Clifford Trafzer's disturbing new work, Death Stalks the Yakama, examines life, death, and the shockingly high mortality rates that have persisted among the fourteen tribes and bands living on the Yakama Reservation in the state of Washington. The work contains a valuable discussion of Indian beliefs about spirits, traditional causes of death, mourning ceremonies, and memorials. More significant, however, is Trafzer's research into heretofore unused parturition and death records from 1888-1964. In these documents, he discovers critical evidence to demonstrate how and why many reservation people died in "epidemics" of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and heart disease. Death Stalks the Yakama, takes into account many variables, including age, gender, listed causes of death, residence, and blood quantum. In addition, analyses of fetal and infant mortality rates as well as crude death rates arising from tuberculosis, pneumonia, heart disease, accidents, and other causes are presented. Trafzer argues that Native Americans living on the Yakama Reservation were, in fact, in jeopardy as a result of the "reservation system" itself. Not only did this alien and artificial culture radically alter traditional ways of life, but sanitation methods, housing, hospitals, public education, medicine, and medical personnel affiliated with the reservation system all proved inadequate, and each in its own way contributed significantly to high Yakama death rates.

One of America's most dramatic environmental battles is unfolding in southern West Virginia. Coal companies are blasting the mountains, decapitating them for coal. The forested ridge tops and valley streams of Appalachia—one of the country's natural treasures—are being destroyed, along with towns and communities. An entire culture is disappearing, and to this day, most Americans have no idea it's happening. Michael Shnayerson first traveled to the coal fields four years ago, on assignment for Vanity Fair. There he met an inspiring young lawyer named Joe Lovett, who was fighting mountaintop removal in court with a series of brilliant and daring lawsuits. He also met Judy Bonds, whose grassroots group, the Coal River Mountain Watch, was speaking out in a region where talking truth to power was both brave and dangerous. The two had joined forces to take on Massey Energy, the largest and most aggressive of the coal companies, and its swaggering, notorious chairman, Don Blankenship. Coal River is Shnayerson's account of this dramatic struggle. From courtroom to boardroom, forest clearing to factory floor, Shnayerson gives us a novelistic and compelling portrait of the people who risked their reputations and livelihoods in the fight against King Coal.

Death Stalks the Fire Child is the fourth and final book of the Fire Child series. In Return of the Fire Child, T.J. grudgingly accepts his destiny as the Fire Child, protector of the Inner World, a civilization located within the core of the Earth. Along with his three teen friends, Scott, Chad and Crash, he returns to the land of his birth to battle the evil that threatens not only his world, but also the surface world where he had been raised. Pursued by a Gorgon and her legion of cats, his friends soon learn that the Inner World is a land filled with strange creatures and dangerous beasts such as the boys had never imagined. In Quest of the Fire Child, T.J. seeks to establish himself as the protector of his world and faces new dangers from ruthless men and creatures that wish to destroy him. Once again he calls upon his three friends who, along with the wolf boy, Criton, risk their lives attempting to bring peace to a world in turmoil. It is during this time that T.J. learns that Scott is his half-brother and the bond between the two boys becomes stronger than ever as they see how their fates are intertwined. Fortress of the Fire Child finds T.J. and his friends facing further dangers in the form of Aquatis, a ruthless shape shifter who once battled the Fire Child's father and who seeks revenge against the son. Intrigue also continues as Mathias, T.J.'s arch enemy, reappears and attempts to regain the throne of Stonemass, the chief city of the Inner World. Additional danger ensues as an army of mercenaries attempts to attack the Fortress, the home of the Fire Child. Now in Death Stalks the Fire Child, T.J. finds himself battling enemies on two separate fronts and he must rely upon the strength of his friends and their newly acquired powers to face one enemy while he faces the other. While Scott and the others hurry to protect Stonemass from a horde of mutant lizards, T.J. travels to the swampland to face the evil Slurpus who controls Liviatin, the most powerful creature the Fire Child has ever had to face.

One of Jeffery Farnol's vigorous novels of adventures in Georgian England - gravitating from the rurality of Kent and Sussex to the stews and fine houses of London - involving Mr. Jasper Shrig. Plot: mysterious young lady is rescued from the Thames. She then disappears, and a new young lady meets and makes (platonic?) relations with the hero. Great adventures with real peril ensue, the hero falls out with everyone important to him, and dastardly baddies with (of course) foreign overtones do their damnedest.

Includes more than forty true stories of life and death adventure in Alaska's wilderness, including such topics as avalanches, animal attacks, aircraft disasters, and fishing, hunting, and kayaking accidents

For thousands of years, Pacific Northwest Indians fished, bartered, socialized, and honored their ancestors at Celilo Falls, part of a nine-mile stretch of the Long Narrows on the Columbia River. Although the Indian community of Celilo Village survives to this day as Oregon's oldest continuously inhabited town, with the construction of The Dalles Dam in 1957, traditional uses of the river were catastrophically interrupted. Most non-Indians celebrated the new generation of hydroelectricity and the easy navigability of the river "highway" created by the dam, but Indians lost a sustaining center to their lives when Celilo Falls was inundated. Death of Celilo Falls is a story of ordinary lives in extraordinary circumstances, as neighboring communities went through tremendous economic, environmental, and cultural change in a brief period. Katrine Barber examines the negotiations and controversies that took place during the planning and construction of the dam and the profound impact the project had on both the Indian community of Celilo Village and the non-Indian town of The Dalles, intertwined with local concerns that affected the entire American West: treaty rights, federal Indian policy, environmental transformation of rivers, and the idea of "progress."