Their father’s favorite saying, between drinks and blows, was, “Life holds only bad surprises, and the last one will be death.” And now, Colin observes of the man sprawled under all the broken furniture, their father was definitely and forever out of surprises. Children of Heroes is the story Colin tells of what happened—and what happened before that.

The Golden Volcano thrusts two Canadian cousins—unexpectedly bequeathed a mining claim in the Klondike—into the middle of the gold rush, where they encounter disease, disaster, extremes of weather, and human nature twisted by a passion for gold. A deathbed confidence sends the two searching for a fabulous gold-filled volcano on the shore of the Arctic Ocean.

The Great Romance, a two-volume novella published under the pseudonym “The Inhabitant,” was one of the outstanding late nineteenth-century works of utopian science fiction. Volume 1 was a possible model for Edward Bellamy’s phenomenally successful Looking Backward, while volume 2 was assumed lost for over a century until uncovered in the Hocken Library in Dunedin, New Zealand.

In the center of the rural boomtown of Soda Springs, Idaho, stands the historic Enders Hotel, Café, and Bar, a three-story brick building that has been many things to many people. But to one family who bought it as an attempt to renew themselves it was home, a place they desperately tried to hold on to and yet, after seventeen years of living there, the very place from which they wanted to escape.

In Crisis and Opportunity, John E. Ikerd outlines the consequences of agricultural industrialization, then details the methods that can restore economic viability, ecological soundness, and social responsibility to our agricultural system and thus ensure sustainable agriculture as the foundation of a sustainable food system and a sustainable society.

Nebraska’s Cowboy Trail: A User’s Guide is the essential companion for anyone planning to hike, bike, or ride horseback on the Cowboy Recreation and Nature Trail, which currently extends from Norfolk to Valentine and will eventually stretch all the way to Chadron. Keith Terry’s guidebook enhances appreciation of the trail’s natural advantages with descriptions of the region’s flora and fauna and with pointers for food, lodging, and camping.

Ira Berkow has compiled from his newspaper columns these profiles of athletes at all stages of their art: the young who dream of glory ahead, those on the cusp of stardom, the athlete at the height of his or her success, the player on the way down, and the retiree. There is also the would-be athlete who never quite made it; the writers, broadcasters, and promoters on the fringes of the game; and the fan, who creates heroes and bums, stars and victims.

Wildfire and Americans is a passionate, deeply informed appeal for us to acknowledge that wildfire is not a fire problem but a people problem. There are no natural disasters, only people in disastrous circumstances. Many Americans are in the wrong places, channeled there by wrong policies.

Robert Falcon Scott’s 1901–4 expedition to the Antarctic was a landmark event in the history of Antarctic exploration and created a sensation comparable to the Arctic efforts of the American Robert E. Peary. Scott’s initial expedition was also the first step toward the dramatic race to the South Pole in 1912 that resulted in the tragic deaths of Scott and his companions.

It was at Wounded Knee, huddled under a night sky lit by military flares and the searchlights of armored personnel carriers, that Vietnam vet Woody Kipp realized that he, as an American Indian, had become the enemy, the Viet Cong, to a country that he had defended at the risk of his life.

American Indian Autobiography is a kind of cultural kaleidoscope whose narratives come to us from a wide range of American Indians: warriors, farmers, Christian converts, rebels and assimilationists, peyotists, shamans, hunters, Sun Dancers, artists and Hollywood Indians, spiritualists, visionaries, mothers, fathers, and English professors.

Restoring the Burnt Child is the second volume in William Kloefkorn’s four-part memoir, which will cover the four elements: water, fire, earth, and air. Negotiating the no man’s land between ages nine and thirteen, this memoir of a small-town boy’s life in 1940s Kansas continues the story Kloefkorn began in his much-loved volume This Death by Drowning.

William L. Ramsey provides a thorough reappraisal of the Yamasee War, an event that stands alongside King Philip’s War in New England and Pontiac’s Rebellion as one of the three major “Indian wars” of the colonial era. By arguing that the Yamasee War may be the definitive watershed in the formation of the Old South, Ramsey challenges traditional arguments about the war’s origins and positions the prewar concerns of Native Americans within the context of recent studies of the Indian slave trade and the Atlantic economy.

The long-term significance of the household as a social and economic force—particularly in relation to authority positions or institutions—has remained relatively unexplored in North American archaeology. Households and Hegemony makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the role households played in long-term cultural change after contact with European traders and settlers.