Examining the lives of individuals - freedmen, planters, and merchants - Willis explores the reciprocal interests of former slaves and former slaveholders. He shows how, in a cruel irony replicated in other areas of the South, the backbreaking work that African Americans did to clear, settle, and farm the land away from the river made the land ultimately too valuable for them to retain.

Includes Q & A with author and book club questions in unnumbered pages at end of work.

Chronicles the life of Charles Pinckney, discussing his childhood on his family's Charleston plantation, service in the state militia during the Revolution, involvement in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, and influence on the country's development.

The New York Times bestseller “The Shadow of the Wind is ultimately a love letter to literature, intended for readers as passionate about storytelling as its young hero.” —Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice) “One gorgeous read.” —Stephen King Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.

[Bookstrand Fantasy Romance, M/F, HEA] Benji has lived alone at his family farm for years. His wife passed away years ago, leaving only his best friend Charlie the quarter horse as his companion. Lexi is on the run from her abusive father. With no destination in mind, she takes off in the middle of a heavy snowstorm, landing right in the middle of an apple orchard. Benji finds the lost angel sleeping beneath one of his prized apple trees and takes her home. With no clothes, shoes, or shawl, how will she ever survive in the world? Benji is confused by such a free-spirited soul. But once she's there, he knows he can't ever let her go. He can't go back to his life of silence, with no sunshine there to share it with. Can he convince Lexi to stay and be a part of his future? Or will she run away? A BookStrand Mainstream Romance

Step into colonial New England, 1752, and meet James Pyper: Farmer, Friend, Adventurer. With the death of his mother, eleven year old James has found himself helping his father keep the family farm running, but still manages to find time for exploration with his best friend, Benjamin Huckin. Their adventures and choices together will lead them in strange roles: as stowaways on a gundalow, befriending an Albanian warrior, and stuck in the mud at a local pig wrasslin contest. Full of period detail and interesting historical facts, Forgotten by Time celebrates the joys of a simpler time, while shedding light on some of the difficulties - revolution, oppression, poverty, disease - faced by the hardy families making their homes in colonial New England.

It is a widely known but little considered fact that Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel were best friends for the last decade and a half of Einstein's life. The two walked home together from Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study every day; they shared ideas about physics, philosophy, politics, and the lost world of German science in which they had grown up. By 1949, Godel had produced a remarkable proof: In any universe described by the Theory of Relativity, time cannot exist . Einstein endorsed this result-reluctantly, since it decisively overthrew the classical world-view to which he was committed. But he could find no way to refute it, and in the half-century since then, neither has anyone else. Even more remarkable than this stunning discovery, however, was what happened afterward: nothing. Cosmologists and philosophers alike have proceeded with their work as if Godel's proof never existed -one of the greatest scandals of modern intellectual history. A World Without Time is a sweeping, ambitious book, and yet poignant and intimate. It tells the story of two magnificent minds put on the shelf by the scientific fashions of their day, and attempts to rescue from undeserved obscurity the brilliant work they did together.