The Dark Side Of The Mountain

A blend of fact and fiction, The Dark Side of the Mountain describes two turbulent decades in the life of Anna Margaretha Mallow, a German immigrant caught up in events beyond her control. Moved by her husband to the frontier of Virginia at the beginning of the French and Indian War, she and her five children are forced to seek safety at Fort Seybert from the notorious War Chief Killbuck, who is on a death march to save his people and culture. Surviving what becomes a deadly massacre, Anna and her children are taken captive and marched to the Ohio River Valley where Anna endures indescribable losses and change. Only courage and perseverance sustain her during this dark period in American history.

A blend of fact and fiction, The Dark Side of the Mountain describes two turbulent decades in the life of Anna Margaretha Mallow, an extraordinary woman caught up in events she cannot understand or control. Moved by her husband to the frontier of Virginia at the beginning of the French and Indian War, she and her five children are forced to seek safety at Fort Seybert from the notorious Chief Killbuck, who is on a death march to save his people and culture. Surviving what becomes a deadly massacre, Anna and her children are taken captive and marched to the Ohio River Valley where she endures indescribable losses and change. Only courage and perseverance sustain her during his dark period in American history.

"What's wrong, Pete?" "Our roof collapsed. I meant to get the snow off yesterday and prop up the middle, but I was too feverish and exhausted. Nuts!" After an avalanche buries two young snowboarders deep in the Colorado Rockies, Pete McGregor, an old World War II veteran, treks into the wilderness to rescue them. When he finds the lone survivor incapacitated by two broken legs, the two hunker down in a makeshift snow cave to ride out an approaching storm. While biding their time, Pete reveals his past as an infantryman with the Tenth Mountain Division, a past filled with adventure, sorrow, triumph, and hope. When tragedy occurs, the two men must make some difficult decisions that could cost them their lives. This dramatic story will engage and surprise you. The raw courage and perseverance of the characters in this story is inspiring and captivating on a deep, heartfelt level. Experience it for yourself in The Dark Side of the Mountain by Christopher Mars.

Professional bear hunter and woodsman Bobby Burris was raised to hunt and poach on the famous Biltmore Estate lands and forest located adjacent to his family's homestead near Asheville, North Carolina. He was ruled by a tyrannical father who taught him to ignore the law and engaged him in an array of illegal activities from an early age, at which time he witnessed a notorious still-unsolved crime and murder. He was forced to participate in other crimes and retaliations during his adolescence under his father's direction. Rebelling against him, Bobby became a young renegade and formed his own small criminal organization in Asheville that extended beyond the region with links to the Italian and Mexican mafias and drug trafficking routes from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. His life from childhood into adulthood, under a Machiavellian authority, eventually led to his arrest and incarceration in a Federal prison where he by mere chance became a bodyguard for a mob boss of a major New York crime family. His road to perdition was interrupted by a vision that transformed him in the midst of this setting and began within him a process of rebelling once more against a life of crime that he'd been forced into since childhood. The story takes place against a backdrop of mountain wilderness and people with a long history of isolation, independence, and rebellion against authority. From a family of moonshine bootleggers, a legacy of crime developed from father to son that began with illegal poaching on the vast acreage of the magnificent Biltmore Estate and its forestlands, hunting parties with politically connected cronies from Asheville's "old boy"network, a series of hidden crimes, cruelties, and cover-ups that led to the monstrous formation of a young man with the brutalized heart of a stone cold killer. This story inflects the true crime genre with a psychological perspective, revealing unsolved mysteries, secret societies, bold adventure set within regional history, and family drama with a focus on the father/son relationship involving murder, sin and redemption. Bobby's journey from the black side of the mountain through a wilderness of transforming enlightenment is an exciting, intriguing, and inspiring story of physical and psychological survival. The book glows with a loving appreciation for the good that lies deep within some of the most hardened hearts, just as the setting, deep in the Appalachian Mountains, is shown bursting with images of spectacular beauty and the rich bounty of nature even while danger may lurk at every turn.

Ghiglieri (anthropology, U. of Northern Arizona) provides a wide- ranging description of what makes men and women fundamentally different, in both body and behavior, arguing that male violence is largely innate and that only policies based on the biological underpinnings of human behavior can limit social violence. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR