Journalist Chris Tomlinson grew up hearing stories about his family's abandoned cotton plantation in Falls County, Texas. Most of the tales lionized his white ancestors for pioneering along the Brazos River. His grandfather often said the family's slaves loved them so much that they also took Tomlinson as their last name. LaDainian Tomlinson, football great and former running back for the San Diego Chargers, spent part of his childhood playing on the same land that his Black ancestors had worked as slaves.

From an award-winning author! This book is full of fun and verified facts and questions, presented in an accessible manner that I hope will provide you with hours of entertainment. My objective has been to provide you with a lifetime supply of icebreakers and points of discussion. Amaze your friends and family by telling them that left-handedness used to be outlawed in Albania or that if you drive south from Detroit, USA, you will end up in Canada. Following the success of my trivia website www.RaiseYourBrain.com, I published a number of trivia books, which have been read by hundreds of ...

For a hundred years after the end of the Civil War, a quarter of all Americans lived under a system of legalized segregation called Jim Crow. Together with its rigidly enforced canon of racial "etiquette", these rules governed nearly every aspect of life - and outlined draconian punishments for infractions. The purpose of Jim Crow was to keep African Americans subjugated at a level as close as possible to their former slave status. Jim Crow left scars on the American psyche that are still felt today.

Award-winning author: 2020 Readers' Favorite Silver Medal *** ‘A fun mix of facts that will surprise and amuse you.’ The Wishing Shelf Book Awards This book is full of fun and verified facts, presented in an accessible manner that I hope will provide you with hours of entertainment. My objective has been to provide you with a lifetime supply of icebreakers and points of discussion. Amaze your friends and family by telling them that pistachios can combust spontaneously or that the holes in pen caps are there to save people from choking to death! Following the success of my site ...

A rock star at the top of his game disappears to a nudist colony. A down-on-her-luck karaoke DJ gets the offer of a lifetime. One song changes - everything. Darby Daire is getting the Late 30s Life Smackdown - big time. Her boss-hole fires her - publicly. Her boyfriend kicks her out. And if it weren’t for a last-minute gig in Pleasure Point, she’d be homeless. Drake Dangerthorne had the world at his feet as the lead singer of Volatilizing the Esthers. But when his wife died in a mysterious accident, everything disappeared faster than a 90s one-hit-wonder. Drake escaped to the one place ...

Award-winning author: 2020 Readers' Favorite Silver Medal! *** This book provides you with fun and challenging questions, whether you want to quiz yourself or your family. Learn something new every day and surprise your circle of friends and colleagues! Knowing stuff makes you a cool and interesting interlocutor. You will always have an icebreaker at hand to start a conversation or to keep it going by dropping a weird fact. I covered a wide range of topics and intentionally made the questions assorted, so you will not know what sort of fact is coming. As I would do myself, you can choose to...

Griffins, cyclopes, monsters, and giants - these fabulous creatures of classical mythology continue to live in the modern imagination through the vivid accounts that have come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. But what if these beings were more than merely fictions? Through careful research and meticulous documentation, Adrienne Mayor convincingly shows that many of the giants and monsters of myth did have a basis in fact - in the enormous bones of long-extinct species that were once abundant in the lands of the Greeks and Romans.

Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, 16-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles toward the possibility of the "normal" life she and her family hope for, the listener is inexorably drawn into her private suffering and deep determination to confront her demons.

Fel'annár is a gifted immortal warrior embarking on his first patrol into the Deep Forest. Half-Silvan, half-Alpine, he battles the enemy from without, and the prejudice from within. But he learns more than just warfare when an arcane power begins to emerge, one he cannot control. While friendships are forged, a destiny unfolds, one that is tied to a past he knows nothing about. For others, though, it is only a matter of time before the truth is revealed, and the danger becomes real.

Bringing together the best and most interesting science stories appearing in Quanta Magazine over the past five years, Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire reports on some of the greatest scientific minds as they test the limits of human knowledge. It communicates science by taking it seriously, wrestling with difficult concepts, and clearly explaining them in a way that speaks to our innate curiosity about our world and ourselves.

When Geraldine "Gerry" Largay first went missing on the Appalachian Trail in remote western Maine in 2013, the people of Maine were wrought with concern. When she was not found, the family, the wardens, and the Navy personnel who searched for her were devastated. The Maine Warden Service continued to follow leads for more than a year. They never completely gave up the search. Two years after her disappearance, her bones and scattered possessions were found by chance by two surveyors.

Award-winning author: 2020 Readers' Favorite Silver Medal *** ‘A fun mix of facts that will surprise and amuse you.’ The Wishing Shelf Book Awards This book is full of fun and verified facts, presented in an accessible manner that I hope will provide you with hours of entertainment. My objective has been to provide you with a lifetime supply of icebreakers and points of discussion. Amaze your friends and family by telling them that all the planets in our Solar System could fit in the distance between Earth and the Moon or that flamingos can drink boiling water. Following the success of ...

Award-winning author: 2020 Readers' Favorite Silver Medal *** Following the success of my trivia website RaiseYourBrain, I published several award-winning compilations of hard-to-believe facts that have reached hundreds of thousands of readers. One of the chapters in each trivia book was “Disturbing Facts about Our World”. I decided to fill an entire volume with facts about upsetting crimes and mayhem, combined with unbelievable yet real instances of misfortune and misery. This is a book where grim examples of bigotry and hypocrisy are intertwined with amusing stories of bad luck. In ...

We face a dilemma these days. We want to be honest about our history and the racism and oppression that Americans have both inflicted and endured. But we want to be proud of our country, too. In The Nation That Never Was, Roosevelt shows how we can do both those things by realizing we’re not the country we thought we were. Reconstruction, Roosevelt argues, was not a fulfillment of the ideals of the Founding but rather a repudiation: we modern Americans are not the heirs of the Founders but of the people who overthrew and destroyed that political order.

I thought I was lucky to have a fresh start. Those don’t come around often for a girl from the streets of this city. But a fortunate chain of events has delivered me to the center of wealth and power and into the midst of three very different, very formidable cousins with the world at their feet. Gage, Micah, and Conner were determined to be my enemies. So I braced for a war. But they underestimated me. I earned respect from one of them, friendship from another, and I found love with the third. Or so I thought.