Taking The Hard Road

Taking the Hard Road is an engaging history of growing up in working-class families in France and Germany during the Industrial Revolution. Based on a reading of ninety autobiographical accounts of childhood and adolescence, the book explores the far-reaching historical transformations associated with the emergence of modern industrial capitalism. According to Mary Jo Maynes, the aspects of private life revealed in these accounts played an important role in historical development by actively shaping the authors' social, political, and class identities. The stories told in these memoirs revolve around details of everyday life: schooling, parent-child relations, adolescent sexuality, early experiences in the workforce, and religious observances. Maynes uses demographics, family history, and literary analysis to place these details within the context of historical change. She also draws comparisons between French and German texts, men's and women's accounts, and narratives of social mobility and political militancy.

Scores of WWII POWs offer lessons of wartime as they remember the terror and hardship of their days in captivity.

The dramatic journeys of the 19th century Gold Rush come to life in this geologist’s tour of the American West and the events that shaped the land. In 1848, news of the discovery of gold in California triggered an enormous wave of emigration toward the Pacific. The dramatic terrain these settlers crossed is so familiar to us now that it is hard to imagine how frightening—even godforsaken—its sheer rock faces and barren deserts once seemed to them. Hard Road West brings their perspective vividly to life, weaving together the epic overland journey of the covered wagon trains and the compelling story of the landscape they encountered. Taking readers along the 2,000-mile California Trail, Keith Meldahl uses settler’s diaries and letters—as well as his own experiences on the trail—to reveal how the geology and geography of the West shaped our nation’s westward expansion. He guides us through a landscape of sawtooth mountains, following the meager streams that served as lifelines through an arid land, all the way to California itself, where colliding tectonic plates created breathtaking scenery and planted the gold that lured travelers west in the first place. “Alternates seamlessly between vivid accounts of the 19th-century journey and lucid explanations of the geological events that shaped the landscape traveled.”—Library Journal

Stuart Hall's writings on the political impact of Margaret Thatcher have established him as the most prescient and insightful analyst of contemporary Conservatism Collected here for the first time with a new introduction, these essays show how Thatcher has exploited discontent with Labour's record in office and with aspects of the welfare state to devise a potent authoritarian, populist ideology. Hall's critical approach is elaborated here in essays on the formation of the SDP, inner city riots, the Falklands War and the signficance of Antonio Gramsci. He suggests that Thatcherism is skillfully employing the restless and individualistic dynamic of consumer capitalism to promote a swingeing programme of 'regressive modernization'. The Hard Road to Renewal is as concerned with elaborating a new politics for the Left as it is with the project of the Right. Hall insists that the Left can no longer trade on inherited politics and tradition. Socialists today must be as radical as modernity itself. Valuable pointers to a new politics are identified in the experience of feminism, the campaigns of the GLC and the world-wide response to Band Aid.

"Count your blessings," his mother told him, "Think of everything good in your life." Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin has done it again. Building from his acclaimed first memoir, From Our House, which recounts the farming accident that cost his father both his hands, Gone the Hard Road is the story of Beulah Martin's endurance and sacrifice as a mother, and the gift of imagination she offered her son. Martin unfolds the world she created for him within their unsettled family life, from the first time she read to him in a doctor's office waiting room, to enrolling him in a children's book club, to the books she bought him in high school. Gone the Hard Road portrays Beulah's selflessness as the family moved around the Midwest, sometimes in the face of her husband's opposition, to show her son a different way of being. Rather than concentrate on the life his father threatened to destroy, as Martin's previous memoirs do, Gone the Hard Road offers the counternarrative of a loving mother and the creative life she made possible, in spite of the eventual cost to herself. A poignant, honest, and moving read, Gone the Hard Road will stay with anyone who has ever struggled to find their place in the world.

The founding father of Canadian bikers shares the story of his fascinating life. You could call Bernie Guindon the Sonny Barger of Canadian bikers (but not to his face). The founder of Satan's Choice, Guindon led what was in the 1960s the second-largest biker club in the world (after the Hells Angels, which Bernie would join briefly in the early 2000s) to national prominence and international infamy. His life wasn't all bikes and crime. He was also a medalist in boxing for Canada at the Pan Am Games. That tension between the very rough life he was born into and the possibility for success in the straight world (and how aspirations in each fed his success in the other) layer Guindon's story, one of the great untold stories in biker history. Friends from the biker world and Guindon's family have given extensive interviews for Hard Road, including his son, Harley, whose own depictions of prison time are some of the most searing you'll ever read.

Jon Reznick is a "ghost" a black-ops specialist who takes his orders from shadowy handlers, and his salary from the US government. Still mourning the loss of his beloved wife on 9/11, he's dispatched to carry out a high-level hit. Reznick knows only that it must look like suicide. It's textbook. But the target is not the man Reznick expected. The whole setup is wrong. In an instant the operation is compromised, and Reznick is on the run with the man he was sent to kill. A man wanted by the FBI, and by a mysterious terrorist organization hell-bent on bringing the United States to its knees. FBI Assistant Director Martha Meyerstein is determined to track him down, and to intercept whatever it is Reznick was sent to do. When Reznick's young daughter becomes a pawn in the game, he has to use more than his military training to stay one step ahead of those responsible. Meanwhile, he is the only person who knows the true extent of the threat to national security--and has the stealth and determination to stop it. Revised edition: This edition of Hard Road includes editorial revisions.

After Father left to catch the last train, I stood there looking in the direction of the train station until it was too dark to see anything. Afterwards, I went to my bed, lay down, and covered my face so my roommates could not see me cry. I was seventeen years old, almost a man, and a grown man didn't cry even if he felt so terribly alone. Growing up in Poland at the start of World War II, Bogdan Tukiendorf lived through the clash of German, Russian, and Polish armies, the German occupation, the separation of his family, and a difficult immigration to the U.S. "The Long, Hard Road" details his journey from a farm in Poland to inner-city Chicago. Saddled with a knee injury from an early age, Bogdan limped through childhood and visited makeshift wartime hospitals as his knee worsened. His health prevented him from migrating to the U.S. with his family, so at seventeen he was left alone in a strange German city. "The Long, Hard Road" shares Bogdan's experiences from the war, such as his family's cooperation with the Polish freedom fighters, tenuous friendship with the occupying German commander, the fear of neighbors betraying them, his life in the netherworld while waiting to immigrate, his voyage to a free land, and his struggle to succeed in a new country. This engrossing autobiography will capture your attention as you read firsthand the story of one who survived World War II.