EBooks - Fiction and NonFiction

History, literature, and botany meet in this charming tour of how humans have relied on plants to nourish, shelter, heal, clothe, and even entertain us. Did you know that during World War II, the US Navy paid kids to collect milkweed's fluffy white floss, which was then used as filling for life preservers? And Native Americans in the deserts of the Southwest traditionally crafted tattoo needles from prickly pear cactus spines. These are just two of the dozens of tidbits that Tammi Hartung highlights in the tales of 45 native North American flowers, herbs, and trees that have rescued and delighted us for centuries.

Describes the "invasion" of emigrant families into the area and their socio-economic and religious reasons for migrating during the period.

Founded by Thomas H. Davis in 1948, Piedmont Airlines was one of the most respected regional airlines of its time. This exhaustive history follows the airline from its humble beginnings at Smith Reynolds Airport in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to its 1989 absorption into USAir after a buyout at the highest price ever commanded by a regional airline. Drawing upon corporate documents, local news stories, and countless personal interviews with former Piedmont employees, the author tells the airline's history in detail. Nearly 100 photographs show the airline's development, and two appendices provide comprehensive lists of its fleet and service destinations.

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. "Libraries have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic." In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a meditation on the meaning of libraries. Manguel, a guide of irrepressible enthusiasm, conducts a unique library tour that extends from his childhood bookshelves to the Internet, from Ancient Egypt and Greece to the Arab world, from China and Rome to Google. He ponders the personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought, oral "memory libraries" kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, and the library of books never written.

The first African American to head a branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL), Regina Andrews led an extraordinary life. Allied with W.E.B. Du Bois, she fought for promotion and equal pay against entrenched sexism and racism. Andrews also played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance, supporting writers and intellectuals with dedicated workspace at her 135th Street Branch Library. After hours she cohosted a legendary salon that drew the likes of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Her work as an actress and playwright helped established the Harlem Experimental Theater. Ethelene Whitmire's new biography offers the first full-length portrait of Andrews' activism, engagement with the arts of the Harlem Renaissance, and work with the NYPL.

Applicants to the Central Intelligence Agency often asked Edward Mickolus what they might expect in a career there. Mickolus, a former CIA intelligence officer whose duties also included recruiting and public affairs, never had a simple answer. If applicants were considering a life in the National Clandestine Service, the answer was easy. Numerous memoirs show the lives of operations officers collecting secret intelligence overseas, conducting counterintelligence investigations, and running covert action programs.

In The Eye of the Sandpiper, Brandon Keim pairs cutting-edge science with a deep love of nature, conveying his insights in prose that is both accessible and beautiful. In an elegant, thoughtful tour of nature in the twenty-first century, Keim continues in the tradition of Lewis Thomas, Stephen Jay Gould, and David Quammen, reporting from the frontiers of science while celebrating the natural world's wonders and posing new questions about our relationship to the rest of life on Earth.

On Mother’s Day, 1985, the bodies of Kathryn Eastburn and her two young daughters were found in their Fayetteville, North Carolina, home. Their toddler sister, Jana, was the only survivor of a bloody killing spree that terrified a community still reeling from the conviction, six years prior, of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald for the savage slayings of his pregnant wife and two daughters.
The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Department soon focused its investigation on US Army soldier Tim Hennis. Detectives and local prosecutors built their case on circumstantial evidence and a jury convicted Hennis and sentenced him to death. But his defense team refused to give up. Piece by piece, they discredited the state’s case, exposing false testimony, concealed evidence, and prosecutorial misconduct. At a second trial, Hennis was found not guilty and released from death row.
But an even more stunning turn of events was yet to come. Twenty-five years after the murders, the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation tested a crucial piece of DNA evidence from the crime scene. The shocking results led to an unprecedented third trial to determine Tim Hennis’s guilt or innocence.

As the largest tribe east of the Mississippi and the ninth largest in the country, the Lumbees have survived in their original homelands, maintaining a distinct identity as Indians in a bi-racial South. In a work both concise and expansive, Lumbee historian Malinda Maynor Lowery tells this story of survival with a breakthrough approach to rigorous scholarship and personal storytelling. The Lumbees' journey sheds new light on America's defining moments, from the first encounters with Europeans to the present day. How and why did the Lumbees fight to establish and resist the United States? How have they not just survived, but thrived, through Civil War, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement, and the War on Drugs, to ultimately establish their own constitutional government in the twenty-first century? Their fight for full federal acknowledgement continues to this day, while the Lumbee people's struggle for justice and determination continues to transform our view of the American experience.

Self-determination theory is a theory of human motivation that is being increasingly used by organizations to make strategic HR decisions and train managers. It argues for a focus on the quality of workers' motivation over quantity. Motivation that is based on meaning and interest is showed to be superior to motivation that is based on pressure and rewards. Work environments that make workers feel competent, autonomous, and related to others foster the right type of motivation, goals, and work values. The Oxford Handbook of Work Motivation, Engagement, and Self-Determination Theory aims to give.

As the wife of a Marine Corps officer, Mollie Gross learned the hard way to laugh instead of cry at what she could not control-and as she quickly discovered, nearly everything was out of her control. A standup comedienne, Mollie explores everything about the "issued" spouse, from deployment and the stress of having a husband in a combat zone, to the realization that marriage changes when your husband returns home from war. Nothing is taboo or out-of-bounds in this funny, poignant memoir, including the "parties" military wives throw for themselves before hubby returns. (You'll have to read the book to find out about those.) "Mollie Gross is the Chelsea Handler of the milspouse community. She's unfiltered, honest, and hilarious, with an underlying message to stop whining and be proud.

This darkly comic memoir "reveal[s] much about the poverty, drunkenness, political corruption, anti-Semitism, and fundamental absurdity of rural life in the Soviet 1960s." From a frantic pursuit of calcium-deprived, lunatic Socialist chickens to a father begging on his knees to Soviet officials to obtain antibiotic for his dying child, Vladimir's tales of Gradieshti are unforgettable. Sometimes hysterical, often moving, always a remarkable and highly entertaining insider's look at rural life under the old Soviet regime, they are a sobering expose of the terrible inadequacies of its much-lauded socialist medical system.

North Carolina's finest fiction and non-fiction writers come together in Every true pleasure, including David Sedaris, Kelly Link, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and more. Within the volume--featuring writers who identify as gay, trans, bisexual, and straight--are stories and essays that show the full spectrum of contemporary life though an LGBTQ lens. These writers, some native to the state, others born elsewhere, but all with ties to North Carolina, show the multifaceted challenges and joys of LBGTQ life: religion and how it's wielded, young love and gay panic, surrogate pregnancies, military service, family life, finding sex and one's true gender, and discovering love.

Drawing on Tanner’s personal journals and written with the cooperation of his widow, Nancy, Ghost Birds recounts, in fascinating detail, the scientist’s
dogged quest for the ivory-bill as he chased down leads in eight southern states. With Stephen Lyn Bales as our guide, we experience the same awe and excitement that Tanner felt when he returned to the Louisiana wetland he had visited earlier and was able to observe and document several of the “ghost birds”—including a nestling that he handled, banded, and photographed at close range. Investigating the ivory-bill was particularly urgent because it was a fast-vanishing species, the victim of indiscriminant specimen hunting and widespread logging that was destroying its habitat. As sightings became rarer and rarer in the decades following Tanner’s remarkable research, the bird was feared to have become extinct.

Drawing on firsthand accounts of early explorers, pirates, merchants, fishers, and travelers, the book recreates the oceans of the past: waters teeming with whales, sea lions, sea otters, turtles, and giant fish. The abundance of marine life described by 15th century seafarers is almost unimaginable today, but Roberts both brings it alive and artfully traces its depletion. Collapsing fisheries, he shows, are simply the latest chapter in a long history of unfettered commercialization of the seas.

Using original colour drawings, diagrams and photographs, Trevor Yorke takes the reader on a careful tour of the country house and describes its features, exterior and interior, upstairs and downstairs. He looks at the different periods of large country houses from the mid 1500s up to 1914, explaining the changing architectural styles and the tastes of those who had them built. He describes the rooms within the main house and their role over the centuries.

The boots a passenger had on when his plane landed on the Hudson River. The tank top Andy Warhol's assistant wore to one of their nightclub outings together. The jacket a taxi driver put on to feel safe as he worked the night shift. - These and over sixty other clothing-inspired narratives make up Worn in New York, the latest volume from New York Times bestselling author Emily Spivack. In these first-person accounts, contributors in and out of the public eye share surprising, personal, wild, poignant, and funny stories behind a piece of clothing that reminds them of a significant moment of their New York lives. Worn in New York offers a contemporary cultural history of the city-its changing identity, temper, and tone, and its irrepressible vitality-by paying tribute to these well-loved clothes and the people who wore them.

Finalist for the 2017 Washington State Book Award in General Nonfiction / History
This book is a glimpse into the lives of vibrant women who have braved the sea for centuries. Their accounts include the excitement, accidents, trials, and tribulations of fishing in Iceland from the historic times of small open rowboats to today's high-tech fisheries. Based on extensive historical and field research, Seawomen of Iceland allows the seawomen's voices to speak directly with strength, intelligence, and - above all - a knowledge of how to survive.

This engaging ethnographic narrative will intrigue both general and academic readers interested in maritime culture, the anthropology of work, Nordic life, and gender studies.

This text delves into the uncovered world of sleep in patients affected by neurological disorders and further explores those night hours that may be precious restoring sources of healing or else confirm, or exacerbate, daytime neurological symptoms.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor offers a chronicle of the twilight of redlining and the introduction of conventional real estate practices into the Black urban market, uncovering a transition from racist exclusion to predatory inclusion. Widespread access to mortgages across the United States after World War II cemented homeownership as fundamental to conceptions of citizenship and belonging. African Americans had long faced racist obstacles to homeownership, but the social upheaval of the 1960s forced federal government reforms. In the 1970s, new housing policies encouraged African Americans to become homeowners, and these programs generated unprecedented real estate sales in Black urban communities. However, inclusion in the world of urban real estate was fraught with new problems. As new housing policies came into effect, the real estate industry abandoned its aversion to African Americans, especially Black women, precisely because they were more likely to fail to keep up their home payments and slip into foreclosure.

With a wedding impending, the Taiwanese bride-to-be turns to bridal photographers, makeup artists, and hair stylists to transform her image beyond recognition. They give her fairer skin, eyes like a Western baby doll, and gowns inspired by sources from Victorian England to MTV.

With its corn by the acre, beef on the hoof, Quaker Oats, and Kraft Mac n' Cheese, the Midwest eats pretty well and feeds the nation on the side. But there's more to the midwestern kitchen and palate than the farm food and sizable portions the region is best known for beyond its borders. It is to these heartland specialties, from the heartwarming to the downright weird, that Fried Walleye and Cherry Pie invites the reader. The volume brings to the table an illustrious gathering of thirty midwestern writers with something to say about the gustatory pleasures and peculiarities.

Seasoned journalists and authors James Bawden and Ron Miller have captured provocative and entertaining interviews with important figures from TV's first fifty years. These thirty-nine interviews, selected from conversations conducted from 1971--1998, present a fascinating glimpse of some of television's most influential performers.