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Release Date: April 01, 2000

Major Richard J. "Dick" Meadows is renowned in military circles as a key figure in the development of the U.S. Army Special Operations. A highly decorated war veteran of the engagements in Korea and Vietnam, Meadows was instrumental in the founding of the U.S. Delta Force and hostage rescue force. Although he officially retired in 1977, Meadows could never leave the army behind, and he went undercover in the clandestine operations to free American hostages from Iran in 1980.The Quiet Professional: Major Richard J. Meadows of the U.S. Army Special Forces is the only biography of this exemplary soldier's life. Military historian Alan Hoe offers unique insight into Meadows, having served alongside him in 1960. The Quiet Professional is an insider's account that gives a human face to U.S. military strategy during the cold war. Major Meadows often claimed that he never achieved anything significant; The Quiet Professional proves otherwise, showcasing one of the great military minds of twentieth-century America.

If there's one lesson every homeowner must learn, it's this: The traditional lawn is a huge, time consuming, synthetic-chemical sucking mistake. The time has come to look for new ways to create friendly, livable spaces around our homes. In The American Meadow Garden, ornamental grass expert John Greenlee creates a new model for homeowners and gardeners. For Greenlee, a meadow isn't a random assortment of messy, anonymous grasses. Rather, it is a shimmering mini-ecosystem, in which regionally appropriate grasses combine with colorful perennials to form a rich tapestry that is friendly to all life -- with minimal input of water, time, and other scarce resources. Kids and pets can play in complete safety, and birds and butterflies flock there. A prairie style planting is a place you want to be. With decades of experience as a nurseryman and designer, John Greenlee is the perfect guide. He details all the practicalities of site preparation, plant selection, and maintenance; particularly valuable are his explanations of how ornamental grasses perform in different climates and areas. Gorgeous photography by Saxon Holt visually illustrates the message with stunning examples of meadow gardens from across the country. We've reached a stage where we can no longer follow past practices unthinkingly, particularly when those practices are wasteful and harmful to the environment. It's time to get rid of the old-fashioned lawn and embrace a sane and healthy future: the American meadow garden.

An American Library Association Notable BookIn discrete disclosures joined with the intricacy of a spider's web, James Galvin depicts the hundred-year history of a meadow in the arid mountains of the Colorado/Wyoming border. Galvin describes the seasons, the weather, the wildlife, and the few people who do not possess but are themselves possessed by this terrain. In so doing he reveals an experience that is part of our heritage and mythology. For Lyle, Ray, Clara, and App, the struggle to survive on an independent family ranch is a series of blameless failures and unacclaimed successes that illuminate the Western character. The Meadow evokes a sense of place that can be achieved only by someone who knows it intimately.

History celebrates George Washington as the leader of the American Revolution and the father of his country....

In September 1857, a wagon train passing through Utah laden with gold was attacked. Approximately 140 people were slaughtered; only 17 children under the age of eight were spared. This incident in an open field called Mountain Meadows has ever since been the focus of passionate debate: Is it possible that official Mormon dignitaries were responsible for the massacre? In her riveting book, Sally Denton makes a fiercely convincing argument that they were.The author–herself of Mormon descent–first traces the extraordinary emergence of the Mormons and the little-known nineteenth-century intrigues and tensions between their leaders and the U.S. government, fueled by the Mormons’ zealotry and exclusionary practices. We see how by 1857 they were unique as a religious group in ruling an entire American territory, Utah, and commanding their own exclusive government and army. Denton makes clear that in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the church began placing the blame on a discredited Mormon, John D. Lee, and on various Native Americans. She cites contemporaneous records and newly discovered documents to support her argument that, in fact, the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, bore significant responsibility–that Young, impelled by the church’s financial crises, facing increasingly intense scrutiny and condemnation by the federal government, incited the crime by both word and deed.Finally, Denton explains how the rapidly expanding and enormously rich Mormon church of today still struggles to absolve itself of responsibility for what may well be an act of religious fanaticism unparalleled in the annals of American history. American Massacre is totally absorbing in its narrative as it brings to life a tragic moment in our history.

Somewhere between chopping down the cherry tree and crossing the Delaware River-a triumph of the will that changed the course of the American Revolution-George Washington had the epiphany that turned him into one of the world’s greatest tacticians and leaders. Alan Axelrod presents a riveting argument that it happened at Great Meadows, a remote western Pennsylvania battlefield where the inexperienced 22-year-old lieutenant colonel from Virginia met a highly skilled French army and suffered a terrible defeat. When it was over, a third of his men lay fallen. Washington walked away, but in a sense left much of himself dead on the field as well, to be reborn as the great man we know as our founding president. His ability to use the experience of defeat to achieve eventual greatness is an inspirational tale that’s retold daily in the stories of the leaders of our own time. Blooding at Great Meadows features not only an exciting and thought-provoking narrative, but examines the significance of Washington’s actual dispatches, along with recent archeological findings from Great Meadows. This was essentially the battle that started the French and Indian Wars. Was it also the battle that “fathered” the father of our country? Fans of Washington and American history will surely want to find out.

We all know George Washington as the Father of the American Nation; few know him as a 22-year-old Virginia lieutenant colonel who led three-hundred of his soldiers to fight a far-more-experienced French army-and paid a high price. Historian Alan Axelrod brings this little-known story to life in his riveting account of the key battle that launched the French and Indian War-and Washington’s role in the loss of that pivotal fight. Published in hardcover in 2007, Blooding at Great Meadows is sure to find a new audience in paperback.

In Meadows, Christopher Lloyd explores the development and management of established meadow areas, ways of starting from scratch in a garden setting, and the hundreds of beautiful grasses, bulbs, and colorful perennials that thrive in different conditions. Lloyd's own experimental prairie is a springboard to discussing North American prairies and the plants that provide swathes of color in late summer and interest into winter. Filled with hundreds of specially commissioned photographs, this book provides a captivating guide for anyone wishing to preserve pasture lands, cultivate native species, and attract wildlife.

The slaughter of a wagon train of some 120 people in southern Utah on September 11, 1857, has long been the subject of controversy and debate. Innocent Blood gathers key primary sources describing the tangled story of the Mountain Meadows massacre. This wide array of contrasting perspectives, many never before published, provide a powerful and intimate picture of this “dastardly outrage” and its cover-up. A fine addition to the Kingdom in the West Series.The documents David L. Bigler and Will Bagley have collected offer a clearer understanding of the victims, the perpetrators, and the reasons a frontier American theocracy sought to justify or conceal the participants’ guilt. These narratives make clear that, despite limited Southern Paiute involvement, white men planned the killing and their church’s highest leaders encouraged Mormon settlers to undertake the deed.This compelling documentary record presents the primary evidence that tells the story from its contradictory perspectives. The sources let readers evaluate and track the evolution of such myths as the Paiutes’ guilt, the emigrants’ provocation of their murderers, Brigham Young’s ignorance of what happened, and John D. Lee’s sole culpability. Clearly revealed is the part Utah authorities took in blocking the investigation until it became expedient to sacrifice Lee.Together, these narratives show how the massacre’s story has been continually distorted and then revealed over 150 years—and how the obfuscation and cover-up continue. Innocent Blood conveys the encompassing impact the atrocity had on people’s lives, then and for generations after. It is a valuable sourcebook sure to prove indispensable to future research.

In September 1857, a wagon train passing through Utah laden with gold was attacked. Approximately 140 people were slaughtered; only 17 children under the age of eight were spared. This incident in an open field called Mountain Meadows has ever since been the focus of passionate debate: Is it possible that official Mormon dignitaries were responsible for the massacre? In her riveting book, Sally Denton makes a fiercely convincing argument that they were.The author–herself of Mormon descent–first traces the extraordinary emergence of the Mormons and the little-known nineteenth-century intrigues and tensions between their leaders and the U.S. government, fueled by the Mormons’ zealotry and exclusionary practices. We see how by 1857 they were unique as a religious group in ruling an entire American territory, Utah, and commanding their own exclusive government and army. Denton makes clear that in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the church began placing the blame on a discredited Mormon, John D. Lee, and on various Native Americans. She cites contemporaneous records and newly discovered documents to support her argument that, in fact, the Mormon leader, Brigham Young, bore significant responsibility–that Young, impelled by the church’s financial crises, facing increasingly intense scrutiny and condemnation by the federal government, incited the crime by both word and deed.Finally, Denton explains how the rapidly expanding and enormously rich Mormon church of today still struggles to absolve itself of responsibility for what may well be an act of religious fanaticism unparalleled in the annals of American history. American Massacre is totally absorbing in its narrative as it brings to life a tragic moment in our history.

We all know George Washington as the Father of the American Nation; few know him as a 22-year-old Virginia lieutenant colonel who led three-hundred of his soldiers to fight a far-more-experienced French army-and paid a high price. Historian Alan Axelrod brings this little-known story to life in his riveting account of the key battle that launched the French and Indian War-and Washington’s role in the loss of that pivotal fight. Published in hardcover in 2007, Blooding at Great Meadows is sure to find a new audience in paperback.

Now in paperback, the highly praised second collection by Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2003 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American PoetsWe hold it against you that you survived.People better than you are dead, but you still punch the clock.Your body has wizened but has not bled —from “Survivor”

The slaughter of a wagon train of some 120 people in southern Utah on September 11, 1857, has long been the subject of controversy and debate. Innocent Blood gathers key primary sources describing the tangled story of the Mountain Meadows massacre. This wide array of contrasting perspectives, many never before published, provide a powerful and intimate picture of this “dastardly outrage” and its cover-up. A fine addition to the Kingdom in the West Series.The documents David L. Bigler and Will Bagley have collected offer a clearer understanding of the victims, the perpetrators, and the reasons a frontier American theocracy sought to justify or conceal the participants’ guilt. These narratives make clear that, despite limited Southern Paiute involvement, white men planned the killing and their church’s highest leaders encouraged Mormon settlers to undertake the deed.This compelling documentary record presents the primary evidence that tells the story from its contradictory perspectives. The sources let readers evaluate and track the evolution of such myths as the Paiutes’ guilt, the emigrants’ provocation of their murderers, Brigham Young’s ignorance of what happened, and John D. Lee’s sole culpability. Clearly revealed is the part Utah authorities took in blocking the investigation until it became expedient to sacrifice Lee.Together, these narratives show how the massacre’s story has been continually distorted and then revealed over 150 years—and how the obfuscation and cover-up continue. Innocent Blood conveys the encompassing impact the atrocity had on people’s lives, then and for generations after. It is a valuable sourcebook sure to prove indispensable to future research.

When Summer was in the Meadow records and preserves a time that is receding all too quickly into the lost pages of the last century. Based on actual events of the 20's and early 30's, the work is the real-life story of Evelyn Johnson, a child who in her own voice draws us into a magical world of backyard circuses, church picnics, and friendly neighbors. As she matures, her narration reveals with poignancy and humor life as it was lived by ordinary people during a critical period in American history. The story has historical appeal in its evocation of life in the South and in its recall of actual places, events, and persons of the time–from the talkies and Lindbergh to FDR and the Great Depression. In a larger sense, however, this is a story about ourselves and the power of remembrance to shape our lives and the lives of those who follow us.

A High Meadow is full of comedy, tragedy and melodrama, all centred around the village of Ballybobawn and Eddie Drannaghy, the "Ram of God" (a former trainee priest who was cynically seduced by the American wife of his cousin, fathered a child and was forced to leave the seminary), and his brothers Murt and Will. John B. Keane weaves an inimitable tapestry of rural life: people good and bad, weak and powerful; gardai, priests and travellers, and towering above them all the personality of the Ram of God.

Now in paperback, the highly praised second collection by Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2003 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American PoetsWe hold it against you that you survived.People better than you are dead, but you still punch the clock.Your body has wizened but has not bled —from “Survivor”

American War Poetry spans the history of the nation. Beginning with the Colonial Wars of the eighteenth-century and ending with the Gulf Wars, this original and significant anthology presents four centuries of American men and women-soldiers, nurses, reporters, and embattled civilians-writing about war. American War Poetry opens with a ballad by a freed African American slave commenting on a skirmish with Indians in a Massachusetts meadow. Poems on the American Revolution follow, as well as poems on "minor" conflicts like the Mexican War and the Spanish-American Wars. This compact anthology has generous selections on the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnamese-American War, but it also includes an unusually large offering on American participation in the Spanish Civil War. Another section covers four hundred years of conflict with Native Americans, ending with poems by contemporary Indians who respond passionately and directly to their difficult history. The collection also reaches into current reaction to American involvement in Latin America, Bosnia, and the Gulf Wars. Showing the depth of feeling and the range of thinking with which Americans have confronted war, American War Poetry expands our sense of what poetry is made to do. While the birth of a national identity is documented in early poems, the anthology also conveys the growing sophistication of a uniquely American style. Although early war poems show that the first justification for war was purely defensive, as American global ambitions matured, American writers moved increasingly to deplore a homegrown imperialism and its terrible costs. While many familiar poems of patriotic ardor have been chosen, other poems show a steady interest in antiwar themes. Lorrie Goldensohn provides a brief biography for each poet and places each poem in its proper literary and historical context. Comprehensive and compelling, American War Poetry not only documents the birth and development of a national style of expression but shows the force of poetry working on the historical moment, making it come vitally alive. (Spring 2006)

When Summer was in the Meadow records and preserves a time that is receding all too quickly into the lost pages of the last century. Based on actual events of the 20's and early 30's, the work is the real-life story of Evelyn Johnson, a child who in her own voice draws us into a magical world of backyard circuses, church picnics, and friendly neighbors. As she matures, her narration reveals with poignancy and humor life as it was lived by ordinary people during a critical period in American history. The story has historical appeal in its evocation of life in the South and in its recall of actual places, events, and persons of the time–from the talkies and Lindbergh to FDR and the Great Depression. In a larger sense, however, this is a story about ourselves and the power of remembrance to shape our lives and the lives of those who follow us.

A commentary on an oppressive colonial system that people fled from in order to start a new life, this historical novel examines the hardships suffered by Welsh colonists who settled in Patagonia. Following a devastating sea journey, Silas James encounters a cold South American desert where nothing survives except the nomadic Tehuelche Indians—a tribe potentially intent on massacring the new arrivals. Fearing that he has been tricked into sacrificing everything for another man’s impossible dream, James, along with his fellow colonists, battles to survive hunger and loss. Under the influences of politically adept Edwyn Owen and the watchful eye of Indian shaman Yelue, James witnesses as a new culture begins to take root as an old one fades.

In Oh What a Slaughter, Larry McMurtry has written a unique, brilliant, and searing history of the bloody massacres that marked -- and marred -- the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century, and which still provoke immense controversy today. Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres -- Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans, and, in the case of the hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children. McMurtry's evocative descriptions of these events recall their full horror, and the deep, constant apprehension and dread endured by both pioneers and Indians. By modern standards the death tolls were often small -- Custer's famous defeat at Little Big Horn in 1876 was the only encounter to involve more than two hundred dead -- yet in the thinly populated West of that time, the violent extinction of a hundred people had a colossal impact on all sides. Though the perpetrators often went unpunished, many guilty and traumatized men felt compelled to tell and retell the horrors they had committed. From letters and diaries, McMurtry has created a moving and swiftly paced narrative, as memorable in its way as such classics as Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. In Larry McMurtry's own words: "I have visited all but one of these famous massacre sites -- the Sacramento River massacre of 1846 is so forgotten that its site near the northern California village of Vina can only be approximated. It is no surprise to report that none of the sites are exactly pleasant places to be, though the Camp Grant site north of Tucson does have a pretty community college nearby. In general, the taint that followed the terror still lingers and is still powerful enough to affect locals who happen to live nearby. None of the massacres were effectively covered up, though the Sacramento River massacre was overlooked for a very long time. "But the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood -- in time, and, often, not that much time -- will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency. "The deep, constant apprehension, which neither the pioneers nor the Indians escaped, has, it seems to me, been too seldom factored in by historians of the settlement era, though certainly it saturates the diary-literature of the pioneers, particularly the diary-literature produced by frontier women, who were, of course, the likeliest candidates for rapine and kidnap."

Professor Stanley Hirshons New York Times review said, Massacre at Mountain Meadows must rank as one of the half dozen boldest and most important books ever written on the Mormons. As an eloquent, moving document, it stands virtually aloneAs a study of human motives and mans brutality, in the name of God, to other men, it is frightening.

Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres-Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans and, in the case of the currently hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children.McMurtry's evocative descriptions of these events recall their full horror, and the deep, constant apprehension and dread endured by both pioneers and Indians. By modern standards the death tolls were often small-Custer's defeat in 1876 was the only encounter to involve more than two hundred dead-yet in the thinly populated West of that time, the violent extinction of a hundred people had a colossal impact on all sides. Though the perpetrators often went unpunished, many guilty and traumatized men felt compelled to tell and retell the horror they had committed. Nephi Johnson, one of the participants in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, died crying "Blood, blood, blood!"McMurtry's powerful prose captures the gritty essence of this tumultuous and pivotal era, and the fascinating and remarkable men and women-American and Indian, celebrated and forgotten-who shaped the West, and would kill to keep it.

Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres-Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans and, in the case of the currently hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children.McMurtry's evocative descriptions of these events recall their full horror, and the deep, constant apprehension and dread endured by both pioneers and Indians. By modern standards the death tolls were often small-Custer's defeat in 1876 was the only encounter to involve more than two hundred dead-yet in the thinly populated West of that time, the violent extinction of a hundred people had a colossal impact on all sides. Though the perpetrators often went unpunished, many guilty and traumatized men felt compelled to tell and retell the horror they had committed. Nephi Johnson, one of the participants in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, died crying "Blood, blood, blood!"McMurtry's powerful prose captures the gritty essence of this tumultuous and pivotal era, and the fascinating and remarkable men and women-American and Indian, celebrated and forgotten-who shaped the West, and would kill to keep it.

Collected here are poems about horse racing, mining, trash collecting, nuclear testing, firefighting, border crossings, buffalo hunting, surfing, logging, and sifting flour. In these pages you will visit flea markets, military bases, internment camps, reservations, funerals, weddings, rodeos, nursing homes, national parks, backyard barbecues, prisons, forests, meadows, rivers, and mountain tops. In your mind s eye, you will meet a simple-minded girl who gets run over by a bull, two mothers watching a bear menacingly nosing toward unsuspecting children, and children who have yet to be toilet trained out of their souls. You will learn to reach into the sacred womb, / grasp a placid hoof / and coax life toward this certain moment. You ll teach poetry to third graders, converse with hitchhikers, lament for an incarcerated brother trying to fill the holes in his soul / with Camel cigarettes / and crude tattoos. You will sit at the kitchen table where perhaps the world will end while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite. In the short time each of us has in this world, here s your chance to experience life widely and to reflect on your experiences deeply. Lowell Jaeger, Editor

BYU StudiesMormon Studies During years of research for their 2008 book Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy, authors Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., Glen M. Leonard, and their colleagues discovered a great deal of information about the 1857 massacre, leading to a clearer understanding of the tragedy. No one can speak responsibly about the details of this event without consulting these newly discovered documents. Mountain Meadows Massacre presents two of the valuable and revealing collections the authors uncovered. The first collection was gathered in the 1890s by Andrew Jenson (1850-1937), a full-time employee in the LDS church historian’s office. The second collection was compiled a decade later by David H. Morris (1858-1937), an attorney and judge in St. George, Utah. Images of the original documents are accompanied by typed transcriptions, which reproduce original spelling, punctuation, strikethroughs, and inserted words or characters. Introductory text explains how each document collection was initially created, how the LDS Church came to possess them, and where they were archived. Brief biographical sketches introduce the individuals who were interviewed, gave affidavits, or wrote letters that appear in the document collections. Distributed for BYU Studies.

A flying saucer crashes in the meadow of Joe Lucky's ranch. Joe hauls the UFO into his barn with his trusty tractor to launch a wild and wacky World War III. Everyone wants the UFO. The Air Force, the Army and the CIA come to the Hispanic San Miguel Valley. Joe can see the people are barely getting along. Times are bad. The country is morally dead. And with the paranoid San Miguel citizens yelping at his heels to give up the UFO, he wants to believe there is something good inside the space ship. He undertakes a journey, and the only sure thing is that he will be changed by it. The little Hispanic town suddenly booms with eager media, tourists, UFO nuts and even a carnival. This influx motivates the citizens to reverse course, and rise up to protect their new 'folk hero.' Joe becomes famous and hunted. Joe Lucky, in the final moments, learns that the creatures in the UFO know God and that God exists.

In Oh What a Slaughter, Larry McMurtry has written a unique, brilliant, and searing history of the bloody massacres that marked -- and marred -- the settling of the American West in the nineteenth century, and which still provoke immense controversy today. Here are the true stories of the West's most terrible massacres -- Sacramento River, Mountain Meadows, Sand Creek, Marias River, Camp Grant, and Wounded Knee, among others. These massacres involved Americans killing Indians, but also Indians killing Americans, and, in the case of the hugely controversial Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, Mormons slaughtering a party of American settlers, including women and children. McMurtry's evocative descriptions of these events recall their full horror, and the deep, constant apprehension and dread endured by both pioneers and Indians. By modern standards the death tolls were often small -- Custer's famous defeat at Little Big Horn in 1876 was the only encounter to involve more than two hundred dead -- yet in the thinly populated West of that time, the violent extinction of a hundred people had a colossal impact on all sides. Though the perpetrators often went unpunished, many guilty and traumatized men felt compelled to tell and retell the horrors they had committed. From letters and diaries, McMurtry has created a moving and swiftly paced narrative, as memorable in its way as such classics as Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star and Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. In Larry McMurtry's own words: "I have visited all but one of these famous massacre sites -- the Sacramento River massacre of 1846 is so forgotten that its site near the northern California village of Vina can only be approximated. It is no surprise to report that none of the sites are exactly pleasant places to be, though the Camp Grant site north of Tucson does have a pretty community college nearby. In general, the taint that followed the terror still lingers and is still powerful enough to affect locals who happen to live nearby. None of the massacres were effectively covered up, though the Sacramento River massacre was overlooked for a very long time. "But the lesson, if it is a lesson, is that blood -- in time, and, often, not that much time -- will out. In case after case the dead have managed to assert a surprising potency. "The deep, constant apprehension, which neither the pioneers nor the Indians escaped, has, it seems to me, been too seldom factored in by historians of the settlement era, though certainly it saturates the diary-literature of the pioneers, particularly the diary-literature produced by frontier women, who were, of course, the likeliest candidates for rapine and kidnap."

American War Poetry spans the history of the nation. Beginning with the Colonial Wars of the eighteenth-century and ending with the Gulf Wars, this original and significant anthology presents four centuries of American men and women-soldiers, nurses, reporters, and embattled civilians-writing about war. American War Poetry opens with a ballad by a freed African American slave commenting on a skirmish with Indians in a Massachusetts meadow. Poems on the American Revolution follow, as well as poems on "minor" conflicts like the Mexican War and the Spanish-American Wars. This compact anthology has generous selections on the Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnamese-American War, but it also includes an unusually large offering on American participation in the Spanish Civil War. Another section covers four hundred years of conflict with Native Americans, ending with poems by contemporary Indians who respond passionately and directly to their difficult history. The collection also reaches into current reaction to American involvement in Latin America, Bosnia, and the Gulf Wars. Showing the depth of feeling and the range of thinking with which Americans have confronted war, American War Poetry expands our sense of what poetry is made to do. While the birth of a national identity is documented in early poems, the anthology also conveys the growing sophistication of a uniquely American style. Although early war poems show that the first justification for war was purely defensive, as American global ambitions matured, American writers moved increasingly to deplore a homegrown imperialism and its terrible costs. While many familiar poems of patriotic ardor have been chosen, other poems show a steady interest in antiwar themes. Lorrie Goldensohn provides a brief biography for each poet and places each poem in its proper literary and historical context. Comprehensive and compelling, American War Poetry not only documents the birth and development of a national style of expression but shows the force of poetry working on the historical moment, making it come vitally alive. (Spring 2006)

For millennia, fields in their myriad forms have been among the most fundamental elements of the landscape of human civilization. Illustrated with 300 photographs and handsome linocut-style prints, the book explains how different landscapes, climates, and cultures produced a variety of field types, from the terraced rice paddies of Southeast Asia to the impenetrable hedgerows of Northwest Europe, each reflecting both ancient traditions and agricultural progress. We see how Old World methods were adapted to new environments like the American prairie, the Australian outback, the African veldt, and the Argentinean pampas. We trace the development of the implements we’ve devised to work our fields, from hand tools to modern tractors and mechanical harvesters.And as we learn to recognize various types of fields, we also explore their characteristic flora—wildflowers, grasses, and nourishing plants like grains, herbs, mushrooms, fruits and berries— and fauna, from tiny but indispensable bugs to field-mice, sheep, cattle, and more. Detailed identification guides catalog a wealth of plant and animal life, and wide-ranging sidebars discuss everything from how to plow a field and sow seeds to how to plant a hedge, build a dry stone wall, and shear a sheep.Here too the rich diversity of field folklore, from rural superstitions, fairy rings, and crop circles, to local legends, weather lore, folk remedies, and more. Both a thoughtful and colorful gift and a practical, informative reference, The Field Guide to Fields portrays an intriguing no-man’s-land between true, chaotic wilderness and the orderly arrangement of human communities.