This book is a comprehensive study of the evolution of the component aspects of drilling technology in Alberta, from the evolution of power sources and drill bit designs to the composition of drilling muds and the use of fishing tools. Included are explanations of the costs and risks of oil well drilling and of the larger issue of industrial technology -- how it evolves and under what conditions. The author draws extensively from original source material such as interviews, photographs, and appendices from both the Glenbow Archives and the Devon-Leduc Petroleum Hall of Fame and Interpretive Ce.

By the time Jim Thompson was sixteen years old, he had been a newspaper boy, a burlesque show hawker, a plumber's helper, a comedian in two-reel pictures, a night bellboy in a luxury hotel and over a dozen other occupations. By the time he was eighteen, he was driving across America in a broken-down Ford without a penny to his name and his mother and his kid sister Freddie in tow, looking for just one more paycheck to keep them all alive. A bittersweet comedy of a hard-won American life, ROUGHNECK chronicles the many jobs, near-criminal escapades, and downright unlawful grifts of the man who would become one of crime fiction's most enduring writers, in a larger-than-life literary memoir--or wildly entertaining tall tale--as only Thompson could tell it. Hard times have never sounded so good.

Frank Antenori chronicles the experiences he had while serving with the Green Berets Special Forces A-team in Iraq, focusing on their battle with heavily armed Iraqi forces on April 6, 2003.

I'm Endo, an office worker who has feelings for Konishi-kun, a construction worker ten years younger than me. Konishi-kun confuses me. He insists on having no interest in men, but his actions such as waiting in the rain and making lunch for me bring my hopes up.Even so, I should give up after telling him my true feeling...Right when I thought so, he says he is interested in how I beat off to him!If that's the case, will Konishi-kun let me touch his body just a little?Endo, who is chicken-hearted but comes through when the chips are down, and Konishi, who looks tough but is a pushover. A love story between two complete opposites!

Travis Cody prepares for the final game of his high school football career, a rematch with his school's chief rival.

A working-class history of the Texas oil fields, as told by one of its workers. Oil, the black gold of Texas, has given rise to many a myth. Oil could turn a man overnight into a millionaire—and did—for some. But these myths have obscured what life was really like in the oil patch, a place that was neither the El Dorado of legend nor quite the unredeemed den of sin and iniquity that some feared. In Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers, Gerald Lynch provides a much-needed insider’s view of the oil industry, describing life in various oil fields in and around Texas. He also chronicles changes in drilling methods and oil-field technology and how these changes affected him and his fellow oil-field workers. No one else has written a working-class history of the oil fields as colorful and articulate as this one.