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The Roller Coaster: A Breast Cancer Story
Misty Krueger
This memoir traces a little over a year in the life of a forty-one-year-old breast cancer patient as she reflects critically on the loss of her breasts, her struggles as a patient and a person, and life on the other side of chemotherapy and radiation. In this book, the author, who is an English professor, addresses how writing and sharing her cancer story with the public is not only a form of self-treatment, but also crucial to one's survival.
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On the ice : an intimate portrait of life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica
Gretchen Legler
Follows the author's trip to McMurdo Station in Antartica, where she discovers how a community can allow a life to reset.
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Woodsqueer : Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life
Gretchen Legler
""Woodsqueer" is sometimes used to describe the mindset of a person who has taken to the wild for an extended period of time. Gretchen Legler is no stranger to life away from the rapid-fire pace of the twenty-first century, which can often lead to a kind of stir-craziness. Woodsqueer chronicles her experiences not just making a living but making a life-in this case, an agrarian one more in tune with the earth on eighty acres in backwoods Maine. Building a home with her partner, Ruth, on their farm means learning to live with solitude, endless trees, and the wild animals the couple come to welcome as family. Whether trying to outsmart their goats, calculating how much firewood they need for the winter, or bartering with neighbors for goods and services, they hone life skills brought with them (carpentry, tracking and hunting wild game) and others they learn along the way (animal husbandry, vegetable gardening, woodcutting). Legler's story, at times humbling and at other times amusing, is an homage to agrarian American life echoing the back-to-the-land movement popularized in the mid-twentieth century"-- Provided by publisher
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The Maine poets : an anthology of verse
Wesley McNair (editor)
In The Maine Poets, editor Wesley McNair has selected work by poets of the state from Longfellow to the present. Chosen for their appeal to the general reader, these poems honor the full vision and diversity of Maine's poets as they address life in Maine and in all human places
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The Quotable moose : a contemporary Maine reader
Wesley McNair (editor)
The best of Maine's contemporary authors celebrate their state in poetry, fiction, and essays that comprise a lively sampler as varied as the state that inspired it. A treasury of works --many previously unpublished--it includes Philip Booth, Franklin Burroughs, Carolyn Chute, Robert Creeley, Amy Clampitt, George Garrett, Susan Kenney, Cathie Pelletier, and 32 others.
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Mapping the heart : reflections on place and poetry
Wesley McNair
In the personal and critical essays of Mapping the Heart, Wesley McNair, one of New England's most important poets, reveals the impact of place on his own poetry and the verse of several other New Englanders, past to present. He also explains the ways poets of his climate have influenced each other, how poets think about their craft, and what poetry is.
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The ghosts of you and me : poems
Wesley McNair
In this new collection, Wesley McNair offers his fullest vision of human life, both its hardships and its rich possibilities. Opening with poems about growing up with family conflict in a New England of broken farms and towns, McNair explores the limits of personal wishes and American dreams. Here too are haunting encounters with ghost selves, the dead, and the gangsters in old movies; lighter fare such as a poem about the poignant hopefulness of comb-overs; and a transcendent series of lyrics that celebrate self-acceptance and the spiritual dimension of "life on the ground." Praised by Maxine Kumin as "a master craftsman" and by Philip Levine as a poet with "a profound love and understanding of people and a superb ear," Wesley McNair here gives us his strongest and most moving volume to date, a major addition to what the Ruminator Review calls "one of the most individual bodies of work by a poet of his generation."
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The religion of Socrates
Mark L. McPherran
This study argues that to understand Socrates we must uncover and analyze his religious views, since his philosophical and religious views are part of one seamless whole. Mark McPherran provides a close analysis of the relevant Socratic texts, an analysis that yields a comprehensive and original account of Socrates' commitments to religion (e.g., the nature of the gods, the immortality of the soul).
McPherran finds that Socrates was not only a rational philosopher of the first rank, but a figure with a profoundly religious nature as well, believing in the existence of gods vastly superior to ourselves in power and wisdom and sharing other traditional religious commitments with his contemporaries. However, Socrates was just as much a sensitive critic and rational reformer of both the religious tradition he inherited and the new cultic incursions he encountered. McPherran contends that Socrates saw his religious commitments as integral to his philosophical mission of moral examination and, in turn, used the rationally derived convictions underlying that mission to reshape the religious conventions of his time. As a result, Socrates made important contributions to the rational reformation of Greek religion, contributions that incited and informed the theology of his brilliant pupil, Plato.
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No Rule That Isn't a Dare: How Writers Connect with Readers
Bill Mesce Jr
In writing, the only real rule is that there are no rules. The successful writer is a problem-solver, recognizing that each project presents its own challenges demanding specific solutions. In No Rule That Isn’t a Dare, working writers – from bestselling authors to midlisters – share the thinking behind the tactics that helped their work come alive for readers. While these tactics are far from rules, they do serve as examples to stimulate the strategic imaginations of all writers.
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Memory Thief
Bryce Moore (Cudick)
Twin brother and sister Benji and Kelly wander off at the local county fair after witnessing their parents argue. When Benji runs into a group of bullies, he escapes into a tent called The Memory Emporium, where he meets a strange old man inside named Louis. The old man shows him a magically vivid memory of a fighter pilot, in the hopes of getting Benji to pay to see other memories Louis has collected from people over the years.
Benji quickly realizes the ability to take memories could help his parents stop fighting with each other, and he asks Louis to teach him how to become a “memory thief.” But Louis isn't the only person with the ability to show and manipulate memories. There's also the mysterious Genevieve, a Memory Thief with much more nefarious motives.
Benji learns how to manipulate memories himself, but having that power comes at a cost to his family, and possibly to his own mind as well. Genevieve’s powers get out of control as she steals more and more memories from people in town―including Benji’s sister, Kelly. Benji must learn to use this newfound power, as he is the only one able to stop Genevieve.
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Vodník
Bryce Moore (Cundick)
When Tomas was six, someone something tried to drown him. And burn him to a crisp. Tomas survived, but whatever was trying to kill him freaked out his parents enough to convince them to move from Slovakia to the United States. Now sixteen-year-old Tomas and his family are back in Slovakia, and that something still lurks somewhere. Nearby. Ready to drown him again and imprison his soul in a teacup. Then there s the fire víla, the water ghost, the pitchfork-happy city folk, and Death herself who are all after him. All this sounds a bit comical, unless the one haunted by water ghosts and fire vílas or doing time in a cramped, internet-deprived teacup is you. If Tomas wants to survive, he'll have to embrace the meaning behind the Slovak proverb, So smr ou e te nik zmluvu neurobil. With Death, nobody makes a pact.
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I Know You Love Me, Too
Amy Neswald
Told from multiple perspectives, the novel-in-stories I Know You Love Me, Too follows half-sisters Ingrid and Kate as they investigate the mysteries left by their deceased father and the riddles posed by their own lives
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Necessary places : a novel
Patricia O'Donnell
But the old man, helpless with Parkinson’s, is impelled by unspoken business that will rock her ordered world. And so will the revelations coming from Anna’s only child, heretofore-perfect 19-year-old Chloe—revelations gleaned from fragmented phone calls with Anna’s husband David, who is searching for Chloe in Boston’s backstreets. When Anna and her father reach Iowa, their road trip takes several directions at once, all leading straight to the heart of self and family.This story of three generations calls forth the strands that connect us one to another.Necessary Places asks what takes us away from those we love, what return is possible, and how to find the forgiveness that can carry us home.
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Waiting to begin : a memoir
Patricia O'Donnell
In the opening scene of Waiting to Begin Patricia O'Donnell speaks to incoming students at a university, telling of her transformation from a rebellious young woman to the writer and professor standing before them. Pat feels the story is not wholly true however, that some of the professor was in the younger woman, and that there is "something of that young woman--lawless, braless, rude and exuberant--in me now." Here's the real story, she writes.
I knew the exuberant young woman, as a student in the same MFA writing program Pat attended. She arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts in the middle of a snowy winter, in a beat-up Chrysler with two young kids. I found this inspiring. Pat tells of her parents, who followed her from Iowa, that leaving their promising daughter, a single mother in a motel room, was "not what they had expected."
Pat struggled at first but placed a story in the New Yorker, found love with a fellow student, and went on to establish a creative writing program. Waiting to Begin is a love story in other ways, as Pat revisits her devastated hometown in Iowa, concurrently telling of a heart-wrenching event unfolding in her daughter's life. Pat O'Donnell is a courageous writer just as she was a courageous young woman, writing openly with remarkable sympathy. She remains an inspiration. -
Vigilance of Stars : A Novel
Patricial O'Donnell
Four stories twine together in this novel set in both contemporary and 1950's Maine. Kiya, a Portland hair stylist in her early 20's, becomes unexpectedly pregnant and determined to keep the baby as she struggles to recover from her brother's suicide. Peter, the baby's father, wants to break away from Kiya and find love--somewhere else. Maddie, Peter's mother, fights her own loneliness as she cares for Alex, incapacitated in a nursing home. Evie, Maddie's mother, appears as a young woman in the 1950's, searching to heal herself both emotionally and physically.
Kiya loses her confidence to be a mother in a shattering experience, which drives her from her home in Portland into the care of Maddie. On the shores of a wide and quiet lake in central Maine, Kiya tries to piece herself together. Peter, still in Portland, struggles to do the right thing without assuming the responsibilities of fatherhood, finding help from his new girlfriend Toni, who--for reasons of her own--pushes him into helping Kiya. In counterpoint to the lives of her descendants, Evie, Peter's grandmother and Maddie's mother, puts herself into the care of Wilhelm Reich at his institute in northern Maine, Orgonon. She is hoping to heal both her melanoma and (though she can hardly admit this to herself) her sexual problems.
The characters' lives spiral together, moving with inexorable force toward an ending which takes place on an uninhabited island in Maine where the stars stand watch over lives both old and new.
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Killer in the trap
Einar A. Olsen and Lee LeBlanc (Illus.)
A seal and a peg-leg gull come to the aid of a Labrador dog caught in a fishnet with a hammer-head shark
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An Introduction to Comparative Sociology
Jon Oplinger
Not your typical sociology primer, this straightforward yet challenging text begins with a discussion of foundational theories, central concepts and areas of study.
Drawing on anthropology, archaeology and history to illustrate key points, the book offers a thorough examination of the field, covering such often neglected topics as the mass production of deviance (Stalin's lethal purges, for example) and the sociology of war.
This multifaceted approach provides a broad overview of the discipline through a clear-eyed investigation of human society at its best and worst.
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Quang Tri cadence : memoir of a rifle platoon leader in the mountains of Vietnam
Jon Oplinger
Having flunked out of college in the fall of 1965, the author enlisted in the U.S. Army. After basic training he was assigned to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, an institution dedicated to the manufacture of the commodity the wartime army most quickly expends--rifle platoon leaders. In June of 1968, he found himself leading a rifle platoon in D Company 2/5th, First Cavalry Division. Quang Tri Cadence draws upon the original maps used in Vietnam and upon the battalion radio logs which were recently declassified at the time of writing. Life in a rifle platoon is presented at the boot level with all its grit, bewilderment, fatigue and fear. This book is not about what the pentagon is pleased to call "violence processing"; this book is about ordinary events in strange places; it is about being "in the field" and coming home. The author's experiences at Kent State University during the shootings in May of 1970 are also recounted.
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The wicked small people of Whiskey Bridge
Jon Oplinger and Elizabeth Cooke
The Little People were a happy and peaceful clan who lived in the crater of a wonderful volcano. There, they were surrounded by their favorite smellssweet sulfur, in particularand were always warm and comfortable. It was safe there, too, because the predators stayed away, which was very important for the Little People, each of them no more than twelve inches tall.
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Not your mother's vampire : vampires in young adult fiction
Deborah Wilson Overstreet
Examining young adult vampire fiction and how it fits in both the contemporary and classic vampire canon, the book's analysis begins with a primer on vampire scholarship, including a brief deconstruction of ten seminal vampire representations-five literary, five cinematic-and their impact on young adult vampire novels; the evolution of vampires from scary Gothic enemies into postmodern sexualized heroes is traced throughout the book; and the influence of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles.
Subsequent chapters examine current young adult vampires novels from such popular horror authors as Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, Christopher Pike, R. L. Stine, Darren Shan, and L. J. Smith, and are divided into three categories based on narrative structure: the process of turning into a vampire, humans and vampires trying to find their way in life, and romantic relationships with a vampire partner. Analysis also addresses vampire conventions (the traditions that exist in each vampire universe), vampires and sexuality, and good and reluctant vampires. The human characters who coexist with vampires in these novels receive the same treatment. Additionally, issues of gender, age, and affectional orientation of human and vampire characters are discussed, as are postmodern constructions of good and evil.
Not Your Mother's Vampire contains an exploration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a television phenomenon, which has sparked an entirely new academic field: Buffy Studies. The vampire characters on Buffy and parallel series, Angel, are explored as are a few main humans (slayers and witches alike). The final chapter of the book is an annotated bibliography of seminal vampire scholarship. As the only in-depth examination of young adult vampire novels in existence, this book is essential for students and scholars of the literature. -
A G.I. in America: The Government Issue Chronicles and Selected Poems
Doug Rawlings
"Poetry is meant to summarize universal feelings. Doug Rawlings' poems capture beautifully the revulsion to war and the spirit of those who work for peace." — Ann Wright, US Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former US diplomat.
"Rawlings has written powerfully about the different facets of the veteran’s experience. His poems will be cathartic to some and revealing to others. Perhaps they will be most revealing to those who hang around veterans and who have trouble understanding." — Dr. Jon Oplinger, Vietnam Veteran and author of Quang Tri Cadence: Memoir of a Rifle Platoon Leader in the Mountains of Vietnam.
"Doug’s poems communicate strength and clarity, pain, moral injury, gentleness, struggle. And always honesty. These poems are faithful companions to anyone who has been part of the veterans’ experience — and in one way or another, that’s every one of us." — Chuck Searcy, Vietnam Veteran and Director of Project RENEW. -
In the Shadow of the Annamese Mountains
Doug Rawlings
A Note from the Author"I was first introduced to the idea of political poetry on October 18, 1970, about midnight, in an all-night Harvard Square corner bookstore. A few months before that encounter I had returned from the war in Viet Nam. To say that I was confused and angry is an understatement. I was also somewhat lost. Then on that fateful night I found this wonderful collection of poems by Denise Levertov that captured her journey to North Viet Nam as a peace activist. This was the first serious "discussion" I had read from and about "my" war. And true to what Robert Bly considers effective political poetry, Levertov used the personal to open up the universal. I was captured, and unlike my response to military "service," I did not want to escape. Instead, I sought out more of her work and other poets and, eventually, began to write my own poems...."
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