From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a “heartfelt and refreshing” (New York Times) memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. This new edition updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope. Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems her home and her people, while also cataloging the source of her childhood hope: the Edenic longleaf pine forests, where orchids grow amid wiregrass at the feet of widely spaced, lofty trees. Today, the forests exist in fragments, cherished and threatened, and the South of her youth is gradually being overtaken by golf courses and suburban development. A contemporary classic, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is a clarion call to protect the cultures and ecologies of every childhood.

Original publication and copyright date: 2009.

The largest edible fruit native to the United States tastes like a cross between a banana and a mango. It grows wild in twenty-six states, gracing Eastern forests each fall with sweet-smelling, tropical-flavored abundance. Historically, it fed and sustained Native Americans and European explorers, presidents, and enslaved African Americans, inspiring folk songs, poetry, and scores of place names from Georgia to Illinois. Its trees are an organic grower’s dream, requiring no pesticides or herbicides to thrive, and containing compounds that are among the most potent anticancer agents yet discovered. So why have so few people heard of the pawpaw, much less tasted one? In Pawpaw—a 2016 James Beard Foundation Award nominee in the Writing & Literature category—author Andrew Moore explores the past, present, and future of this unique fruit, traveling from the Ozarks to Monticello; canoeing the lower Mississippi in search of wild fruit; drinking pawpaw beer in Durham, North Carolina; tracking down lost cultivars in Appalachian hollers; and helping out during harvest season in a Maryland orchard. Along the way, he gathers pawpaw lore and knowledge not only from the plant breeders and horticulturists working to bring pawpaws into the mainstream (including Neal Peterson, known in pawpaw circles as the fruit’s own “Johnny Pawpawseed”), but also regular folks who remember eating them in the woods as kids, but haven’t had one in over fifty years. As much as Pawpaw is a compendium of pawpaw knowledge, it also plumbs deeper questions about American foodways—how economic, biologic, and cultural forces combine, leading us to eat what we eat, and sometimes to ignore the incredible, delicious food growing all around us. If you haven’t yet eaten a pawpaw, this book won’t let you rest until you do.

**Nonfiction Book Awards Gold Winner and Winner of the Illumination Book Awards' 2018 Gold Enduring Light Medal** The Powers is written for people who have a drive to become highly successful in their chosen field of endeavor. Throughout this revised edition, you will meet many who came from ordinary backgrounds to achieve extraordinary things in a variety of pursuits. They came from different circumstances with a wide range of gifts as well as many personal limitations. All have experienced failure and some were serial failures. The Powers they discovered within themselves are the same Powers Erwin has identified and discusses. Through study, they can become your Powers. While everyone has different dreams and goals, everyone also possesses their own set of Powers, even if some are hidden deep within. Erwin has found that intellectual curiosity, developing a grand vision, setting clear goals, practicing persistence, and other concepts included in this book are common traits among the most successful people. After years of studying works by great authors such as Napoleon Hill, Norman Vincent Peale, and Dale Carnegie, befriending highly successful people, and exploring an experimental learning style, Erwin has found common traits that not only create success but also allow one to go from ordinary to extraordinary. Mark Erwin has mentored hundreds of people, and has collected life-changing lessons throughout his journey that brought him from a sixteen-year-old in a jail cell to a multimillionaire before he was forty. In The Powers, he shares personal stories, philosophical and practical advice, and a one-of-a-kind collection of wisdom and insights from some of the most successful people in history, many of whom are his friends. This book creates the blueprint for you to become exceptionally successful and maps out how using the Powers, in combination with your unique personality and emotional intelligence, will help you stand out and make a difference in whatever area you choose to pursue. Read and reread this book and your true path for success on your terms will be revealed, and you will know exactly how to make your dreams come true.

Rarely accessible beyond the limits of its people, Ojibway mythology is as rich in meaning and mystery, as broad, as deep, and as innately appealing as the mythologies of Greece, Rome, Egypt, and other civilizations. In Ojibway Heritage, Basil Johnston sets forth the broad spectrum of his people’s life, legends, and beliefs. Stories to be read, enjoyed, dwelt on, and freely interpreted, their authorship is perhaps most properly attributed to the tribal storytellers who have carried on the oral tradition which Basil Johnston records and preserves in this book.