Andrew has seen a flash of his future. (Dad: unfinished PhD. Mom: unfulfilling career. Their marriage: unsuccessful.) Based on what he's seen, he's uninspired to put a foot on the well-worn path to the adulthood everyone expects of him. There must be another way around.After a particularly disastrous Thanksgiving (his cousin wets Andrew's bed; his parents were too chicken to tell him his grandmother died), Andrew accidentally (on purpose) runs away and joins the circus. Kind of.A guy can meet the most interesting people at the Greyhound station at dinnertime on Thanksgiving day. The Freegans are exactly the kinds of friends (living out of an ancient VW camper van, dumpster diving, dressing like clowns and busking for change)who would have Andrew's mom reaching for a third glass of Chardonnay. To Andrew, five teenagers who seem like they've found another way to grow up are a dream come true. But as the VW winds its way across the USA, the future is anything but certain.The path of least resistance is a long, strange trip.

Andrew has seen a flash of his future. (Dad: unfinished PhD. Mom: unfulfilling career. Their marriage: unsuccessful.) Based on what he's seen, he's uninspired to put a foot on the well-worn path to the adulthood everyone expects of him. There must be another way around. After a particularly disastrous Thanksgiving (his cousin wets Andrew's bed; his parents were too chicken to tell him his grandmother died), Andrew accidentally (on purpose) runs away and joins the circus. Kind of. A guy can meet the most interesting people at the Greyhound station at dinnertime on Thanksgiving day. The Freegans are exactly the kinds of friends (living out of an ancient VW camper van, dumpster diving, dressing like clowns and busking for change) who would have Andrew's mom reaching for a third glass of Chardonnay. To Andrew, five teenagers who seem like they've found another way to grow up are a dream come true. But as the VW winds its way across the USA, the future is anything but certain. The path of least resistance is a long, strange trip.

With a lot of practice, a young boy learns from his old teacher how to listen to the sounds and songs of the natural world. When you know “the other way to listen,” you can hear the wild-flower seed bursting open. You hear rocks murmuring and hills singing, and it seems like the most natural thing in the world. Of course, it takes a lot of practice, and you can’t be in a hurry. Most people never hear these things at all. This is the story of an old man who had a special way of hearing and of a child who hoped to learn his secrets. Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnall have combined their unique, award-winning talents to celebrate the world of nature.

Bill Hillsman is simply, in the words of Slate.com, "the world's greatest political adman." With his groundbreaking consulting work on Paul Wellstone's senatorial, Jesse Ventura's gubernatorial, and Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns, he was the first to publicly challenge the conventional strategies of political campaigns, the inefficiency of campaign spending, the desultory, banal, and insulting political ads. As Hillsman says, "I don't believe you can annoy someone into voting for your candidate." Hillsman first rocked the political establishment during Wellstone's 1990 Senate bid, with witty, sharp political ads that had audiences glued to their television sets and talking about the commercials for weeks afterward. In the end, he helped Wellstone overcome a $7 million campaign spending disadvantage to win the election. And the risk taking continued when he ran Jesse Ventura's Reform Party gubernatorial and Ralph Nader's Green Party presidential campaigns. In one Nader ad, a child looks out at the viewer and says, "When I grow up, I want politicians to ignore me." In an ad from Ventura's campaign, a boy playing with a Jesse Ventura action figure ("New, from the Reform Party!") takes on Ventura's voice to growl, "I don't want your stupid money!" With bold and brilliant ads like these, Hillsman helped two underdog candidates become senator and governor, transformed Minnesota politics, and showed the country that it has viable and appealing options outside of the two major parties. Run the Other Way offers fascinating and disturbing insights into the shadowy, cronyistic world of political consulting: the grossly overpaid consultants, incompetent and inaccurate pollsters, fundraisers who take a dollar for every dollar they raise, and strategists who use negative advertising to intentionally keep people from voting. But it also gives us a from-the-trenches look at how Americans can turn the weapons trained on us back against the master propagandists, and in so doing revitalize our badly damaged democracy. Fleshing out his case with real-life stories from his involvement in numerous campaigns, Hillsman takes us behind the electioneering scenes of old Washington hands and trouble-making independents, including Ross Perot, Warren Beatty, John McCain, Arianna Huffington, and Colin Powell. An outsider with an insider's vantage point, Hillsman sees America at a crucial historical moment defined by the continuing decline of both major political parties and the rise of independent voters. Edgy, controversial, and often humorous, his political ads have energized voters and revolutionized election campaigning over the last fifteen years. This is a book for everyone who's ever run for office, thought about running for office, or voted for someone running for office. Run the Other Way investigates the many imperfections in the greatest system of government in the world and challenges all of us to make it better.

Author's note: If I had known just how difficult an ancestor Erkenbald the Fleming would be, I would possibly have stuffed him back into the academic journal in which I first found him, namely: History, volume 28, issue 108, September 1943, pp. 129-147, Companions of the Conqueror by David C. Douglas. Most academics seem to concur with Professor Douglas that Erkenbald (Erchenbaldo filio Erchenbaldi vicecomitis = Erkenbald, son of Erkenbald the vicomte) had probably taken part in the Battle of Hastings in 1066. However, when I suggested that this same Erkenbald was the true ancestor of the medieval Fleming families in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, I ran into considerable opposition. I was told that it is common knowledge that the Flemings of the British Isles descend from any number of unrelated immigrants from Flanders who took the surname Fleming. Apparently, there cannot possibly have been any "first Fleming." With the publication of this present volume, I hope to give Erkenbald some of the notoriety that I believe he deserves by having made him an interesting character in a story. Later, perhaps, we can re-examine the historical evidence without burdensome preconceptions.

Often overlooked in accounts of World War II is the Soviet Union's quiet yet brutal campaign against Polish citizens, a campaign that included, we now know, war crimes for which the Soviet and Russian governments only recently admitted culpability. Standing in the shadow of the Holocaust, this episode of European history is often overlooked. Wesley Adamczyk's gripping memoir, When God Looked the Other Way, now gives voice to the hundreds of thousands of victims of Soviet barbarism. Adamczyk was a young Polish boy when he was deported with his mother and siblings from their comfortable home in Luck to Soviet Siberia in May of 1940. His father, a Polish Army officer, was taken prisoner by the Red Army and eventually became one of the victims of the Katyn massacre, in which tens of thousands of Polish officers were slain at the hands of the Soviet secret police. The family's separation and deportation in 1940 marked the beginning of a ten-year odyssey in which the family endured fierce living conditions, meager food rations, chronic displacement, and rampant disease, first in the Soviet Union and then in Iran, where Adamczyk's mother succumbed to exhaustion after mounting a harrowing escape from the Soviets. Wandering from country to country and living in refugee camps and the homes of strangers, Adamczyk struggled to survive and maintain his dignity amid the horrors of war. When God Looked the Other Way is a memoir of a boyhood lived in unspeakable circumstances, a book that not only illuminates one of the darkest periods of European history but also traces the loss of innocence and the fight against despair that took root in one young boy. It is also a book that offers a stark picture of the unforgiving nature of Communism and its champions. Unflinching and poignant, When God Looked the Other Way will stand as a testament to the trials of a family during wartime and an intimate chronicle of episodes yet to receive their historical due. “Adamczyk recounts the story of his own wartime childhood with exemplary precision and immense emotional sensitivity, presenting the ordeal of one family with the clarity and insight of a skilled novelist. . . . I have read many descriptions of the Siberian odyssey and of other forgotten wartime episodes. But none of them is more informative, more moving, or more beautifully written than When God Looked the Other Way.”—From the Foreword by Norman Davies, author of Europe: A History and Rising ’44: TheBattleforWarsaw “A finely wrought memoir of loss and survival.”—Publishers Weekly “Adamczyk’s unpretentious prose is well-suited to capture that truly awful reality.” —Andrew Wachtel, Chicago Tribune Books “Mr. Adamczyk writes heartfelt, straightforward prose. . . . This book sheds light on more than one forgotten episode of history.”—Gordon Haber, New York Sun “One of the most remarkable World War II sagas I have ever read. It is history with a human face.”—Andrew Beichman, Washington Times