History of the US space shuttle programme and its first 100 missions

Sir Nigel Anstruthers comes to New York in search of an heiress, as he no longer has enough money to keep up his estate, Stornham Court. He marries the pretty and cosseted Rosalie Vanderpoel, the daughter of an American millionaire. But on their return to England, Nigel and his mother isolate Rosalie from her family. Many years later, Rosalie's now-grown up sister Bettina, who has spent a decade wondering why Rosy has lost contact with the family, arrives at Stornham Court to investigate. She discovers Rosalie and her son Ughtred, physically and emotionally fragile, living in the ruined estate. Bettina, who is both beautiful and made of considerably stronger stuff than her sister, begins to restore both Rosalie's health and spirits and the building and grounds of Stornham Court in Nigel's absence. Bettina, as an attractive heiress, attracts the attention of the local gentry and re-integrates her sister into society, and she also makes the acquaintance of another impoverished English nobleman, Lord Mount Dunstan.

"The Shuttle" deals with themes of intermarriages between wealthy American heiresses and impoverished British nobles. It is about wealthy American heiresses who could not make the best societal marriages because their family fortune came from new rather than old money. To solve this issue, they travelled to England. They married poor but Aristocratic husbands who needed money to finance their neglected estates.

Original poetry, dozens of archival images, and illuminating historical summaries depict the rise of the mills and King Cotton in the 19th century through the turn of the 20th. An accomplished poet weaves a tapestry of the textile industry that the Historian Laureate of Rhode Island calls "a blend of both triumph and tragedy." With the rise of the mills came a matrix of events, at times deadly, always in the name of prosperity. Labor "paced for the first time to feed the nation's frenzy for finished cloth. Northern collusion in slave-grown southern cotton. The tuberculosis epidemic. "Kissing the shuttle" was a common weaving practice that spread TB, and is but one inter-connected subject of this lyric narrative. Discover Rhode Island's pioneering public health role in curbing TB: "open-air" schools, the first hot school lunch program and formal outdoor recess, child labor laws and factory sanitation. Experience life in a TB sanatorium and open-air school through the eyes of a spirited young girl, inspired by the author's ancestors. Glimpse mill towns teeming with new arrivals, toxins coloring the Blackstone River, tenement porches strung with clotheslines "sagging with shirts that never dry / the same blue shirts / that cling, damp / to the backs of the laborers / a gray-blue line reaching to dawn." The author, also an occupational therapist, has delivered a well-researched, engaging volume which will inform, surprise, and entertain readers of history and poetry alike, and provide a teaching tool for YA students. Mayer re-enacts a history at risk of being forgotten, and shows its human face.

Voted the Best Space Book of 2018 by the Space Hipsters The dramatic inside story of the epic search and recovery operation after the Columbia space shuttle disaster. On February 1, 2003, Columbia disintegrated on reentry before the nation’s eyes, and all seven astronauts aboard were lost. Author Mike Leinbach, Launch Director of the space shuttle program at NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center was a key leader in the search and recovery effort as NASA, FEMA, the FBI, the US Forest Service, and dozens more federal, state, and local agencies combed an area of rural east Texas the size of Rhode Island for every piece of the shuttle and her crew they could find. Assisted by hundreds of volunteers, it would become the largest ground search operation in US history. This comprehensive account is told in four parts: Parallel Confusion Courage, Compassion, and Commitment Picking Up the Pieces A Bittersweet Victory For the first time, here is the definitive inside story of the Columbia disaster and recovery and the inspiring message it ultimately holds. In the aftermath of tragedy, people and communities came together to help bring home the remains of the crew and nearly 40 percent of shuttle, an effort that was instrumental in piecing together what happened so the shuttle program could return to flight and complete the International Space Station. Bringing Columbia Home shares the deeply personal stories that emerged as NASA employees looked for lost colleagues and searchers overcame immense physical, logistical, and emotional challenges and worked together to accomplish the impossible. Featuring a foreword and epilogue by astronauts Robert Crippen and Eileen Collins, and dedicated to the astronauts and recovery search persons who lost their lives, this is an incredible, compelling narrative about the best of humanity in the darkest of times and about how a failure at the pinnacle of human achievement became a story of cooperation and hope.