Meet Lucy E., a tough, driven woman, born in the mountain town of Mount Holly, Vermont about 1826. This is the story, based on fact, of her survival through increasingly hard times in Vermont and New Hampshire, beginning with the painful deaths of her father and husband, and her fateful second marriage to a Civil War veteran who turned out to be a drinker, gambler, arsonist and abusive husband, and who ended up in the state prison in Concord, New Hampshire. Through all of the roughness of her life, including three more hsubands, she persevered in her goals to be a landowner and farmer like her father." --Publisher's description.

After spending his first twenty years with his supportive working class parents in a village largely run by middle-class professional values, Richard decides to move away. As a young boy growing up surrounded by farming people, including his father, two uncles and many other family members, his mother had always encouraged him not to end up as a farm worker. After a short spell working for a local furniture company, and running away with an underage girl to Scotland, he goes to sea for a while. Afterwards, slowly but surely, he begins to develop an enjoyable and productive career in forestry, working around the country, each time moving to a higher and better paid job. After nearly thirty years away from his place of birth, although he does visit his family and friends during that time, he decides to move back to where his parents were living, where he develops a new career and finds a new partner. But perhaps he had paid a high price for leaving his home village in the first place!

Although separated from the modern reader by a full century, the First World War continues to generate controversy and interest as the great event upon which modern history pivoted. Not only did the war cull the European peoples of some of their best and brightest, it also led to the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman and Russian empires, and paved the way for the Second World War. This thought-provoking book explores ten alternate scenarios in which the course of the war is changed forever. How would the war have changed had the Germans not attacked France but turned their main thrust against Russia; had the Greeks joined the allies at Gallipoli; or had the British severed the communications of the Ottoman Empire at Alexandretta? What if there was a more decisive outcome at Jutland; if the alternative plans for the Battle of the Somme in 1916 had been put into effect; or if the Americans intervened in 1915, rather 1917? Expertly written by leading military historians, this is a compelling and credible look at what might have been.

A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: Foreign Affairs, Bloomberg In March 1944, as World War II raged and America’s next presidential election loomed, Franklin D. Roosevelt was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Driven by a belief that he had a duty to see the war through to the end, Roosevelt concealed his failing health and sought a fourth term—a term that he knew he might not live to complete. With unparalleled insight and deep compassion, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Joseph Lelyveld delves into Roosevelt’s thoughts, preoccupations, and motives during his last sixteen months, which saw the highly secretive Manhattan Project, the roar of D-Day, the landmark Yalta Conference and FDR’s hopes for a new world order—all as the war, his presidency, and his life raced in tandem to their climax. His Final Battle delivers an extraordinary portrait of this famously inscrutable man, who was full of contradictions but a consummate leader to the very last.