JOYCE'S MOTTO has had much fame but few apostles. Among them, there has been Jack Gilbert and his orthodoxy, a strictness that has required of this poet, now in the seventh decade of his severe life, the penalty of his having had almost no fame at all. In an era that puts before the artist so many sleek and official temptations, keeping unflinchingly to a code of "silence, exile, and cunning" could not have been managed without a show of strictness well beyond the reach of the theater of the coy. The "far, stubborn, disastrous" course of Jack Gilbert's resolute journey--not one that would promise in time to bring him home to the consolations of Penelope and the comforts of Ithaca but one that would instead take him ever outward to the impossible blankness of the desert--could never have been achieved in the society of others. What has kept this great poet brave has been the difficult company of his poems--and now we have, in Gilbert's third and most silent book, what may be, what must be, the bravest of these imperial accomplishments.

The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction. A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, Aldred Leith, a brave and brilliant soldier, finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. Helen Driscoll, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia's coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.

The Great Fire of 1871 was one of most colossal disasters in American history. Overnight, the flourshing city of Chicago was transformed into a smoldering wasteland. The damage was so profound that few people believed the city could ever rise again.By weaving personal accounts of actual survivors together with the carefully researched history of Chicago and the disaster, Jim Murphy constructs a riveting narrative that recreates the event with drama and immediacy. And finally, he reveals how, even in a time of deepest dispair, the human spirit triumphed, as the people of Chicago found the courage and strength to build their city once again.

This is the definitive fire history of Oregon Coast Range forests, woodlands, savanna's, and grasslands for the past 500 years. Its comprehensive research methods, references, and recommendations serve as a model for other landscape-scale fire histories and is primarily why it is being updated and reprinted at this time.

A book of poetry by one author

"In the summer of 1910, wildfires scorched millions of acres in the West, darkened skies in New England, and deposited soot on the ice of Greenland. The flames ravaged pristine wilderness along with farms, towns, and mining camps, culminating in the deaths of seventy-eight firefighters in the Big Blowup along the Montana-Idaho border. The blazes also illuminated a national debate raging about fire policy. Year of the Fires is the fascinating story of that catastrophic year and its pivotal role in establishing how we deal with forest fire in this country. Everything from the tools firefighters carry to strategies of land management was shaped by the fires of 1910. Stephen Pyne, acclaimed by the Journal of American History as America?s foremost historian of fire, not only explains how the fires occurred, how they were fought, and who fought them, but puts the event in the context of America?s changing attitudes about forests and fires. In 1910 steam-powered trains were spewing sparks across the West while homesteaders were burning their way into the woods to create farms and settlements. Teddy Roosevelt had just doubled the size of the forest reserves, and the idea that timber is finite was just entering American consciousness. The Forest Service, only five years old, was struggling to solidify its role. And even as the country?s first foresters were facing the question of how to protect the new public lands, the West exploded in fire. Pyne brings that astonishing year to life in a riveting narrative of the fires, the people, and the decisions that continue to affect American life"--Amazon.com.

Using photographs from the extensive collection of the Lynn Museum and Historical Society, Bill Conway, former deputy fire chief of the Lynn Fire Department, and Diane Shephard look back on Lynn's great fires and how the city has picked itself up from the ashes.