On his way back from a meeting one day, investment banker Alex Wold finds himself standing up to his waist in the Thames, trying to guide a lost bottlenose whale back out to the sea. Later, as he's drying out his suit and shoes, the news comes through that Tony Nolan – his mother’s ex-husband – has died of a sudden heart attack. Alex wonders if the universe is urging him to resolve a long-running feud with his environmentalist brother Matthew, and with the Wolds and the Nolans all heading back to Warwickshire for Tony’s funeral he now has an opportunity to do just that. But he finds Matthew as angry as ever, unable to relinquish his obsession with Caitlin, Tony’s troubled daughter, whose actions force both families to take an uncomfortable journey into the past. In Midland, the acclaimed novelist James Flint carries out a devastating exploration of what binds families together, and what tears them apart.
Between the Nebraska border and Osage County, Oklahoma, are the Flint Hills of Kansas, and growing on those hills the last of the tallgrass prairie that once ranged from Canada to Texas, and on those fields of bluestem, cattle graze—and tending the cattle, someone like Jim Hoy, whose people have ranched there from, well, not quite time immemorial, but pretty darn close. Hoy has always called the Flint Hills home and over the decades he has made a study of them—their tough terrain and quiet beauty, their distinctive folk life and cattle culture—and marshaled his observations to bring the Flint Hills home to readers in a singular way. These essays are Hoy’s Flint Hills, combining family lore and anecdotes of ranching life with reflections on the region’s rich history and nature. Whether it’s weaning calves or shoeing horses, checking in on a local legend or a night of high school basketball in nearby Cassoday, encountering a coyote or a badger or surveying what’s happened to the tallgrass prairie over time, summoning cowboy traditions or parsing the place’s plant life or rock formations, he has something to say—and you can bet it’s well worth hearing. With his keen eye, understated wit, and store of knowledge, Hoy makes his Flint Hills come alive, and in the telling, live on.
The Flint Hills are America's last tallgrass prairie, a green enclave set in the midst of the farmland of eastern Kansas. Known as the home of the Big Beef Steer, these rugged hills have produced exemplary cowboys-both the ranch and rodeo varieties-whose hard work has given them plenty of material for equally good stories. Jim Hoy grew up in the Flint Hills on a ranch at Cassoday that's been in his family for five generations and boasts roots "as deep as those of bluestem grass in black-soil bottomland." He now draws on this area's rich cowboy lore-as well as on his own experience working cattle, breaking horses, and rodeoing-to write a folk history of the Flint Hills spanning a century and a half. Hoy blends history, folklore, and memoir to conjure for readers the tallgrass prairies of his boyhood in a book that richly recalls the ranching life and the people who lived it. Here are cowboys and outlaws, rodeo stars and runaway horses, ordinary folks and the stuff of legends. Hoy introduces readers to the likes of Lou Hart, a top hand with the Crocker Brothers from 1906 to1910, whose poetic paean to ranch life circulated orally for fifty years before seeing print. And he tracks down the legend of Bud Gillette, considered by his neighbors the world's fastest man until he fell in with an unscrupulous promoter. He even unravels the mystery of a lone grave supposed to be that of the first cowboy in the Flint Hills. Hoy also explains why a good horse makes up for having to work with exasperating cattle-and why not all horses are created (or trained) equal. And he traces Flint Hills cattle culture from the days of the trail drive through the railroad years to today's trucking era, with most railroad stockyards torn down and only one section house left standing. Writes Hoy, "I feed on the stories of the Hills and the characters who tell them as the cattle feed on the grasses." His love of the land shines throughout a book so real that readers will swear they hear the click of horseshoes on flint rock with every turn of the page.
Ape Man, Space Man Earth's colonists have spread throughout the cosmos, and have almost divided into two separate species. One is the Swimmers, who have adapted to living in zero-gravity, and regard themselves as the next step in evolution, and those who prefer to live on the surface of a planet as little better than apes. The latter group, the Walkers, are not about to say farewell to the planets they grew up on, and think the Swimmers are not so much advanced as deranged. Crowell, born a Swimmer but now a Walker by choice, is caught in the middle as the two sides seem headed for war. Then he discovers the true cause of the altercation: a hidden alien race moving behind the scenes to provoke a war so that they can pick up the pieces after the two sides have obliterated each other. And if Crowell cannot head off the war and convince both sides of the existence of the real enemy, both branches of the human race may be headed for untimely extinction. This full-length novel and much more, fill a huge volume from the master of science fiction adventure. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management). "Much has been made of the 'sense of wonder' that science fiction evokes, and believe me, there was nothing to evoke that sense quite like the worlds of James Schmitz. . . . Thank you, James Schmitz, wherever you are. And thank you, Eric Flint and Jim Baen, for bringing his Right Stuff back again." ¾Mercedes Lackey "Take my advice and buy TWO copies of this book! You'll want to lend it to friends and (trust me on this: I have years of experience to back up the observation) once people get their hands on a Schmitz book, they don't let go!" ¾ Janet Kagan, Hugo-winner and author of Uhura's Song
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