Hunting Buffalo With Bent Nails

While he is probably best known as a novelist and short-story writer, Lawrence Block has produced a rich trove of nonfiction over the course of a sixty-year career. His instructional books for writers are leaders in the field, and his self-described pedestrian memoir, Step By Step, has found a loyal audience in the running and racewalking community. Over the years, Block has written extensively for magazines and periodicals. Generally Speaking collects his philatelic columns from Linn's Stamp News, while his extensive observations of crime fiction, along with personal glimpses of some of its foremost practitioners, have won wide acclaim in book form as The Crime of Our Lives. Hunting Buffalo With Bent Nails is what he's got left over. The title piece, originally published in American Heritage, recounts the ongoing adventure Block and his wife undertook, criss-crossing the United States and parts of Canada in their quixotic and exotic quest to find every "village, hamlet, and wide place in the road named Buffalo." Other travel tales share space with a remembrance of his mother, odes to New York, a disquisition on pen names and book tours, and, well, no end of bent nails not worth straightening. Where else will you find "Raymond Chandler and the Brasher Doubloon," an assessment of that compelling writer from a numismatic standpoint? Where else can you read about Block's collection of old subway cars? Highly recommended.

Born of mixed blood parents Bill's father died before he was born from a buffalo hunting accident. Adopted by his mothers new husband he would be educated and grow to be an Osage Warrior to fight for the rights of Native Americans and his families very survival. He would eventually be commissioned a Second Lieutenant and serve in the Army of General Stand Watie fighting for citizenship, Congressional Representation and the right to live in freedom. As Native Americans they were denied American Citizenship and the right to vote and even after the American Civil War they could still be legally owned as slaves. After the war he would work hard in the reconstruction of his people's homeland giving rise to the Osage Nation. Serving in law enforcement he would rise to become a judge. In his lifetime he went from participating on the buffalo hunts of his people to driving automobiles and the wonders of flight. However, the rights he and his fellow warriors fought for would not be achieved until his Great grandson was nearly 17 years old in 1948 when the last objective (the right to vote) would finally be achieved. His story is an American story, rarely told about the Native Americans from the Indian Territory now known as Oklahoma. A comprehensive work that brings the history to life with family pictures and the actual events that shaped America as we know it today.

Heroes of the Santa Fe Trail is the product of decades of primary research by a writer who has lived all of his life in the shadow the TrailOCOs legacy. This book tells the dramatic story of the men and womenOCoHispanic, Anglo, and Native AmericanOCowho settled the West and provides insights not commonly found elsewhere. From the Hispanic Jaramillo and Chavez families of the Rio Grande Valley to the legacy of Ham Bell, a nonviolent man who made more arrests than any Dodge City lawman, Heroes relates the violent, comic, and often tragic adventures of the pioneers of the early Santa Fe Trail. Boson Books offers several exciting novels by Randy Smith about the Old West. For an author bio, photo, and a sample read visit www.bosonbooks.com."

Reproduction of the original: Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches by Theodore Roosevelt

The author recounts her life growing up on a northern Saskatchewan farm in the 1940s and 50s.

"At the place known as Head-Smashed-In in southwestern Alberta, Aboriginal people practiced a form of group hunting for nearly 6,000 years before European contact. The large communal bison traps of the Plains were the single greatest food-getting method ever developed in human history. Hunters, working with their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour, drove their quarry over a cliff and into wooden corrals. The rest of the group butchered the kill in the camp below