Gone To The Country

Jane Porter returns with an entertaining tale of a former top model who is forced to reinvent herself by moving back to her hometown in Texas after her marriage falls apart. Shey Darcy, a 39-year-old former top model for Vogue and Sports Illustrated led a charmed life in New York City with a handsome photographer husband until the day he announced he'd fallen in love with someone else. Left to pick up the pieces of her once happy world, Shey decides to move back home to Texas with her three teenage sons. Life on the family ranch, however, brings with it a whole new host of dramas starting with differences of opinion with her staunch Southern Baptist mother, her rugged but overprotective brothers, and daily battles with her three sons who are also struggling to find themselves. Add to the mix Shey's ex-crush, Dane Kelly, a national bullriding champ and she's got her hands full. It doesn't take long before Shey realizes that in order to reinvent herself, she must let go of an uncertain future and a broken past, to find happiness--and maybe love--in the present.

Gone to the Country chronicles the life and music of the New Lost City Ramblers, a trio of city-bred musicians who helped pioneer the resurgence of southern roots music during the folk revival of the late 1950s and 1960s. Formed in 1958 by Mike Seeger, John Cohen, and Tom Paley, the Ramblers introduced the regional styles of southern ballads, blues, string bands, and bluegrass to northerners yearning for a sound and an experience not found in mainstream music. Ray Allen interweaves biography, history, and music criticism to follow the band from its New York roots to their involvement with the commercial folk music boom. Allen details their struggle to establish themselves amid critical debates about traditionalism brought on by their brand of folk revivalism. He explores how the Ramblers ascribed notions of cultural authenticity to certain musical practices and performers and how the trio served as a link between southern folk music and northern urban audiences who had little previous exposure to rural roots styles. Highlighting the role of tradition in the social upheaval of mid-century America, Gone to the Country draws on extensive interviews and personal correspondence with band members and digs deep into the Ramblers' rich trove of recordings.

She's a little bit country, and he's...not. Arizona businessman and long-lost McKay love child Gavin Daniels has been awarded sole custody of his teenage daughter, Sierra. In order to steer her back on track after a brush with the law, he heads to Wyoming...even if he isn't sure where they fit in the McKay dynamic. But he's thrown for a loop when his new housemate, Rielle, is a whole lot sexier than he remembered. Rielle Wetzler has finally overcome the stigma of having hippie parents and being a young single mother. But now Gavin is in Sundance to claim the house that's rightfully his. Rielle knew this day would come, but she isn't prepared to leave the home she built for herself. And to further complicate matters, her long-dormant libido is definitely not ready to live with this newly buff Gavin--who has the take-charge attitude to prove he's all McKay. Sharing a roof is too much temptation, and before long, Gavin and Rielle are sharing a bed. But are they ready to share their hearts, lives and families forever? Warning: Contains a feisty, independent heroine who doesn't need a man to take care of her needs outside the bedroom and a sweet, sexy and bossy hero who's up to the challenge of proving her wrong

A journey through the history of country music.

“Not only does Anholt explain the challenges facing the world with unique clarity, he also provides genuinely new, informative, practical, innovative solutions. . . . The book is a must-read for anyone who cares about humanity's shared future.” —H. E. Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (Farmaajo), President of the Federal Republic of Somalia Simon Anholt has spent decades helping countries from Austria to Zambia to improve their international standing. Using colorful descriptions of his experiences—dining with Vladimir Putin at his country home, taking a group of Felipe Calderon's advisors on their first Mexico City subway ride, touring a beautiful new government hospital in Afghanistan that nobody would use because it was in Taliban-controlled territory—he tells how he began finding answers to that question. Ultimately, Anholt hit on the Good Country Equation, a formula for encouraging international cooperation and reinventing education for a globalized era. Anholt even offers a “selfish” argument for cooperation: he shows that it generates goodwill, which in turn translates into increased trade, foreign investment, tourism, talent attraction, and even domestic electoral success. Anholt insists we can change the way countries behave and the way people are educated in a single generation—because that's all the time we have.

Set in Toronto and Italy, this powerful sequel to In a Glass House explores the sometimes forbidden aspect of desire and one’s longing for what is unrecoverable. Victor Innocente remeets his half-sister in Toronto, shortly after his father’s death. Uneasy with their new proximity in each other’s lives, they are at first restrained. But gradually what is unspoken between them comes closer to the surface, setting in motion a course of events that will take Victor back to Valle del Sole in Italy, the place of his birth. It is there, where the story had its strange beginning twenty years earlier, that he confronts his past, its secrets and its revelations. Poignant, gripping, and written in luminous, highly charged prose, Where She Has Gone is an unforgettable novel – for its vivid portrayal of character and place, and for its extraordinarily moving encounter with the past.

The rich and colorful story of America's most popular music and the singers and songwriters who captivated, entertained, and consoled listeners throughout the twentieth century--based on the upcoming eight-part film series to air on PBS in September 2019 This gorgeously illustrated and hugely entertaining history begins where country music itself emerged: the American South, where people sang to themselves and to their families at home and in church, and where they danced to fiddle tunes on Saturday nights. With the birth of radio in the 1920s, the songs moved from small towns, mountain hollers, and the wide-open West to become the music of an entire nation--a diverse range of sounds and styles from honky tonk to gospel to bluegrass to rockabilly, leading up through the decades to the music's massive commercial success today. But above all, Country Music is the story of the musicians. Here is Hank Williams's tragic honky tonk life, Dolly Parton rising to fame from a dirt-poor childhood, and Loretta Lynn turning her experiences into songs that spoke to women everywhere. Here too are interviews with the genre's biggest stars, including the likes of Merle Haggard to Garth Brooks to Rosanne Cash. Rife with rare photographs and endlessly fascinating anecdotes, the stories in this sweeping yet intimate history will captivate longtime country fans and introduce new listeners to an extraordinary body of music that lies at the very center of the American experience.

The Wadawurrung are the Aboriginal people whose land includes the cities now known as Ballarat and Geelong. This book is a history about relations between the Wadawurrung and the ngamadjidj (generally translated as white stranger belonging to the sea) in the period 1800 -1870. The history of inter-racial relations between the Wadawurrung and the British colonisers is distinctive. Divided into chronological and thematic sections, the book chronicles three waves of invasion: the early invasion period incorporating trespassers from England and France, predominately from the sea, the sheepherders or squatters who followed in their wake and usurped the Wadawurrung of all their Country for sheep runs, and the third wave of invaders - the gold seekers.It examines the adaptations of the Wadawurrung to the European invaders in some detail by including lengthy excerpts of first hand accounts. Indeed, a feature of this book is the lengthy transcripts from the archival sources, often unabridged, which increases its historical value and provides the detail and the tone of the events as no historian can.This history book is transformative as it constructs a compelling argument of how the Wadawurrung were active agents of change and sought cultural enrichment in the midst of the frontier war on their Country. In addition to the accounts of the accommodative actions by the Wadawurrung to the newly imposed economy, spiritual beliefs and socio-political frameworks, the author has woven the colonial invaders stories of their actions and attitudes towards the Wadawurrung ranging from genocidal intent to arrangements approximating Native Title. The book therefore details not just the violent conquest of Wadawurrung lands by the squatters but also paints the fine brush strokes of the conquest stories - including their 'longing to belong'.The author, Associate Professor Dr Fred Cahir acknowledges the necessity for non-Aboriginal Australians to recognise and confront their own place and role in the history of Aboriginal-colonial invader relations.