A fascinating insight into notable speeches that were never delivered, showing what could have been if history had gone down a different path For almost every delivered speech, there exists an undelivered opposite. These "second speeches" provide alternative histories of what could have been if not for schedule changes, changes of heart, or momentous turns of events. In Undelivered, political speechwriter Jeff Nussbaum presents the most notable speeches the public never heard, from Dwight Eisenhower’s apology for a D-Day failure to Richard Nixon’s refusal to resign the presidency, and even Hillary Clinton’s acceptance for a 2016 victory—the latter never seen until now. Examining the content of these speeches and the context of the historic moments that almost came to be, Nussbaum considers not only what they tell us about the past but also what they can inform us about our present.

In 1906, at the Klondike Mine schoolhouse in Hatcher Pass, Alaska, teacher Raymond Williams gave his nine students a very special writing assignment that upon completion was to be sent to nine different people who would judged the work, and jointly decided on one grand prize winner. However, before this could happen, a mining explosion caused a landslide that crushed the classroom, and killed all nine students, yet sparing the life of their teacher. Although dreadful, the accident was all but forgotten until 1987, when a group of deer hunters on Kodiak Island discovers the wreckage of an old Army DC-3 airplane that had disappeared forty-five years earlier. Inside, investigators find several items such as the nine student desks, one unique brass U.S. Postal Service outdoor mailbox, along with other miscellaneous mining pieces that were all associated with that mining disaster. Upon removal of the aircraft fuselage to the Coast Guard Air Base on Kodiak Island, while the plane's cargo is being inspected, strange events begin to happen that lead people to eventually realize that something paranormal was at work and maybe some of the students that had used those school desks although long dead, were still present and involved in something very evil. In The Undelivered, a teacher's satanic beliefs dramatically change the lives of a handful of people that come in contact with the aircraft's contents. And, no amount of love, religious beliefs or educational training will change the course of what is to be.

For eight days in March 1970, over 200,000 postal workers staged an illegal "wildcat" strike--the largest in United States history--for better wages and working conditions. Picket lines started in New York and spread across the country like wildfire. Strikers defied court injunctions, threats of termination, and their own union leaders. In the negotiated aftermath, the U.S. Post Office became the U.S. Postal Service, and postal workers received full collective bargaining rights and wage increases, all the while continuing to fight for greater democracy within their unions. Using archives, periodicals, and oral histories, Philip Rubio shows how this strike, born of frustration and rising expectations and emerging as part of a larger 1960s-1970s global rank-and-file labor upsurge, transformed the post office and postal unions. It also led to fifty years of clashes between postal unions and management over wages, speedup, privatization, automation, and service. Rubio revives the 1970 strike story and connects it to today's postal financial crisis that threatens the future of a vital 245-year-old public communications institution and its labor unions.

An evocative spiritual memoir which explores the essence of belief and spirituality, set around ancient church in rural Suffolk.~The morning on which John Rogers was due to deliver his 'mardle' (a talk of local interest) to the people of Letheringham, Suffolk, about the community's ancient Priory Church, he suffered an unexpected heart attack. In this beautiful and evocative book, he revisits the months of research leading up to the undelivered mardle and - with the added poignancy of his keener sense of mortality - explores the deeper meanings of life and faith that this simple building and its ghosts from centuries of history gradually reveal to him.

An unsent letter in a first edition copy of Charlotte’s Web leads to a hunt for treasure in this heartwarming middle grade mystery from the author of The Mother-Daughter Book Club. Now that Truly Lovejoy’s father has been injured by an IED in Afghanistan and is having trouble finding work back home, the family moves from Texas to tiny Pumpkin Falls, New Hampshire, to take over Lovejoy’s Books, a struggling bookstore that’s been in the family for one hundred years. With two older brothers and two younger sisters clamoring for attention, her mother back in school, and everyone up to their eyebrows trying to keep Lovejoy’s Books afloat, Truly feels more overlooked than usual. So she pours herself into uncovering the mystery of an undelivered letter she finds stuck in a valuable autographed first edition of Charlotte’s Web, which subsequently goes missing from the bookshop. What’s inside the envelope leads Truly and her new Pumpkin Falls friends on a madcap treasure hunt around town, chasing clues that could spell danger. Fans of Heather Vogel Frederick’s Mother-Daughter Book Club series “will rejoice for a new series with a similarly cozy New England setting, great characters, and literary references to beloved classics” (School Library Journal).

A sensitive, stunning debut on movement, migration, and loss, in the vein of Valeria Luiselli's Sidewalks.