Norma Barzman is a blacklisted writer living in Southern France. Henry Myers is her beloved cousin, a former member of the Algonquin circle who has found his writing talent diminished with age, and is living an isolated life in New York City. When Norma invites Henry to Italy to realize their mutual dream of traveling together to Cremona to write about the mysterious origins of violin making, neither one could have anticipated the explosive consequences of their journey. But their adventure opens a Pandora's box of long-suppressed emotions, family secrets, and forces each to reassess their feelings towards each other, and themselves.

After more than thirty years as an expatriate, Irma Kurtz gave in to her growing curiosity about her American roots and set off on a grand adventure to explore 'the most baffling of all places' - by Greyhound bus. Taking only the barest necessitites for travel, she entered the vast network of America's bus routes and a seething, fleeting world of brief encounters and changing landscapes.

Traveling Heavy is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by the master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories, she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart, she writes about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the strangers who show her kindness as she makes her way through the world. Compassionate, curious, and unafraid to reveal her failings, Behar embraces the unexpected insights and adventures of travel, whether those be learning that she longed to become a mother after being accused of giving the evil eye to a baby in rural Mexico, or going on a zany pilgrimage to the Behar World Summit in the Spanish town of Béjar. Behar calls herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness. Repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba, unwilling to utter her last goodbye, she is obsessed by the question of why we leave home to find home. For those of us who travel heavy with our own baggage, Behar is an indispensable guide, full of grace and hope, in the perpetual search for connection that defines our humanity.

Tempe 1970 1st Arizona Historical Foundation. Hardcover. Tall 4to., 209pp., photographs by the Author, Supplemental Essays, end paper maps, cloth. Fine in later protective glassine jacket. No ownership marks.

A legendary figure from Hollywood's Golden Age tells the story of his life, from "royal" upbringing, through his salad days, stormy marriage, and numerous affairs, to his adventures as a naval commander in World War II

Product Description When Jack Rodenko shipped out as a sailor during World War II, he never imagined that real adventure would be waiting for him at home in New Orleans. The Crescent City after the war is at the heart of a rapidly changing America, and ex-sailor Jack Rodenko is caught up in a strange and shifting milieu as he tends bar at a seedy club called L’Êtoile. While struggling to build a new life, Rodenko becomes involved with a corrupt, greedy power broker, and falls in love with a striking photographer - relationships that will force him to choose between two decidedly different futures. First published decades after the author's death in 1972, The Unknown Constellations is the first novel by unsung postwar literary hero Henry Swados. Through these pages, we can trace the origins of a unique voice and an unerring conscience. From Library Journal Written in the 1940s, this is Swados's recently rediscovered first novel. (The late Swados was the author of ten books, including The Will, which received a National Book Award nomination in 1963.) The novel concerns Jack Rodenko, a disaffected seaman who puts ashore in New Orleans, hoping to rebuild a life shattered by an accident that occurred while in college. Soon, he is a protege of corrupt, power-hungry Shepard Ball and becomes enmeshed in Ball's schemes involving drugs, weapons, and politics. In the end, Jack must decide between wealth and easy success with Ball or self-respect and the love of Linda Lester, a beautiful photographer. While generally melodramatic, the novel is significant for sounding themes Swados would develop in later works: father-son conflicts, concern for the working class, and the tensions between public and private commitments. For academic and large public libraries.?Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In 1987, John F. Schwartz transcribed a collection of letters from his great-grandfather, William Philip Schwartz, who took the first known war photographs in 1847. This remarkable correspondence covers his exile from wife and family in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, service in the US Army in the Indian Wars and the Mexican-American War, his court-martial and desertion, his adventures in the Gold Rush and the Pacific, his enlistment in the Marine Corps and service aboard the USS Constellation in the Mediterranean Sea. His vivid and highly detailed letters paint an unforgettable portrait of a life on the American frontier and at sea-a must-read for anyone interested in American history.