Today’s professionals recognize the need to elevate written communication beyond argument-driven pedantry, political polemic, and obtuse pontification. Whether the goal is to write the next serious work of best-selling nonfiction, to develop a platform as a public scholar, or simply to craft clear and concise workplace communication, The Art of Public Writing demystifies the process, showing why it’s not just nice, but necessary, to connect with those inside and outside one’s area of expertise. Drawing on a diverse set of examples ranging from Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics, Zachary Michael Jack offers invaluable advice for researchers, scholars, and working professionals determined to help interpret field-specific debates for wider audiences, address complex issues in the public sphere, and successfully engage audiences beyond the Corner Office and the Ivory Tower.
What does it mean to deeply love a home place that haunts us still? From Mark Twain to Grant Wood to Garrison Keillor, regionalists from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age have explored the American Gothic and the homegrown fatalism that flourish in many of the nation's most far-flung and forgotten places. The Haunt of Home introduces us to a cast of real-life Midwestern characters grappling with the Gothic in their own lives, from promising young professionals debating the perennial "Should I stay or should I go" dilemma, to recent émigrés and entrepreneurs seeking personal reinvention, to faithful boosters determined to keep their communities alive despite the odds. In The Haunt of Home Zachary Michael Jack considers the many ways a region's abiding spirit shapes the ethos of a land and its people, offering portraits of others who, like himself, are determined to live out the unique promise and predicament of the Gothic.
From yesterday's gingham girls to today's Google-era Farmer Janes, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter explores the resurgent role played by female agriculturalists at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the US are woman-owned, but when, paradoxically, America's farm-reared daughters are conspicuously absent from popular film, television, and literature. In this first-of-its-kind treatment, Zachary Michael Jack follows the fascinating story of the girl who became a regional and national legend: from Donna Reed to Laura Ingalls Wilder, from Elly May Clampett to The Dukes of Hazzard's Catherine Bach, from Lawrence Welk's TV sweethearts to the tragic heroines of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. From Amish farm women bloggers, to Missouri homesteaders and seed-savers, to rural Nebraskan graphic novelists and, ultimately, to the seven generations of entrepreneurial Iowan farm women who have animated his own family since before the Civil War, Jack shines new documentary light on the symbol of American virtue, energy, and ingenuity that rural writer Martha Foote Crow once described as the "great rural reserve of initiating force, sane judgment and spiritual drive." Packed with dozens of interviews, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter covers the history and the renaissance of agrarian women on both sides of the fence. Giving equal consideration to both agriculture's time-tested rural and small-town Farm Bureaus, 4-H, and FFA training grounds as well as to the eco-innovations generated by the region's rising woman-powered "agro-polises" such as Chicago, the author crafts a lively, easy-to-read cultural and social history, exploring the pioneering role today's female agriculturalists play in the emergence of farmers' markets, urban farms, community-supported agriculture, and the new "back-to-the-land" and "do-it-yourself" movements. For all those whose lives have been graced by the enduring strength of American farm women, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter offers a groundbreaking examination of a dynamic American icon.
Long before journalist George Plimpton donned shoulder pads for Paper Lion, sportswriters were stepping onto the field, arena, track and ring. This first-of-its-kind anthology of participatory sportswriting collects 48 pieces from the Gilded and Golden Age greats. Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Frances Elizabeth Willard, John Muir, Jack London, Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, Ring Lardner, Bill Tilden, Bobby Jones, Helen Mills, Paul Gallico, and many more prowled America's sporting grounds with pen in hand in a time when, as Grantland Rice put it, "a flame...lit up the sporting skies and covered the world.
From yesterday's gingham girls to today's Farmer Janes, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter unearths the untold history and renewed cultural currency of an American icon at a time when fully 30 percent of new farms in the US are woman-owned. From farm women bloggers, to back-to-the-land homesteaders and seed-savers, to rural graphic novelists and, ultimately, to the seven generations of farm daughters who have animated his own family since before the Civil War, the author travels across the region to shine new documentary light on this seedbed for American virtue, energy, and ingenuity. Packed with many memorable interviews, print artifacts, and historic images, this groundbreaking documentary history describes the centuries-long reiteration and reinterpretation of agrarian daughters in the field, over the airwaves, on the printed page, and in the court of public opinion. Offering a sweeping cultural and social history, it ranges widely and well from Jane Smiley's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres to Laura Ingalls Wilder's proto-feminist commentaries for the Missouri Ruralist; from the critical importance of rural girls and young women to time-honored organizations such as the Farm Bureau, 4-H, and FFA to the entrepreneurial role today's female agriculturalists and sustainable farm advocates play in farmers' markets, urban farms, and community-supported agriculture. For all those whose lives have been graced by the enduring strength of this regional and national touchstone, The Midwest Farmer's Daughter offers a one-of-a-kind scholarly examination and contemporary appreciation.
It was "scary," Jack Nicklaus said of Pebble Beach, and gave him nightmares so acute he famously woke his wife on the eve of his 1972 U.S. Open victory totally spooked. "It's not a golf course," sportswriter Jim Murray wrote, "it's a hellship." Golf writer Dan Jenkins once joked that the famed venue of the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am should be dubbed "Double Bogey-by-the-Sea." A one-time failed Division One golf walk-on, Zachary Michael Jack opts to stare down an early midlife crisis by chronicling a U.S. Open year spent at Pebble Beach, object of his ailing father's fantasies and site of the nation's number one public course and its fairy-tale host town, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. There, along the blue Pacific, he traces the colorful, capricious, and comical world of golf on the Monterey Peninsula as never before via interviews with legends of the game Johnny Miller, Gary Player, and Tom Watson; with today's brightest stars-Padraig Harrington, Phil Mickelson, and Bubba Watson; and with some of its most famous celebrity linksters-actor Bill Murray, Olympic soccer star Brandi Chastain, and billionaire entrepreneur Charles Schwab. Conducting more than one hundred interviews, Jack ranges far and wide to get the scoop, talking golfing haunts with bestselling golf novelist Michael Murphy; teeing up with members of a Carmel-based worldwide golfing society devoted to mystical play; learning to play Pebble at the knee of one of the Top 50 Golf Teachers in America and with a Carmel-based journeyman pro described as "a golf savant"; and raising a cup with a lifelong Pebble Beach resident and caddy who, unbeknownst to the hackers he shepherds, is a Hall of Fame golfer. By turns hilarious, haunting, and historic, Let There Be Pebble reveals the utter uniqueness-the people, the rich history, the unforgettable setting and sporting culture-of this one-of-a-kind golfing cathedral.
The story is about a boy who is an up and coming athlete in his school who is uprooted from the town when his father lands a job as coowner of a sporting goods store in another town. He must work his way up the depth chart, and in his journey to do so, meets and falls for the girlfriend of the local high school football star.
In his eagerly awaited poetic debut, Zachary Michael Jack takes his readers on mind-bending, mytho-poetic travels from modern-day rural Mexico to the American Great Plains of the early century and back again. Employing an unlikely list of dramatis persona
The Strange Genius of Ignatius Donnelly sheds light on the inimitable life of a neglected figure in US political and literary history. The father of American Populism, lieutenant governor of Minnesota, People's Party candidate for vice president, popularizer of the Shakespeare authorship controversy, proponent of the Atlantis theory, and author of bestselling speculative fictions, Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901) positively defies categorization. Called a crank and a pseudoscientist by some and a genius by others, Donnelly broke all the rules. When skeptics said he was too green for politics, he got elected Minnesota's youngest-ever lieutenant governor. When they said a politician who prized his Irish heritage could never ascend to national office in a state dominated by conservative Scandinavians, he proved his critics wrong again. As Zachary Michael Jack' shows, in the latter half of Donnelly's remarkable life, he generated more fame and infamy than he had as a combative congressman. In an uncanny reversal of the usual midcareer doldrums, Donnelly turned political defeat into an opportunity for personal and professional reinvention, remaking himself as a visionary author and a champion of people-first third-party politics. The man known by enemies and friends alike as the Sage of Nininger pushed through poverty and ignominious defeat to introduce the masses to surprising theories about ancient civilizations, world-ending comets, and cryptograms purported to reveal the true authorship of Shakespeare's plays. At root, The Strange Genius of Ignatius Donnelly reveals the story of a man unafraid to speak truth to power, consequences be damned.
An alternate-history reimagining of the Faust legend from the Nebula Award–winning author of Stations of the Tide Taking as his canvas the classic tale of the temptation of Faust—made famous by such literary luminaries as Goethe, Marlowe, and Mann—author Michael Swanwick paints a fresh vision of the dangers posed by the pursuit of knowledge. Set in Old World Germany, this tale of science and damnation begins with the great scholar Dr. Johannes Faust burning his books, having concluded that all his knowledge is nothing compared to the vast sea of ignorance surrounding him. Out of his despair, he inadvertently summons the tempter spirit, Mephistopheles, who is the projection of a dying alien race determined to make the destruction of humankind its final deed. Their weapon is knowledge—of science and technology, the mechanics of flight, the nature of the atom, and the secrets of economics. When, in an act of defiance, Faust nails the Periodic Table of the Elements to a church door in Wittenberg, he ushers in a golden age of prosperity for Germany that will make him the most powerful man in the world. But the love of the beautiful Margarete will be his downfall. What happens when the greed for knowledge and glory goes unchecked? Has a demon ever made a bad deal yet? Nominated for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the British Science Fiction Award, Jack Faust is a masterful retelling of legend by one of science fiction’s finest craftsmen.
March of the Suffragettes tells the forgotten, real-life story of "General" Rosalie Gardiner Jones, who in the waning days of 1912 mustered and marched an all-women army nearly 200 miles to help win support for votes for women. General Jones, along with her good friends and accomplices "Colonel" Ida Craft, "Surgeon General" Lavinia Dock, and "War Correspondent" Jessie Hardy Stubbs, led marchers across New York state for their pilgrims' cause, encountering not just wind, fog, sleet, snow, mud, and ice along their unpaved way, but also hecklers, escaped convicts, scandal-plagued industrialists on the lam, and jealous boyfriends and overprotective mothers hoping to convince the suffragettes to abandon their dangerous project. By night Rosalie's army met and mingled with the rich and famous, attending glamorous balls in beautiful dresses to deliver fiery speeches; by day they fought blisters and bone-chilling cold, debated bitter anti-suffragists, and dodged wayward bullets and pyrotechnics meant to intimidate them. They composed and sang their own marching songs for sisterhood and solidarity on their route, even as differences among them threatened to tear them apart. March of the Suffragettes chronicles the journey of four friends across dangerous terrain in support of a timeless cause, and it offers a hopeful reminder that social change is achieved one difficult, dauntless, daring step at a time.
Fifty years after their marriage, Jack and Michael's story is one of the milestone events in the fight for equal rights, and this memoir the unmissable account a remarkable couple. On September 3, 1971, at the dawn of the modern gay movement, Michael McConnell and Jack Baker exchanged vows in the first legal same-sex wedding in the United States. But the battle to get there - legal and emotional - was only the start of their incredible lives together. Jack enrolled in law school, keeping his promise to Michael that he would figure out a way to marry. He did, but the repercussions would echo not only through their lives, but through those of everyo gay person in the US who ever wanted what this one pioneering couple did: a happy family life. This is the story of how they met, how they married, and what came after. And one wedding heard 'round the world. 'A beautiful, well-written love story that is heartrending and ultimately heartwarming' Robert Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The Kitchen Boy 'A fascinating story of love and struggle that reads like a novel' Washington Book Review
In February 1913 young firebrand activist "General" Rosalie Gardiner Jones defied convention and the doubts of better-known suffragists such as Alice Paul, Jane Addams, and Carrie Chapman Catt to muster an unprecedented equal rights army. Jones and "Colonel" Ida Craft marched 250 miles at the head of their all-volunteer platoon, advancing from New York City to Washington, DC in the dead of winter, in what was believed to be the longest dedicated women's rights march in American history. Along the way their band of protestors overcame violence, intimidation, and bigotry, their every step documented by journalist-embeds who followed the self-styled army down far-flung rural roads and into busy urban centers bristling with admiration and enmity. At march's end in Washington, more than 100,000 spectators cheered and jeered Rosalie's army in a reception said to rival a president's inauguration. This first-ever book-length biography details Jones's indomitable and original brand of boots-on-the-ground activism, from the 1913 March on Washington that brought her international fame to later-life campaigns for progressive reform in the American West and on her native Long Island. Consistently at odds with conservatives and conformists, the fiercely independent Jones was a prototypical social justice warrior, one who never stopped marching to her own drummer. Long after retiring her equal rights army, Jones advocated nonviolence and fair trade, authored a book on economics and international peace, and ran for Congress, earning a law degree, a PhD, and a lifelong reputation as a tireless defender of the dispossessed
Looks at one of historys most infamous serial killers known for committing gruesome murders in the late nineteenth-century who remains one of the world's most notorious criminals.
A New York Times Bestseller Frank Sinatra desperately wanted to be part of John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s gang. He had his own famed “Rat Pack,” made up of hard drinking, womanizing individuals like himself—guys like Dean Martin, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford—but the guy “Ol’ Blue Eyes” really wanted to hang with was Lawford’s brother-in-law, the real chairman of the board, John F. Kennedy. In Sinatra and the Jack Pack, Michael Sheridan delves deep into the acclaimed singer’s relationship with the former president. He shares how Sinatra emerged from a working class Italian family and carved out a unique place for himself in American culture, and how Kennedy, also of immigrant stock, came from a privileged background of which the young Frank could only have dreamed. By the time the men met in the 1950s, both were thriving—and both liked the good life. They bonded over their mutual ability to attract beautiful women, male admirers, and adoring acolytes. They also shared a scandalous secret: each had dubious relationships with the mafia. It had promoted Frank’s career and helped Kennedy buy votes. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had, over two decades, compiled detailed and damning dossiers on their activities. From all accounts the friendship thrived. Then, suddenly, in March 1962, Frank was abruptly ejected from JFK’s gang. This unique volume tells why. It will release shortly after a television documentary inspired by the book airs, is filled with a beloved cast of characters, and is the compelling, untold story of a tumultuous relationship between two American icons. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
In this time-shift romance series by the screenwriter of Beetlejuice, the timeless lovers are on a daring adventure through 1950s NYC and Havana. Regardless of what the calendar says, Jack and Susan are always, eternally, twenty-seven years old. They are destined for each other like Hepburn and Tracy, Dagwood and Blondie, Nick and Nora. And somehow, they always acquire a shaggy white dog on the way to falling in love. In 1953, New York City is at its glamorous best, Jack’s engaged to be engaged to a margarine heiress, and Susan’s got a dark and mysterious suitor. When word arrives that someone is trying to poison Susan’s long-lost uncle, she and Jack—and his loyal dog Woolf!—head for Havana to rescue uncle James, apprehend the bad guys and hit a few casinos on the side.
In this unique romance series debut, two timeless young lovers find each other amid the madcap antics of the silent film industry. Regardless of what the calendar says, Jack and Susan are always, eternally, twenty-seven years old. They are destined for each other like Hepburn and Tracy, Dagwood and Blondie, Nick and Nora. And somehow, they always acquire a shaggy white dog on the way to falling in love. In 1913, the world is thrilling to that fabulous invention, the motion picture. When Susan’s Broadway career is ended by injury, she takes up work writing for a New York studio. And when Jack sees Susan, he’s willing to do anything—even break into a new business—to get her attention. When the movies move West, Jack and Susan—and their three-legged dog Tripod!—go along with them. But they soon discover that not all of the bad guys are on the silver screen.
A human monster that roamed the streets of London in the 1800s has unknowingly returned wreaking havoc with the help of his ingenious modern-day invention.
Where is the "cleft of the rock?" How do we get there? What will we find once we arrive? Both Moses and the Shulamite woman had extraordinary encounters with God in the cleft of the rock. What did they discover hidden there, and why is it important for us? In the Cleft of the Rock offers dramatic Biblical insights into the process of bringing the soul into submission to the spirit, and thereby walking in the Glory of God on a daily basis. If you sincerely desire to see the Glory of God manifested in your life, this book is for you. The Apostle Peter instructs us that the "completion, or the perfection, of our faith is the saving of the soul." What does this mean, and how do we accomplish it? This book answers those questions, and many more. Michael Webb graduated from the University of Florida with High Honors and obtained his J.D. from the same university. He has spent over two decades studying the Bible. He previously published two Biblically-based supernatural thrillers, The Master's Quilt and Balaam's Error. Currently, he is the U.S. Director of The Obed Project, a non-profit ministry that focuses on educational and service tours to Israel. Michael and his wife, Ophelia, make their home in North Carolina. Together they have traveled to such diverse places as the Ukraine, Honduras, and Israel, teaching the Word of God.
Forced out of the Los Angeles Times amid the latest budget cuts, newspaperman Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, using his final days at the paperto write the definitive murder story of his career. He focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer in jail after confessing to a brutal murder. But as he delves into the story, Jack realizes that Winslow's so-called confession is bogus. The kid might actually be innocent. Jack is soon running with his biggest story since The Poetmade his career years ago. He is tracking a killer who operates completely below police radar--and with perfect knowledge of any move against him. Including Jack's. Bonus materials include an in-depth interview with the author about writing "The Scarecrow" along with his exciting travel photos-plus a link to an online promotional video and links within the text to a fictitious website based on the novel and a teaser chapter from his next book, "Nine Dragons.
This monograph seeks to recover and assess the critically neglected comic strip work produced by the Irish painter Jack B. Yeats for various British publications, including Comic Cuts, The Funny Wonder, and Puck, between 1893 and 1917. It situates the work in relation to late-Victorian and Edwardian media, entertainment and popular culture, as well as to the evolution of the British comic during this crucial period in its development. Yeats’ recurring characters, including circus horse Signor McCoy, detective pastiche Chubblock Homes, and proto-superhero Dicky the Birdman, were once very well-known, part of a boom in cheap and widely distributed comics that Alfred Harmsworth and others published in London from 1890 onwards. The repositioning of Yeats in the context of the comics, and the acknowledgement of the very substantial corpus of graphic humour that he produced, has profound implications for our understanding of his artistic career and of his significant contribution to UK comics history. This book, which also contains many examples of the work, should therefore be of value to those interested in Comics Studies, Irish Studies, and Art History.
Michael P. Spradlin (outrageous words) and Jeff Weigel (eye-popping illustrations)—the seriously twisted minds that brought you the New York Times bestselling Christmas carol tome It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Zombies and Every Zombie Eats Somebody Sometime, a book of Zombie love songs—have arisen once more, this time to devour Mother Goose raw! Jack and Jill Went Up to Kill is a hilarious volume of zombie nursery rhymes designed to tickle the (exposed) funnybone of every World War Z, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and The Walking Dead fan on either side of the grave!
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