When It Gets Dark

When It Gets Dark is a 600,000 word fictional Vietnam War drama based on the real events. An even more unsettling Apocalypse Now when two idealistic West Point grads fight in Vietnam their idealism and confidence takes a beating in their first tour. One platoon leader questions everything whereas his counterpart feels the need to join Special Forces to really make a difference in the war. Haunted by his charges being killed, maimed and disabled he questions his sanity about being a combat leader fighting over the same piece of real estate over and over.In the stripped-down, barbaric life of an infantryman, Michael McLachlan, a Harvard bound rich kid from Philadelphia elects to go to West Point and dismiss his chosen destiny to be an egg head lawyer working the Wall Street racket. His classmate Frenchie Goulet convinces him not to abandon Vietnam after one combat tour and join him in Special Forces. As he eventually agrees to Goulet's badgering friends and family alike question his mental state. As they both become top secret SOG commandos they realize how dark their work is and how truly convoluted the Army is, the chain of command and other meddling departments of the US government and double dealing politicians. Even the four branches of the military go to war amongst themselves over turf wars, control of assets and bombing at the cost of the lives of Special Forces troops. Further the book explores the double dealing involving the State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress and President Nixon as Watergate slowly destroys any chance of saving South Vietnam.When It Gets Dark is deeply inspired by the heroic men and women who served in Vietnam, a glimpse of the sacrifices and dedication it takes to be a soldier along with the frustration of fighting in that endless war. Having met and been acquainted with many Vietnam Veterans, their stories and sacrifice had to be told. Forty years later the Vietnam Veteran has not received his due and certainly zero has been told about SOG commando's that were dispatched to kill their South Vietnamese allies, top NVA generals, treasonous Americans and foreign war profiteers. They fought with dedication to their comrades in arms and to their country. But most importantly, they showed the strength, courage and determination to fight in the most unpopular war in America's history.

In this follow-up to "Losing My Mind," DeBaggio comes to terms not only withloss of memory but the ultimate loss of his life.

It’s night. It’s dark. It’s time to go indoors—or is it? The outdoors at night can be a scary place, but this book will help young readers investigate the mysterious nature of night. To explore the night, it would be great to have eyes like an owl, the sensitive nose of a deer, and feet that can move as silently as a fox. Humans aren’t quite as good as nocturnal animals at navigating the darkness, but we can come surprisingly close. Our senses are much sharper than we realize, if we learn how to use them. Some scientists are even researching the sensory abilities of human hair! Each chapter of the book spotlights a different nocturnal creature. And while learning about animals’ adaptations for navigating the world of night, young readers discover their own surprising abilities. Years of teaching children in the outdoors has given the author, renowned environrmental educator Anita Sanchez, firsthand experience in introducing students to the terrors and joys of nature at night. She has led kids on night walks in a variety of habitats, including urban settings. Based on these experiences, the book describes night-time landscapes and the nocturnal animals that inhabit them, from desert coyotes to the frog chorus in a backyard pond—and a corner of the bathroom at midnight where a spider lurks. Readers will encounter: --The great horned owl, who can spot the twitch of a mouse’s tail in almost total darkness. --The Gila monster, who prowls the desert night using its tongue to locate prey. --The super-sensitive ears of a bullfrog (yes, frogs have ears!) --The delicate sense of touch of a spider, capturing its prey by feeling the slightest vibrations of its web. Sidebars called “You Can Do It!” offer fun and active ways for kids to explore their own senses—learning more about their own eyes, ears, nose, and senses of touch and taste. --While using crayons at night, can your eyes tell red from green? --Can you hold completely still for an entire minute, like a fox stalking its prey? --Could you follow the scent trail of an onion across the back yard? --Can you find sounds in the dark? Learn to use the “big ears” technique to locate sounds with accuracy.

Winner of the 2020 Kingdoms in the Wild Annual Poetry PrizeYves Olade on Dark When It Gets Dark- is about desire, about gentleness and grief. The collection also speaks to something of honesty, of truth, to the absence of duplicity. What would it mean for something to just be what it was, and nothing else? What if a storm is just a storm, and nothing else? What if it's finally dark when it gets dark?

Ken Levine's second novel, Before It Gets Dark, powerfully explores what happens when a person's expectations for a better life are raised, only to have those expectations dashed by a shattering event that illuminates how fragile life can be. Boyd may be nearly seven feet tall, but everything else about the socially awkward custodian is ordinary. At the factory in a small southern town where he works, Boyd happens upon pregnant and lonely Marcy Travers crying in a bathroom stall. The novel traces the tumultuous lives of Marcy and her sister Tanya with their troubled young mother Jo. As Marcy grows to an adult, she strives to avoid her mother's mistakes, yet finds herself about to repeat them before Boyd comes into her life. Their chance meeting transforms Boyd's unexceptional life into one with purpose and meaning and provides Marcy the stability she craves. Boyd creates a bond with Marcy's daughter Katie, and through her he becomes the father he never imagined he could be. But his new life comes crashing down in a momentary spasm of violence that sets him off on an unpredictable journey with Katie that will forever change all of their lives.

Adeptly navigating between elegy and celebration, fear and determination, confusion and clarity, DeBaggio delivers an exquisitely moving and inspiring book that will resonate with all those who have grappled with their own or their loved ones' memory loss and with death. With his first memoir, Losing My Mind, Thomas DeBaggio stunned readers by laying bare his faltering mind in a haunting and beautiful meditation on the centrality of memory to human life, and on his loss of it to early-onset Alzheimer's disease. In this second extraordinary narrative, he confronts the ultimate loss: that of life. And as only DeBaggio could, he treats death as something to honor, to marvel at, to learn from. Charting the progression of his disease with breathtaking honesty, DeBaggio deftly describes the frustration, grief, and terror of grappling with his deteriorating intellectual faculties. Even more affecting, the prose itself masterfully represents the mental vicissitudes of his disease—DeBaggio's fragments of memory, observation, and rumination surface and subside in the reader's experience much as they might in his own mind. His frank, lilting voice and abundant sense of wonder bind these fragments into a fluid and poetic portrait of life and loss. Over the course of the book, DeBaggio revisits many of the people, places, and events of his life, both in his memory and in fact. In a sense, he is saying goodbye, paying his respects to the world as it recedes from him—and it is a poignant irony that even as this happens, he is at the height of his remarkable descriptive powers. In his moments of clarity, his love for life's details only grows deeper and richer: the limestone creek where he has fished for years; his satisfying and lonely herb farming days; the goldfish pond his son designed and built in his backyard in honor of DeBaggio's passion for "any hole in the ground with some liquid in it"; the thirty years in his beloved home in Arlington, Virginia; his early career as a muckraker; the innumerable precious moments spent with his wife and son; his belated grief over his parents' deaths.

“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker

Uses rhetorical and literary theory to recover the power of the blues in its cultural tradition. Describes effective strategies for teaching the blues to students.