However, he has a separate agenda: become the daring and adventurous Captain Charles Stewart. Charley's logs illustrate his journey on the way to the open seas.

"Mary Ann Berry has given us a riveting story [that] transcends the everyday and reveals how one family has written its chapter in the fascinating story of America." William R. Gray Retired writer, editor and publishing executive after 33 years at the National Geographic Society Author of Legacy of the West Charley's Girl tells the tale of a scrappy farm girl in central Oregon fighting her only classmate in front of their one-room schoolhouse--to a feisty octogenarian snowshoeing in Durango, Colorado. Along the way, Mary Alma Christy Sablich also recalls her more than fifty years spent in Chicago and its suburbs as worried wife, nervous mother, and grateful grandma. Charley's Girl offers a dual-perspective on the life that Mary Alma and her daughter (author Mary Ann Berry) share as Berry listens, records, and remembers, too. This country was built on the backs of regular folks like the Christy family who rose to the task with common sense, healthy humor, and simple dignity. It takes courage to live an ordinary life, and Charley's Girl provides one example that has worked for almost a century.

In Alaska a popular belt buckle reads: “Alaska is what America was.” This novel is about 1950 Alaska, when the state’s population was an unbelievably small ninety-eight thousand people, compared to today’s seven hundred thousand plus. And yet Alaska is still “The Last Frontier.” This book is about a time when adventure and challenge were daily in the wilderness as well as in the small towns and cities between the great Mountain Ranges. In particular in the far north where these five years of wilderness intimacy take place, of coming of age and old age, of migrating caribou, free roaming wolf packs, aerial hunters. denning bears and huge moose, constant daylight, constant night, and much, much more.

Noted guitarist John Fahey presents a textual and musicological examination of the music of blues legend Charley Patton. This new edition is enhanced by Fahey's notes from the Grammy-winning, out-of-print box set Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton.