Stricken Field

Martha Gellhorn was one of the first—and most widely read—female war correspondents of the twentieth century. She is best known for her fearless reporting in Europe before and during WWII and for her brief marriage to Ernest Hemingway, but she was also an acclaimed novelist. In 1938, before the Munich pact, Gellhorn visited Prague and witnessed its transformation from a proud democracy preparing to battle Hitler to a country occupied by the German army. Born out of this experience, A Stricken Field follows a journalist who returns to Prague after its annexation and finds her efforts to obtain help for the refugees and to convey the shocking state of the country both frustrating and futile. A convincing account of a people under the brutal oppression of the Gestapo, A Stricken Field is Gellhorn’s most powerful work of fiction. “[A] brave, final novel. Its writing is quick with movement and with sympathy; its people alive with death, if one can put it that way. It leaves one with aching heart and questing mind.”—New York Herald Tribune “The translation of [Gellhorn’s] personal testimony into the form of a novel has . . . force and point.”—Times Literary Supplement

The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument is the site of one of America's most famous armed struggles, but the events surrounding Custer's defeat there in 1876 are only the beginning of the story. As park custodians, American Indians, and others have contested how the site should be preserved and interpreted for posterity, the Little Bighorn has turned into a battlefield in more ways than one. In Stricken Field, one of America's foremost military historians offers the first comprehensive history of the site and its administration in more than half a century. Jerome A. Greene has produced a compelling account of one of the West's most hallowed and controversial attractions, beginning with the battle itself and ending with the establishment of an American Indian memorial early in the twenty-first century. Chronicling successive efforts of the War Department and the National Park Service to oversee the site, Greene describes the principal issues that have confounded its managers, from battle observances and memorials to ongoing maintenance, visitor access, and public use. Stricken Field is a cautionary tale. Greene elucidates the conflict between the Park Service's dual mission to provide public access while preserving the integrity of a historical resource. He also traces the complex events surrounding the site, including Indian protests in the 1970s and 1980s that ultimately contributed to the 2003 dedication of a monument finally recognizing the Lakotas, Northern Cheyennes, and other American Indians who fought there.

The Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument is the site of one of America’s most famous armed struggles, but the events surrounding Custer’s defeat there in 1876 are only the beginning of the story. As park custodians, American Indians, and others have contested how the site should be preserved and interpreted for posterity, the Little Bighorn has turned into a battlefield in more ways than one. In Stricken Field, one of America’s foremost military historians offers the first comprehensive history of the site and its administration in more than half a century. Jerome A. Greene has produced a compelling account of one of the West’s most hallowed and controversial attractions, beginning with the battle itself and ending with the establishment of an American Indian memorial early in the twenty-first century. Chronicling successive efforts of the War Department and the National Park Service to oversee the site, Greene describes the principal issues that have confounded its managers, from battle observances and memorials to ongoing maintenance, visitor access, and public use. Stricken Field is a cautionary tale. Greene elucidates the conflict between the Park Service’s dual mission to provide public access while preserving the integrity of a historical resource. He also traces the complex events surrounding the site, including Indian protests in the 1970s and 1980s that ultimately contributed to the 2003 dedication of a monument finally recognizing the Lakotas, Northern Cheyennes, and other American Indians who fought there.

Two women. All alone. With no provision…Can they find hope in a foreign land? Ruth leaves her home with a barren womb and an empty future after losing her husband. She forsakes her abusive parents and follows the woman she has grown to love as a true parent, her late husband's mother, Naomi. Ruth arrives in Israel with nothing to recommend her but Naomi's love. She is destitute, grief-stricken, and unwanted by the people of God. But God has great plans for her. While everyone considers Ruth an unworthy outsider, she is shocked to find the owner of the field—one of the wealthiest and most honored men of Judah—is showing her favor. Long since a widower and determined to stay that way, Boaz finds himself irresistibly drawn to the foreign woman with the dark, haunted eyes. He tells himself he is only being kind to his cousin Naomi's chosen daughter when he goes out of his way to protect her from harm, but his heart knows better. Obstacles. Heartache. Withered dreams. How can God forge love, passion, and new hope between two such different people?

Mary Douglas, an American journalist working in Prague during 1938, finds herself becoming involved in the predicament of the Nazis' victims

Let go your keys, let go your gun, let go your good pen and your rings, let your wolf mask go and kiss goodbye your goddess figurine. With this invocation, Mar’a MelŽndez beckons us on a journeyÑan exotic expedition through lifeÕs mysteries in search of the finer strands of experience. In a Latina voice laced with a naturalistÕs sense of wonder, she weaves bold images reflecting a world threaded by unseen wounds, now laid before us with an unflinching love of life and an exquisite precision of language. Adopting multiple guisesÑfield researcher, laboring mother, grief-stricken loverÑMelŽndez casts aside stereotypes and expectations to forge a new language steeped in life and landscape. Whether meditating on a controlled prairie burn or contemplating the turquoise cheek of a fathead minnow, she weaves words and memories into a rich tapestry that resonates with sensual detail and magnifies her sense of maternal wildness, urging us to ÒLove as much as you / can, donÕt throw your heart / away to just one god.Ó In her paean to the Aztec deity Tonacacihuatl, mother of the gods, MelŽndez muses that ÒHow many spirits sheÕs twin to, and how long sheÕll last in this world, / are secrets stashed in the rattle / of corn ears, in the coils / of venomous snakes.Ó Through stunning images and stark realism, her poems embrace motherhood and vocation, love and grief, land and life, to bring new meaning to the natural world and how we experience it.

Here is one of the most remarkable, ambitious, and utterly original memoirs of this generation, a story of the losing and finding of self, of sex and love and fatherhood and the joy of language, of death and failure and heartbreak, of Los Angeles and Portland and Nicaragua and Mexico, and the shifting sands of place and meaning that can make up a culture, or a community, or a home. Faced with the collapse of his son’s Little League program–consisting mostly of Latino kids in the largely Asian suburb of Monterey Park, California–Jesse Katz finds himself thrust into the role of baseball commissioner for La Loma Park. Under its lights the yearnings and conflicts of a complex immigrant community are played out amid surprising moments of grace. Each day–and night–becomes a test of Jesse’s judgment and adaptability, and of his capacity to make this peculiar pocket of L.A.’s Eastside his home. While Jesse soothes egos, brokers disputes, chases down delinquent coaches and missing equipment, and applies popsicles to bruises, he forms unlikely alliances, commits unanticipated errors, and receives the gift of unexpected wisdom. But there’s no less drama in Jesse’s complicated personal life as he grapples with a stepson who seems destined for trouble, comforts his mother (a legendary Oregon politician) when she’s stricken with cancer, and receives hard lessons in finding–and holding on to–the love of a good woman. Through it all, Jesse’s emotional mainstay is his beloved son, Max, who quietly bests his father’s brightest hopes. Over nine springs and summers with Max at La Loma, Jesse learns nothing less than what it takes to be a father, a son, a husband, a coach, and, ultimately, a man. This is an epic book, a funny book, a sexy book, a rapturously evocative and achingly poignant book. Above all it is true, in that it happened, but also in a way that transcends mere facts and cuts to the quick of what it means to be alive.

A rural Kentucky teenager comes of age in the summer of 1969 in this novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. Nameless, Kentucky, in 1969 is a hardscrabble community where jobs are few and poverty is a simple fact—just like the hot Appalachian breeze or the pests that can destroy a tobacco field. RubyLyn Bishop is luckier than some. Her God-fearing uncle, Gunnar, has a short fuse and high expectations, but he’s given her a good home ever since she was orphaned at the age of five. Yet now a month shy of her sixteenth birthday, RubyLyn itches for more. Maybe it’s something to do with the paper fortunetellers RubyLyn has been making for townsfolk, each covered with beautifully wrought, prophetic drawings. Or perhaps it’s because of Rainey Ford, her black neighbor who works alongside her in the tobacco field and with whom she has a kinship—despite the disapproval of others. RubyLyn’s predictions are just wishful thinking, not magic at all, but through them she’s imagining life as it could be, away from the prejudice and hardship that ripple through Nameless… “A voice rich and authentic, steeped in the somber beauty that defines life in the South.”—David Joy, author of When These Mountains Burn “Richardson’s brilliant writing made me feel as though I were transported back in time…and actually there witnessing this poignant heartfelt story.”—Charles Belfoure, New York Times–bestselling author of The Fallen Architect “A reader always recognizes when the author has poured her soul into a body of work. [This] is a tender, beautifully written second novel.”—Ann Hite, author of the Black Mountain series