Lynwood Roe spent his young years toiling in fields of tobacco and corn that grew lushly on the rolling hillsides of the eastern Bluegrass Region of Kentucky. He grows up expecting to follow a life not unlike his father and his grandfather before him. That is, if he were to reach his majority. At nine years of age he is felled by rheumatic fever which leaves him hindered with a weak heart and an uncertain future. While recovering he becomes a keen observer of his surroundings and the people who are in and out of his life. His father's passing ends his hope that he can go to college and direct his life onto a different course. Then a girl enters his life and convinces him that the future he believes to be impossible can still be realized, if he is willing to leave the farm and strike out audaciously to pursue it. The nearest big city is Louisville where he seeks employment as a first step to attaining his dreams. It is to be a summer full of awakening and discovery. Through it all he recalls moments of the past - episodes in a boy's life that shaped the young man he was to become. He is adrift but watching the horizon for a safe harbor.
This engaging biography of Augustus Garrett and Eliza Clark Garrett tells two equally compelling stories: an ambitious man’s struggle to succeed and the remarkable spiritual journey of a woman attempting to overcome tragedy. By contextualizing the couple’s lives within the rich social, political, business, and religious milieu of Chicago’s early urbanization, author Charles H. Cosgrove fills a gap in the history of the city in the mid-nineteenth century. The Garretts moved from the Hudson River Valley to a nascent Chicago, where Augustus made his fortune in the land boom as an auctioneer and speculator. A mayor during the city’s formative period, Augustus was at the center of the first mayoral election scandal in Chicago. To save his honor, he resigned dramatically and found vindication in his reelection the following year. His story reveals much about the inner workings of Chicago politics and business in the antebellum era. The couple had lost three young children to disease, and Eliza arrived in Chicago with deep emotional scars. Her journey exemplifies the struggles of sincere, pious women to come to terms with tragedy in an age when most people attributed unhappy events to divine punishment. Following Augustus’s premature death, Eliza developed plans to devote her estate to founding a women’s college and a school for ministerial training, and in 1853 she endowed a Methodist theological school, the Garrett Biblical Institute (now the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary), thereby becoming the first woman in North America to found an institution of higher learning. In addition to illuminating our understanding of Chicago from the 1830s to the 1850s, Fortune and Faith in Old Chicago explores American religious history, particularly Presbyterianism and Methodism, and its attention to gender shows how men and women experienced the same era in vastly different ways. The result is a rare, fascinating glimpse into old Chicago through the eyes of two of its important early residents.
Solving the global climate crisis through local partnerships and experimentation Global climate diplomacy—from the Kyoto Protocol to the Paris Agreement—is not working. Despite decades of sustained negotiations by world leaders, the climate crisis continues to worsen. The solution is within our grasp—but we will not achieve it through top-down global treaties or grand bargains among nations. Charles Sabel and David Victor explain why the profound transformations needed for deep cuts in emissions must arise locally, with government and business working together to experiment with new technologies, quickly learn the best solutions, and spread that information globally. Sabel and Victor show how some of the most iconic successes in environmental policy were products of this experimentalist approach to problem solving, such as the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer, the rise of electric vehicles, and Europe’s success in controlling water pollution. They argue that the Paris Agreement is at best an umbrella under which local experimentation can push the technological frontier and help societies around the world learn how to deploy the technologies and policies needed to tackle this daunting global problem. A visionary book that fundamentally reorients our thinking about the climate crisis, Fixing the Climate is a road map to institutional design that can finally lead to self-sustaining reductions in emissions that years of global diplomacy have failed to deliver.
In 1916, Thomas Grayson travels to the isolated mountains in eastern Kentucky to establish a school for the children of the area. He enters a community in a harsh and secluded part of the country that he cannot help but contrast to the gentle fields and rolling hills that he left behind in the Kentucky Bluegrass region. Thomas encounters the timid children and takes on the almost hopeless task of improving not only their minds but also their lives. When he meets and forms a close friendship with the wealthy Roger Taliaferro, his life will change forever. Taliaferro secretly holds the mineral rights to much of the land in the area and awaits the arrival of the railroad in order to make a vast fortune from the mines. Roger asks Thomas to tutor his wife, a beautiful Melungeon named Lily, many years younger than himself. Thomas and Lily observe a teacher-pupil relationship until they can no longer contain their growing passion. The two struggle to foresee their future as the country plunges into World War I. Will their love survive, or will fate lead them down a different path?
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