Mountain Memoir

Close to midnight on May 17, 1951, four north Alabama lawmen drove to a bootlegger's home to serve an arrest warrant. Before the clock struck twelve, the bootlegger lay dead in front of the house he shared with his wife and eight children, and three of the four officers were also dead. Afterward, a sixteen-year-old boy would face a series of trials that would divide a county and thrust the state of Alabama into the national spotlight.

Growing up in a family where everyone was just fine, Don Follis learned early on to keep his arms crossed and his emotions at bay. While his spiritual life groaned for development, the land of numb held him back. He didn’t think about the connection between his emotional and spiritual lives.

With Mountain Madness, Clinton Crockett Peters chronicles his travels and personal transformation from a West Texas evangelical to mountain guide to humbled humanist after a near-fatal injury in Japan's Chichibu Mountains. From 2007 to 2010, Peters lived in Kosuge Village, nestled in central Japan's peaks, where he was the only foreigner in town. This essay collection profiles who he was before Japan, why he became obsessed with mountains, and his fallout from mountain obsession. Ultimately, the collection asks, how can landscape create and end identities?

On October 12, 2007, a young soldier is injured in Afghanistan. For the next two years, as he is moved from Bagram to Germany to Walter Reed to Palo Alto and finally home to Washington State, his family never leaves his side. And throughout those years, his father writes daily emails to family and friends, chronicling the journey from a dusty road in Afghanistan to the snowy summit of Mt. Rainier.

In a story of remarkable perseverance, Helen Joy writes a memoir of her unusual childhood, her mental breakdown at age 31, and how she fought for a year to stay alive in the mental healthcare system.

After decades as a long-haul trucker, Finn Murphy left the road and settled in Boulder County, Colorado. Before long he noticed that many of his neighbors were captivated by the prospect of vast riches in “the Hemp Space.” When hemp was legalized, after eighty years in federal exile, Colorado became the center of a hemp growing and processing boom. Figuring he’d harvest some of that easy money, Murphy bought a thirty-six-acre farm. What could go wrong? Well, pretty much everything…

More than half a century after the Vietnam War, a riveting, true story emerges. The author embarks on a journey to bridge the silent gap between himself and his estranged father, whose memories of the war are deeply buried. This quest for understanding leads him to a close-knit brotherhood of Marine combat veterans who become the voice for the untold stories, filling the void left by his father's unspoken past.

Stable Weight is a story of resilience, empowerment, and the transformative power of the human-animal bond, revealing how even the most sensitive soul can ditch being a good girl for becoming an independent woman.

At 54, Lisa Stewart set out to regain the fearless girl she once had been, riding her horse, Chief, 500 miles home. Hot, homeless, and horseback, she snapped back into every original cell. On an extraordinary homegoing from Kansas City to Bates and Vernon Counties in Missouri, Lisa exhausted herself, faced her past, trusted strangers, and stayed in the middle of her frightened horse to document modern rural America, the people, animals, and land.

At eighteen, Paul Mountain pissed on his academic scholarship to the University of Minnesota and fled to Boulder, Colorado without money, family or prospects. In a cramped one-bedroom apartment with two other dudes, Paul's life was youth unbridled, impulsive, and without remorse. Within a year, Paul finds himself in a tiny cabin with his new girlfriend in a Rocky Mountain ghost town, convinced he can write his way out of poverty before buying his first legal drink. He was wrong. He was wrong about a great many things.

On October 7, 1780, American Patriot and Loyalist soldiers battled each other at Kings Mountain, near the border of North and South Carolina. With over one hundred eyewitness accounts, this collection of participant statements from men of both sides includes letters and statements in their original form—the soldiers' own words—unedited and unabridged.

In Wilderness and Mountain Lore explores the stories and adventures of visiting a mountain wilderness retreat over a 50-year period with a group of friends. We nearly always were able to reserve the only two cabins for the second week of June. Domke Lake is located in the North Cascades wilderness area of North Central Washington State. There is no electricity or phone service of any kind along with little change other than what nature has wrought.

In her hilarious yet sage debut essay collection, Midstokke demonstrates that battles with freeloading varmints, clogged stove pipes, childhood trauma, and one surprisingly aggressive boulder are unexpected, if not wonderfully entertaining, pathways to personal growth and joy. All the Things delivers the irreverent, fearless, and brilliant voice of a woman who laughs in the face of failure and soothes her wounds by splitting wood, often in her skivvies.

Who is Rampaging Roy Slaven? An Australian icon, a raconteur, an athlete of unsurpassable - and some may say improbable - sporting feats. Whether it was riding Rooting King to another Melbourne Cup victory, commentating the Olympics or hobnobbing with the country's upper crust, Rampaging Roy...

An accurate and personal record from one of America's first breed of mountain men, giving a detailed description of many the lands he passed through and the habits and character of the various tribes encountered.

"This is the tale of Mark Horrell’s not-so-nearly ascent of Gasherbrum in Pakistan, of how one man’s boredom and frustration was conquered by a gutsy combination of exhaustion, cowardice, and sheer mountaineering incompetence. He made not one, not two, but three intrepid assaults, some of which got quite a distance beyond Base Camp, and overcame many perilous circumstances along the way. The mountaineer Joe Simpson famously crawled for three days with a broken leg, but did he ever have to read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown while waiting for a weather window?

Voices From the Hills is a history of female participation in mountain running, a development that was fiercely resisted in its early years. Steve Chilton has researched his subject deeply, interviewing many female athletes whom he rightly describes as pioneers. Thanks to them, female participation has become accepted and followed avidly in all its aspects including the long distance, high ascent runs over ranges such as the Mamores and recognized challenges such as the Bob Graham Round.

In this book, honesty and perspective are what I hope to share by giving you full access to what goes on during hypnotherapy sessions. In the stories that follow, I open the doors of my office and give you a glimpse of what it’s really like...what people are really like. Once you listen to details about all the things that trouble and puzzle others, you’ll probably feel reassured about the issues that bother you.

By the time life had finished hitting Rick Crandall from all sides, he was at the lowest point of his life, both personally and professionally. His wife, Pamela, makes an astute and life-changing suggestion: "Let's get a dog." So begins the story of Emme, a 200-pound Saint Bernard trapped in the body of a five-pound Australian terrier puppy. Soon, Emme and Rick hit the hiking trails around Aspen, Colorado. While she is groomed to be a show dog, it's soon obvious that her heart is in the hills and with Rick, who decides to add more challenging hikes to the mix.

Hidden among the photographs, uniforms, revolvers, and war medals of the Civil War are the remarkable stories of some of the most unlikely heroes: women. This audiobook brings to light the incredible stories of women from the Civil War that remain relevant to our nation today. Each woman's experience helps us see a truer, fuller, richer version of what really happened in this country during this time period.