A Sawdust Heart

Chronicles the life of vaudeville actor Henry Wood, and details his early life and experiences while performing in traveling medicine and tent shows in the early twentieth century. Includes black-and-white photographs.

This novel was adapted from the Leonid Adreyev drama and the Victor Seastrom photoplay. Illustrated with scenes from the MGM motion picture starring Norma Shearer and John Gilbert.

Duluth may be the city of “untold delights” as lampooned in a Kentucky congressman’s speech in 1871. Or it may be portrayed by a joke in Woody Allen’s film Manhattan. Or then again, it may be the “Zenith City of the unsalted seas” celebrated by Dr. Thomas Preston Foster, founder of the city’s first newspaper. But whatever else it may be, this city of granite hills, foghorns, and gritty history, the last stop on the shipping lanes of the Great Lakes, is undeniably a city with character—and characters. Duluth native Michael Fedo captures these characters through the happy-go-melancholy lens nurtured by the people and landscape of his youth. In Zenith City Fedo brings it back home. Framed by his reflections on Duluth’s colorful—and occasionally very dark—history and its famous visitors, such as Sinclair Lewis, Joe DiMaggio, and Bob Dylan, his memories make the city as real as the boy next door but with a better story. Here, among the graceful, poignant, and often hilarious remembered moments—pranks played on a severe teacher, the family’s unlikely mob connections, a rare childhood affliction—are the coordinates of Duluth’s larger landscape: the diners and supper clubs, the baseball teams, radio days, and the smelt-fishing rites of spring. Woven through these tales of Duluth are Fedo’s curious, instructive, and ultimately deeply moving stories about becoming a writer, from the guidance of an English teacher to the fourteen-year-old reporter’s interview with Louis Armstrong to his absorption in the events that would culminate in his provocative and influential book The Lynchings in Duluth. These are the sorts of essays—personal, cultural, and historical, at once regional and far-reaching—that together create a picture of people in a place as rich in history and anecdote as Duluth and of the forces that forever bind them together.

This text emphasizes the importance of artificial intelligence techniques in the field of biological computation. It also discusses fundamental principles that can be applied beyond bio-inspired computing. It comprehensively covers important topics including data integration, data mining, machine learning, genetic algorithms, evolutionary computation, evolved neural networks, nature-inspired algorithms, and protein structure alignment. The text covers the application of evolutionary computations for fractal visualization of sequence data, artificial intelligence, and automatic image interpretation in modern biological systems. The text is primarily written for graduate students and academic researchers in areas of electrical engineering, electronics engineering, computer engineering, and computational biology. This book: • Covers algorithms in the fields of artificial intelligence, and machine learning useful in biological data analysis. • Discusses comprehensively artificial intelligence and automatic image interpretation in modern biological systems. • Presents the application of evolutionary computations for fractal visualization of sequence data. • Explores the use of genetic algorithms for pair-wise and multiple sequence alignments. • Examines the roles of efficient computational techniques in biology.

Eleven-year-old Nissa's life has never been perfect. Living in the small town of Harper, Louisiana, with a mama like hers, circa 1933, has led to lots of mean rumors. But now Mama is gone, and all the townsfolk talk about is who she might have run off with. Nissa's memories of the Sundays her mama would come home smelling of sawdust lead her to suspect the rumors could be true. Did her mama go away with the Sawdust Man? And if so, does it mean she's never coming back? A. LaFaye's powerful first novel beautifully explicates the world of a child in distress and how she copes with something beyond her understanding.