Taking Back the River

Taking Back the River PDF Author: Sheila A. O'Quirke
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0615658822
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The river is within me. It is the life force that sustains me. For years...my grief, my rage, and other demons, kept the flow of my life force stagnant. It led me to some very dark and terrifying places. I didn't think I'd ever get off the merry-go-round of addiction and codependency. My PTSD was so severe I feared I'd never have a normal life...a life free of suicide attempts and overwhelming panic. But as I began the difficult work of healing and facing my demons, I came to see the value of having lived horrific life events. I truly believe that my life was spared, many times over, so that I could tell you my story. We are...all of us...here for a reas

Taking Back the River

Taking Back the River PDF Author: Sheila A. O'Quirke
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0615658822
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Get Book Here

Book Description
The river is within me. It is the life force that sustains me. For years...my grief, my rage, and other demons, kept the flow of my life force stagnant. It led me to some very dark and terrifying places. I didn't think I'd ever get off the merry-go-round of addiction and codependency. My PTSD was so severe I feared I'd never have a normal life...a life free of suicide attempts and overwhelming panic. But as I began the difficult work of healing and facing my demons, I came to see the value of having lived horrific life events. I truly believe that my life was spared, many times over, so that I could tell you my story. We are...all of us...here for a reas

Holding Back the River

Holding Back the River PDF Author: Tyler J. Kelley
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501187066
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
A revelatory work of reporting on the men and women wrestling to harness and preserve America’s most vital natural resource: our rivers. The Mississippi. The Missouri. The Ohio. America’s rivers are the very lifeblood of our country. We need them for nourishing crops, for cheap bulk transportation, for hydroelectric power, for fresh drinking water. Rivers are also part of our mythology, our collective soul; they are Mark Twain, Led Zeppelin, and the Delta Blues. But as infrastructure across the nation fails and climate change pushes rivers and seas to new heights, we’ve arrived at a critical moment in our battle to tame these often-destructive forces of nature. Tyler J. Kelley spent two years traveling the heartland, getting to know the men and women whose lives and livelihoods rely on these tenuously tamed streams. On the Illinois-Kentucky border, we encounter Luther Helland, master of the most important—and most decrepit—lock and dam in America. This old dam at the end of the Ohio River was scheduled to be replaced in 1998, but twenty years and $3 billion later, its replacement still isn’t finished. As the old dam crumbles and commerce grinds to a halt, Helland and his team must risk their lives, using steam-powered equipment and sheer brawn, to raise and lower the dam as often as ten times a year. In Southeast Missouri, we meet Twan Robinson, who lives in the historically Black village of Pinhook. As a super-flood rises on the Mississippi, she learns from her sister that the US Army Corps of Engineers is going to blow up the levee that stands between her home and the river. With barely enough notice to evacuate her elderly mother and pack up a few of her own belongings, Robinson escapes to safety only to begin a nightmarish years-long battle to rebuild her lost community. Atop a floodgate in central Louisiana, we’re beside Major General Richard Kaiser, the man responsible for keeping North America’s greatest river under control. Kaiser stands above the spot where the Mississippi River wants to change course, abandoning Baton Rouge and New Orleans, and following the Atchafalaya River to the sea. The daily flow of water from one river to the other is carefully regulated, but something else is happening that may be out of Kaiser and the Corps’ control. America’s infrastructure is old and underfunded. While our economy, society, and climate have changed, our levees, locks, and dams have not. Yet to fix what’s wrong will require more than money. It will require an act of imagination. “With meticulous research and insightful analysis” (Publishers Weekly), Holding Back the River brings us into the lives of the Americans who grapple with our mighty rivers and, through their stories, suggests solutions to some of the century’s greatest challenges.

Take Me to the River

Take Me to the River PDF Author: Michael Kolster
Publisher: George F Thompson Publishing
ISBN: 9781938086427
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In the spirit of nineteenth-century photographers such as Timothy O'Sullivan, Michael Kolster uses the old collodion process to reveal anew four Atlantic rivers, from source to sea.

Stones from the River

Stones from the River PDF Author: Ursula Hegi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439144761
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
From the acclaimed author of Floating in My Mother’s Palm and Children and Fire, a stunning story about ordinary people living in extraordinary times—“epic, daring, magnificent, the product of a defining and mesmerizing vision” (Los Angeles Times). Trudi Montag is a Zwerg—a dwarf—short, undesirable, different, the voice of anyone who has ever tried to fit in. Eventually she learns that being different is a secret that all humans share—from her mother who flees into madness, to her friend Georg whose parents pretend he’s a girl, to the Jews Trudi harbors in her cellar. Ursula Hegi brings us a timeless and unforgettable story in Trudi and a small town, weaving together a profound tapestry of emotional power, humanity, and truth.

Swimming Back to Trout River

Swimming Back to Trout River PDF Author: Linda Rui Feng
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982129425
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A “beautifully written, poignant exploration of family, art, culture, immigration…and love” (Jean Kwok, author of Searching for Sylvie Lee and Girl in Translation) set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution that follows a father’s quest to reunite his family before his precocious daughter’s momentous birthday, which Garth Greenwell calls “one of the most beautiful debuts I’ve read in years.” How many times in life can we start over without losing ourselves? In the summer of 1986, in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future. Junie doesn’t know that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country, each holding close private tragedies and histories from the tumultuous years of their youth during China’s Cultural Revolution. While Momo grapples anew with his deferred musical ambitions and dreams for Junie’s future in America, Cassia finally begins to wrestle with a shocking act of brutality from years ago. For Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three family members before Junie’s birthday—even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light. Swimming Back to Trout River is a “symphony of a novel” (BookPage) that weaves together the stories of Junie, Momo, Cassia, and Dawn—a talented violinist from Momo’s past—while depicting their heartbreak and resilience, tenderly revealing the hope, compromises, and abiding ingenuity that make up the lives of immigrants. Feng’s debut is “filled with tragedy yet touched with life-affirming passion” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), and “Feng weaves a plot both surprising and inevitable, with not a word to spare” (Booklist, starred review).

Long Way Back to the River Kwai

Long Way Back to the River Kwai PDF Author: Loet Velmans
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1628721650
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Loet Velmans was seventeen when the Germans invaded Holland. He and his family fled to London on the Dutch Coast Guard cutter Seaman’s Hope and then sailed to the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—where he joined the Dutch army. In March 1942, the Japanese invaded the archipelago and made prisoners of the Dutch soldiers. For the next three and a half years Velmans and his fellow POWs toiled in slave labor camps, building a railroad through the dense jungle on the Burmese-Thailand border so the Japanese could invade India. Some 200,000 POWs and slave laborers died building this Death Railway. Velmans, though suffering from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, and unspeakable mistreatment, never gave up hope. Fifty-seven years later he returned to revisit the place where he should have died and where he had buried his closest friend. From that emotional visit sprung this stunning memoir. Long Way Back to the River Kwai is a simply told but searing memoir of World War II—a testimonial to one man’s indomitable will to live that will take its place beside the Diary of Ann Frank, Bridge over the River Kwai, and Edith’s Story.

Follow the River

Follow the River PDF Author: James Alexander Thom
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345338545
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “It takes a rare individual not only to see that history can live, but also to make it live for others. James Thom has that gift.”—The Indianapolis News Mary Ingles was twenty-three, happily married, and pregnant with her third child when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement in 1755 and kidnapped her, leaving behind a bloody massacre. For months they held her captive. But nothing could imprison her spirit. With the rushing Ohio River as her guide, Mary Ingles walked one thousand miles through an untamed wilderness no white woman had ever seen. Her story lives on—extraordinary testimony to the indomitable strength of one pioneer woman who risked her life to return to her own people.

The River of Doubt

The River of Doubt PDF Author: Candice Millard
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 030757508X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait—the bestselling author of River of the Gods brings us the true story of Theodore Roosevelt’s harrowing exploration of one of the most dangerous rivers on earth. “A rich, dramatic tale that ranges from the personal to the literally earth-shaking.” —The New York Times The River of Doubt—it is a black, uncharted tributary of the Amazon that snakes through one of the most treacherous jungles in the world. Indians armed with poison-tipped arrows haunt its shadows; piranhas glide through its waters; boulder-strewn rapids turn the river into a roiling cauldron. After his humiliating election defeat in 1912, Roosevelt set his sights on the most punishing physical challenge he could find, the first descent of an unmapped, rapids-choked tributary of the Amazon. Together with his son Kermit and Brazil’s most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Roosevelt accomplished a feat so great that many at the time refused to believe it. In the process, he changed the map of the western hemisphere forever. Along the way, Roosevelt and his men faced an unbelievable series of hardships, losing their canoes and supplies to punishing whitewater rapids, and enduring starvation, Indian attack, disease, drowning, and a murder within their own ranks. Three men died, and Roosevelt was brought to the brink of suicide. The River of Doubt brings alive these extraordinary events in a powerful nonfiction narrative thriller that happens to feature one of the most famous Americans who ever lived. From the soaring beauty of the Amazon rain forest to the darkest night of Theodore Roosevelt’s life, here is Candice Millard’s dazzling debut. Look for Candice Millard’s latest book, River of the Gods.

The River of No Return

The River of No Return PDF Author: Bee Ridgway
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 0142180831
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
Named a Notable Fiction Book of 2013 by The Washington Post “An engrossing adventure, with mystery, romance, humor, and impeccable historical detail.” –The Boston Globe Devon, 1815. The charming Lord Nicholas Davenant and the beguiling Julia Percy should make a perfect match. But before their love has a chance to grow, Nicholas is presumed dead in the Napoleonic war. Nick, however, is lost in time. Somehow he escaped certain death by leaping two hundred years forward to the present day where he finds himself in the care of a mysterious society – the Guild. Questioning the limits of the impossible, Nick is desperate to find a way back to the life he left behind. Yet with the future of time itself hanging in the balance, could it be that the girl who first captured his heart has had the answers all along? Can Nick find a way to return to her?

Lost in River of Grass

Lost in River of Grass PDF Author: Ginny Rorby
Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab ®
ISBN: 1467731676
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
"I don't realize I'm crying until he glances at me. For a moment, I see the look of anguish in his eyes, then he blinks it away and slips off into the water. I immediately think of the gator. It's still down there somewhere. . . ." A science-class field trip to the Everglades is supposed to be fun, but Sarah's new at Glades Academy, and her fellow freshmen aren’t exactly making her feel welcome. When an opportunity for an unauthorized side trip on an air boat presents itself, it seems like a perfect escape—an afternoon without feeling like a sore thumb. But one simple oversight turns a joyride into a race for survival across the river of grass. Sarah will have to count on her instincts—and a guy she barely knows—if they have any hope of making it back alive.