Rebecca Gunderson's fresh start in High Plains, Kansas, is destroyed when a deadly tornado wrecks the immigrant's new home–and her reputation. Everyone knows Rebecca rode out the storm with the town's blacksmith, and no one believes her time with Pete Benjamin was totally innocent. To protect her, Pete offers Rebecca his hand in marriage...

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.

"This book combines text and image to reveal the real-life origins of the place where "the women are strong, the men are good-looking and the children above average." Keillor meditates on the enduring culture of the county and on the years he spent there as a young writer and an outsider. And a short story of Lake Wobegon, "October," appears here for the first time in print."--BOOK JACKET.

An exploration of the fast food industry in the United States, from its roots to its long-term consequences.

Amy's father is scheduled to visit Heartland. Amy hasn't seen him since he abruptly left the family following his debilitating accident. Eleven years and countless tragedies later, Amy doesn't know how she feels about him. She wonders if he could even be her father after having been absent for so many years. But his arrival affects Amy in a way she had not anticipated. She sees so much of who she is in him. And when she watches him work with horses, she realizes that what they share goes beyond blood.

"The most complete and engrossing biography yet of this exotic Southern girl...Excellent."—Liz Smith She was the sex symbol who dazzled all the other sex symbols. She was the temptress who drove Frank Sinatra to the brink of suicide and haunted him to the end of his life. Ernest Hemingway saved one of her kidney stones as a sacred memento, and Howard Hughes begged her to marry him—but she knocked out his front teeth instead. She was one of the great icons in Hollywood history—star of The Killers, The Barefoot Contessa, and The Night of the Iguana—and one of the few whose actual life was grander and more colorful than any movie. Her jaw-dropping beauty, charismatic presence, and fabulous, scandalous adventures fueled the legend of Ava Gardner—Hollywood's most glamorous, restless and uninhibited star. In this acclaimed first full biography of Gardner, Lee Server recreates—with great style and vivid detail—the actress's life, from her beginnings as a barefoot North Carolina farm girl to her heady days as a Hollywood goddess. He paints the full spectacle of her tumultuous private life—including her string of failed marriages to Mickey Rooney, Sinatra and Artie Shaw—and Gardner's lifelong search for adventure and love. Ava Gardner: "Love is Nothing" is both an exceptional work of biography and a richly entertaining read.

When first published, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century.