Hannah Dawson never expected to be attacked by Yankee deserter’s where she lives in the Tennessee Smokey Mountains…but she never imagined she’d be forced to marry the Yankee officer that saves her either. When Lieutenant Lane Peterson, of the Union Army rescues a Tennessee belle and is injured in the process he is surprised when Hannah takes him in and nurses him back to health. Unable to keep his hands from exploring her tempting body, Lane finds himself in a compromising position and before he knows it he is standing as a reluctant groom for a shot-gun wedding. As soon as his wounds heal, Lane plans to head north, find the first Union Army camp he comes to and get his marriage to the Southerner annulled. But mother-nature and fate have plans of their own. Snowed in for the winter, Lane and Hannah find a passion that will not be denied North and South of the Mason Dixon Line.

The definitive history of the world's greatest baseball team—with an all new afterword by the author.

Baseball, first dubbed the “national pastime” in print in 1856, is the country’s most tradition-bound sport. Despite remaining popular and profitable into the twenty-first century, the game is losing young fans, among African Americans and women as well as white men. Furthermore, baseball’s greatest charm—a clockless suspension of time—is also its greatest liability in a culture of digital distraction. These paradoxes are explored by the historian and passionate baseball fan Susan Jacoby in a book that is both a love letter to the game and a tough-minded analysis of the current challenges to its special position—in reality and myth—in American culture. The concise but wide-ranging analysis moves from the Civil War—when many soldiers played ball in northern and southern prisoner-of-war camps—to interviews with top baseball officials and young men who prefer playing online “fantasy baseball” to attending real games. Revisiting her youthful days of watching televised baseball in her grandfather’s bar, the author links her love of the game with the informal education she received in everything from baseball’s history of racial segregation to pitch location. Jacoby argues forcefully that the major challenge to baseball today is a shortened attention span at odds with a long game in which great hitters fail two out of three times. Without sanitizing this basic problem, Why Baseball Matters remind us that the game has retained its grip on our hearts precisely because it has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to reinvent itself in times of immense social change.

The author was a Monk of the Vedanta Society of Southern California from the early fifties. After a few years, he felt a need to go to India and experience India for himself. At the least we have a travel story that chronicles his adventures and mis-adventures, and the amazing people he met as he journeyed throughout India. At another level, the book is a memento of the spiritual power he felt in a world far removed from his own. When the book first came out many years ago, it was controversial. The author’s frank tales offended some people, but others, especially in America loved reading about the author’s experiences. John Yale’s impressions of his Indian trip were first serialized in our magazine ‘Vedanta and the West’, then later came out in book form. Eventually, the book went out of print for many years, and was only recently reprinted in India.

Today’s Terrorism Against America May Have Beginnings Going Back Over 100 Years. When America drove its modernized fleet into Asian Pacific waters, prior to 1900, that action became a catalyst starting a chain reaction. A legacy of America’s subsequent imperialism may well have been the springboard to terrorist activities in America today. Following the wake of America’s Navy, Christian missionaries flooded into Pacific Rim countries, not unlike the missionaries who accompanied the Spanish conquistadors. The sacrosanct policy of “Manifest Destiny,” may have provided the moral principle for America to impose its will upon its own non-Christian people, as well as the peoples of the Asian Pacific, but it also sent a thinly veiled message, demeaning in nature, that unified the peoples who resisted us. America’s intentions may have been noble and caring, but they were also insulting. Shortly, the consequences of that international policy resulted in America’s involvement in the Boxer Rebellion in China and the Moro Insurrection in the Philippines. The term “benevolent assimilation” was the euphemistic label given by President William McKinley to America’s rationale for the mission of transforming the Pacific Rim peoples of Asia into Christians. In spite of strong opposition to America’s imperialistic Asian Pacific policy, headed by none other than Mark Twain, the movement had little restraint upon America’s quest to “civilize the heathen peoples,” a phrase frequently used by America’s press to describe its foreign mission. Andrew DiConti, in two of a trilogy of sequential novels, reveals that world through the eyes of a young sailor aboard the Boston, a modern man of war. The novels tell a succession of unique tales in each of the Boston’s ports of call, which demonstrate how America’s social order impacted its own non-white peoples, as well as the peoples of the Asian Pacific Rim. Due to a taboo romance with an American of Chinese ancestry by the protagonist, the reader is exposed to the prejudice in America in 1900 and the resultant consequences in a society that was both temperamentally and legally biased against non-white people. Could a society that would not treat its own citizens equally be expected to deal with people in its imperialistic adventures more benevolently? The author’s background as a teacher, an historian, a student of Asian culture and a former sailor gives authority to a novel that depicts how peoples throughout the Asian Pacific Rim were impacted by the influences of America’s leadership, as well as its military establishment. Web Page. www.geocities.com/wsb3499/YankeeTsunami2.html