Donald and Sadie MacIntosh who emigrated West from PEI in Eastern Canada, spent nearly four years on the Alberta prairies where they gambled everything they had investing in two quarters of land to raise their precious wheat crop. Between dust storms, hailstorms, prairie fires, Black Blizzards the dreadful May 19 blizzard, and a difficult landlady, Donald and Sadie were beaten into submission. Loading their few possessions they moved north in a railroad boxcar to the bushland to face new c...

The book starts in PEI, Canada, where the Macintosh Family decide to move West, where the pot-o-gold was a stretch of black fertile soil alive with a sea of golden wheat waving before them. This typical family, part of a vibrant group of Canadian dreamers and visionaries braved the dark lean days on the prairies to carve out a new life for themselves. While gambling their lives to fulfill their dreams they meet black blizzards, drought and Influenza but there is comedy as well, much seen t...

A Full House is a historical novel of farm life in Alberta, Canada, in the 1930’s, 1940’s and ’50’s. The book follows the historical novels: Book #1 The Gentle Gamblers, and book #2 The Tender Years. The MacIntosh Family moves into their homestead in the northern bushland after trials in a series of rented houses. Here, this pioneer family, along with friends and neighbours, rides out the Depression as one by one their children grow up, and we share their struggles, their joys and their tr...

The fur trade that rode the Canadian river highway from York factory to the West was dwindling, and the settlers, following the missionaries, are moving in to claim the new land.John and Adolphe, among these early pioneers, emigrated from Scotland and France to travel west, where they meet Father Lacombe, Louis Riel, and the women who will teach them how to straddle two cultures. Métis women, fairer than the men, and uncommonly pretty, open the eyes of these voyagers, their minds, and thei...

The real story of Frank (Cougar) Wright tells of a loud, brash, irreverent, pioneer to the Canadian Northwest from Wisconsin and the forests of Washington. Cougar swore like a trooper, and didn't believe in a higher power than his own strength, but he loved his family and wanted them to join him in his struggle to tame the wilderness in Canada. The book is filled with romance, adventure, even a ghost story, and there is a thread of mystery winding through its pages. Tempers run high in a d...

A classic look at Hollywood and the American film industry by The New Yorker's Lillian Ross, and named one of the "Top 100 Works of U.S. Journalism of the Twentieth Century."Lillian Ross worked at The New Yorker for more than half a century, and might be described not only as an outstanding practitioner of modern long-form journalism but also as one of its inventors. Picture, originally published in 1952, is her most celebrated piece of r...

The definitive sketch of one of America’s greatest writers.On May 13, 1950, Lillian Ross’s first portrait of Ernest Hemingway was published in The New Yorker. It was an account of two days Hemingway spent in New York in 1949 on his way from Havana to Europe. This candid and affectionate profile was tremendously controversial at the time, to the great surprise of its author. Booklist said, “The piece immediately conveys to the reader the kind of ma...

William Shawn once called The Talk of the Town the soul of the magazine. The section began in the first issue, in 1925. But it wasn't until a couple of years later, when E. B. White and James Thurber arrived, that the Talk of the Town story became what it is today: a precise piece of journalism that always gets the story and has a little fun along the way.The Fun of It is the first anthology of Talk pieces that spans the magazine's life. ...

From the inimitable New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross—“a collection of her most luminous New Yorker pieces” (Entertainment Weekly, grade: A).A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1945, Lillian Ross is one of the few journalists who worked for both the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, and its current editor, David Remnick. She “made journalistic history by pioneering the kind of novelistic nonfiction that inspired later...

A surprisingly tender coming-of-age story of a close-knit yet tough Sicilian-American family that accepts and welcomes a young boy struggling to understand himself—by the former Daily News (New York) gossip columnist and E! television host.A.J. Benza’s distinctive blend of wit, dry humor, and genuine tenderness shines through this candid, compelling memoir about the summer of 1974 when his shy, effeminate cousin comes to live with A.J.’s family, w...

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, no place burned more brightly in the imagination of European geographers––and fortune hunters––than the lost city of Timbuktu. Africa's legendary City of Gold, not visited by Europeans since the Middle Ages, held the promise of wealth and fame for the first explorer to make it there. In 1824, the French Geographical Society offered a cash prize to the first expedition from any nation to visit Timbuktu and return to tell the tale.One o...

Raised like a princess in one of the most powerful families in the American South, Henrietta Bingham was offered the helm of a publishing empire. Instead, she ripped through the Jazz Age like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character: intoxicating and intoxicated, selfish and shameless, seductive and brilliant, endearing and often terribly troubled. In New York, Louisville, and London, she drove both men and women wild with desire, and her youth blazed with sex. But her love affairs with women made...