My library button
  • Book cover of Melonhead
    Katy Kelly

     · 2009

    Melonhead is my preferred name. Preferred by me, not my mom. She likes people to call me by my real name, Adam Melon. Luckily, it’s too late for that because when my friend, Lucy Rose, invented Melonhead, it caught on fast. Usually I am the one doing the inventing. All my life, which is 10 years, great ideas have been popping in and out of my melon head. Sometimes they work. This year they’d better, because our class is entering an inventing fair. My friend Sam and I are dreaming up plans. And Capitol Hill has a ton of places to find invention parts. We just have to make sure to get home on time, with no excuses. If we get first place at school, it will be Chantilly, Virginia Regionals, here we come! The first book in an all-new series by Katy Kelly is nonstop adventure—and trouble. Meet Melonhead! Katy Kelly lives and writes full-time in Washington, D.C. Melonhead is her fifth book for young readers.

  • Book cover of Bloody Ridge

    The Japanese called it the centipede. The northern part of Lunga Ridge, a narrow grass-covered rise that looked like an insect from the air, overlooked a coastal plain. In the center of that plain was Henderson Field, the vital home of the Cactus Air Force and the prize of the Guadalcanal campaign. Whoever commanded the ridge commanded the airstrip. In September 1942, the ridge was the scene of a bloody, three-day battle for control of Henderson Field. In Bloody Ridge, the first book written exclusively on this battle, historian Michael S. Smith has utilized a treasure trove of primary and secondary sources on both sides of the Pacific. NOTE: This edition does not include photographs.

  • Book cover of Gunshots in Another Room
    Charles Kelly

     · 2012

    Dan J. Marlowe (1914-1986), author of The Name of the Game is Death, was one of the finest paperback suspense novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, so good that Stephen King dedicated a book to him. But Marlowe's life was full of strange drama, some featuring his friendship with bank robber Al Nussbaum, a partner of the murderous sociopath Bobby "One-Eye" Wilcoxson. This biography interweaves the stories of Nussbaum, who became a mystery-story writer, Wilcoxson, who committed a savage murder after being released from prison, and Marlowe, who, stricken with amnesia, was haunted by the ghosts of his past, some of whom roamed the world of kinky sex. Book contains 16 photos. "Fantastic...This biography is almost as wild, compelling, dark and surprising as one of Marlowe's books...Highly recommended "-Lee Goldberg, author and TV writer/producer who has scripted Diagnosis: Murder, Monk, Hunter and Spenser: For Hire. "A brilliant biography of the great noir and hardboiled paperbacker Dan J. Marlowe, written with novelistic flair by Charles Kelly."--James Reasoner, celebrated western/mystery writer and author of Texas Wind. Reasoner called Gunshots in Another Room one of his ten favorite books of 2012. "I still remember buying The Name of the Game is Death on a metal spin rack when I was in college. No novel except They Shoot Horses, Don't They? had ever shocked me to the same degree. Marlowe had created a masterpiece. So has Charles Kelly."--Ed Gorman, legendary mystery writer and editor of The Big Book of Noir. "Kelly relates (the details of Marlowe's life) with a sharp and sympathetic eye and a hardboiled style. Informative and well-written, Gunshots in Another Room makes for quite a story."--Woody Haut, author of Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War, Neon Noir, and Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood. "For anyone interested in the history of crime fiction, or the evolution and devolution of the paperback original industry, Gunshots in Another Room is an indispensable volume."-Cullen Gallagher, in the Los Angeles Review of Books. "(The book) demonstrates impeccable (and imaginative) research, perhaps not surprisingly since Kelly is an award-winning journalist."-Marvin Lachman, author of A Reader's Guide to the American Novel of Detection. "Kelly's delight in his subject is so palpable that we feel his excitement as if we're handling the material ourselves...His biography unfolds like the best stories; truth that reads as fiction, containing narrative drive, setups and plenty of payoffs along the way, satisfying and literate."-Jessica Argyle, author of Arrest Me (before I write again), on KeysNews.com.

  • Book cover of Classified Catalogue of the Public Library, of Fitchburg Mass
  • Book cover of Combat Ready? The Eighth U.S. Army on the Eve of the Korean War

    "Historians and sliders have not been kind to either [General Douglas] MacArthur or the soldiers whom he placed in harm's way in the summer of 1950 ... This study seeks to redress the imbalance that exists between fact and interpretation. For too long historians and soldiers have roundly criticized Task Force Smith's performance, extrapolated from its fate a set of assumptions about what constitutes readiness, and then used those assumptions to condemn the entire Eighth Army. The reality is much more complex. A proper examination of the historical record reveals wide disparities in the readiness and combat effectiveness of the subordinate units of America's first forward-deployed Cold War field force ... This work will demonstrate how units achieved that readiness by means of case studies of four infantry regiments, one from each of the four infantry divisions that constituted the Eighth Army in 1950. It synthesizes contemporary training doctrine, training records generated by maneuver units, unit histories, reports of inspections by outside agencies, contemporary self-assessments, and the observations of veterans who served in Japan in the fifteen months before the outbreak of the Korean War. It challenges the long-standing reputation of the Eighth Army as flabby, dispirited, and weak"--Introduction.

  • Book cover of Crusade Or Conspiracy? Catholics and the Anti-Communist Struggle in Australia
    Bruce Duncan

     · 2001

    Bitterness over the 1950s split between Catholics and anti-Communists has never gone away. The importance of this book in defining Labor politics for the last 50 years is crucial, and all those interested in either Labor history or history of organised religion in Australia will find it useful.

  • Book cover of White Metropolis

    Winner, T. R. Fehrenbach Award, Texas Historical Commission, 2007 From the nineteenth century until today, the power brokers of Dallas have always portrayed their city as a progressive, pro-business, racially harmonious community that has avoided the racial, ethnic, and class strife that roiled other Southern cities. But does this image of Dallas match the historical reality? In this book, Michael Phillips delves deeply into Dallas's racial and religious past and uncovers a complicated history of resistance, collaboration, and assimilation between the city's African American, Mexican American, and Jewish communities and its white power elite. Exploring more than 150 years of Dallas history, Phillips reveals how white business leaders created both a white racial identity and a Southwestern regional identity that excluded African Americans from power and required Mexican Americans and Jews to adopt Anglo-Saxon norms to achieve what limited positions of power they held. He also demonstrates how the concept of whiteness kept these groups from allying with each other, and with working- and middle-class whites, to build a greater power base and end elite control of the city. Comparing the Dallas racial experience with that of Houston and Atlanta, Phillips identifies how Dallas fits into regional patterns of race relations and illuminates the unique forces that have kept its racial history hidden until the publication of this book.

  • Book cover of The Secret

    The tale begins over three-hundred years ago, when the Fair People—the goblins, fairies, dragons, and other fabled and fantastic creatures of a dozen lands—fled the Old World for the New, seeking haven from the ways of Man. With them came their precious jewels: diamonds, rubies, emeralds, pearls... But then the Fair People vanished, taking with them their twelve fabulous treasures. And they remained hidden until now... Across North America, these twelve treasures, over ten-thousand dollars in precious jewels in 1982 dollars, are buried. The key to finding each can be found within the twelve full-color paintings and verses of THE SECRET. Are you smart enough? THE SECRET: A TREASURE HUNT was published in 1982. The year before publication, the author and publisher Byron Preiss had traveled to 12 locations in the continental U.S. (and possibly Canada) to secretly bury a dozen ceramic casques. Each casque contained a small key that could be redeemed for one of 12 jewels Preiss kept in a safe deposit box in New York. The key to finding the casques was to match one of 12 paintings to one of 12 poetic verses, solve the resulting riddle, and start digging. Since 1982, only two of the 12 casques have been recovered. The first was located in Grant Park, Chicago, in 1984 by a group of students. The second was unearthed in 2004 in Cleveland by two members of the Quest4Treasure forum.

  • Book cover of Gasquet-Orleans Road, Chimney Rock Section, Del Norte County, California
  • Book cover of Working the Navajo Way

    "O'Neill chronicles a history of Navajo labor that illuminates how cultural practices and values influenced what it meant to work for wages or to produce commodities for the marketplace. Through accounts of Navajo coal miners, weavers, and those who left the reservation in search of wage work, she explores the tension between making a living the Navajo way and "working elsewhere.""--BOOK JACKET.