“Imagine a postmodern Pindar with a liberal arts education and good command of Polish; think of an Orpheus who starts out as a horny kid from the American suburbs, hits the road like Kerouac, learns a few things along the way, but still looks back—wacked! Kress has come up with some playful and surprisingly haunting sonnets that glance at the old stories but sing their own new, not too sweet songs.” –Julia Kasdorf
OSS Against the Reich presents the previously unpublished World War II diaries of Colonel David K.E. Bruce, London branch chief of America’s first secret intelligence agency, as he observed the war against Hitler. The entries include eyewitness accounts of D-Day, the rocket attacks on England, and the liberation of Paris. As a top deputy of William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the Office of Strategic Services, Bruce kept his diary sporadically in 1942 and made daily entries from the invasion of Normandy until the Battle of the Bulge. Bruce had served in World War I and, as Andrew Mellon’s son-in-law, moved easily in the world of corporate and museum boardrooms and New York society. However, World War II gave him a more serious and satisfying purpose in life; the experience of running the OSS’s most important overseas branch confirmed his lifelong interest in foreign service. After the war, in partnership with his second wife, Evangeline, Bruce headed the Marshall Plan in France and was ambassador to Paris, Bonn, and London. He further served as head of negotiations at the Paris peace talks on Vietnam, first American emissary to China and ambassador to NATO.
For decades, the dramatic stories of World War II soldiers have been the stuff of memoirs, interviews, novels, documentaries, and feature films. Yet the men and women who served in less visible roles, never engaging in physical combat, have received scant attention. Convinced that their depiction as pencil pushers, grease monkeys, or cowards was far from the truth, Rona Simmons embarked on a quest to discover the real story from the noncombat veterans themselves.
Our Human Hearts is a nonfiction exploration of the meanings of the human heart as interpreted by two traditions: medical science, which has made possible dramatic cardiac surgery and sophisticated drug treatments, and the much older cultural traditions that view the heart as a repository for wisdom, courage, emotion, and the soul. Carter interlaces medical and linguistic information with the stories of four heart patients, each with different illnesses and different personal approaches to healing. Much has been written about the heart from a medical standpoint, but few experts have explored the human side of the heart by giving a voice to the patients.
Our Native Trees and How to Identify Them, first published by Charles Scriber’s Sons in 1900, was warmly received at a time when America was rapidly urbanizing and public interest in conservation and the establishment of parks was growing. In her preface, Keeler explained that “the trees described . . . are those indigenous to the region ex-tending from the Atlantic Ocean to the Rocky Mountains and from Canada to the northern boundaries of the southern states; together with a few well-known and naturalized foreign trees.” Profusely illustrated and with a biographical introduction by Carol Poh Miller that illuminates Keeler’s life and accomplishments, this edition of Our Native Trees and How to Identify Them will aid a new generation eager to identify and thus better appreciate what they observe outdoors.
The four decades of French’s professional career are often described as an era that forced homosexuals to be sexually vague and anonymous, especially if they aspired to prominence in their local community. But French’s life and career contradicted that assumption. He never hid his sexuality yet achieved journalistic leadership and unchallenged influence over Cleveland’s social life. Richly illustrated with contemporary news photographs and editorial drawings, Out and About with Winsor French documents the powerful role played by about-town columnists during a raucous episode in the history of American newspapers.
In this, his third collection of stories, Lester Goran moves us again through the times and places indelibly stamped with his wit and insight about people and events lost to history. Outlaws of the Purple Cow centers around the domains of Irish-American men and women in Pittsburgh. Goran creates once more his world of poignant and magical times and places within the mundane affairs of ordinary men and women. Goran’s evocative settings and narratives range form the supernatural to the humorous, from bawdy to richly detailed realism.
As a married man and Stanford graduate student nearing thirty, Christopher Donner would likely have qualified for an exemption from the draft. Like most of his generation, however, he responded promptly to the call to arms after Pearl Harbor. His wartime experiences in the Pacific Theater were seared into his consciousness, and in early 1946 he set out to preserve those memories while they were still fresh. Sixty-five years later, Donner’s memoir is now available to the public.
In Pantaloons and Power, Gayle V. Fischer depicts how the reformers’ denouncement of conventional dress highlighted the role of clothing in the struggle of power relations between the sexes. Wearing pantaloons was considered a subversive act and was often met with social ostracism. This carefully researched interdisciplinary study successfully combines the fields of costume history, women’s history, material culture, and social history to tell the story of one highly charged dress reform and its resonance in nineteenth-century society.
Displaying a range of voices and subjects—from dramatic monologues in the voices of Judas Iscariot and John the Baptist to harrowing personal lyrics of family, time, memory, and loss—Creech’s poems examine the difficulties of belief and the transcendent possibilities of common experience, pushing beyond mere surfaces to explore the “kingdom of desire.” Paper Cathedrals confronts the tensions between the here and hereafter, gravity and grace, and religious faith and an allegiance to the passing, sensual world.
