Alfred Jacob Miller (1810-1874) was the first artist to journey into the heart of the Rocky Mountains. He did so as the commissioned expedition artist for William Drummond Stewart (1795-1871), a Scottish nobleman and veteran of a five-year hunting tour in America. Their destination would be the annual fur traders' rendezvous at Horse Creek, near the present-day border of Colorado and Wyoming. Miller, Stewart, and the rest of their party departed from Independence, Missouri, in mid-May 1837. They arrived at the rendezvous two months later and, after a week among the trappers and traders, headed into the Wind River Mountains to the source of the Green River. There, they spent the waning summer hunting moose and elk before returning to St. Louis in early October. Miller executed some one hundred watercolor and pen-and-ink sketches during the expedition, and he later reworked them into finished watercolors and oils for a variety of patrons. Over the past two decades, much valuable scholarship has emerged on how western American art has reflected American nationalist or expansionist ideologies. In Sentimental Journey: The Art of Alfred Jacob Miller, Lisa Strong takes a new approach, however, by examining how Miller tailored his western scenes to suit the specific needs and interests of local American audiences. She also crosses national boundaries to explore how Miller's paintings helped promote a vision of Scottish aristocratic identity.

Alfred's long journey through life as told by his granddaughter.

Destiny's Journey is a memoir reconstructed partly from notebooks that Döblin kept from the time he worked in the French Ministry of Information in the spring of 1940 and partly written without notes in Los Angeles where he took refuge during the Second World War. It tells the personal and generational story of the flight of Jewish and anti-Nazi intellectuals from Europe to America, their fear and frustration, isolation, and inability to work. Döblin’s story differs from that of other Jewish intellectuals and artists in that his family converts to Catholicism in Los Angeles. Unlike most of them, he returns to Europe as an officer with the French forces and works on denazifying German literature. The conversion narrative bridges the departure from and return to Europe. To critic John Simon, “the latter part of the book often reads like a shrill piece of Christian homiletics. But even this is not without interest, as it traces the transformation of an anarchic outsider into a dogmatic insider.” “The first part of ‘Destiny's Journey’ [about] Döblin's departure from Paris [in] 1940... is magisterial: acidly observed, saturated in telling detail, grimly comic and harrowing... with an exemplary introduction by Peter Demetz... an important, nourishing book” — John Simon, The New York Times

The Journey of a Warrior tells the inspiring story of a truly unique marine who became a brilliant combat leader and achieved international prominence. General Alfred Mason Gray, US Marine Corps, was a loner by nature, and many of his peers considered him to be a maverick. At the same time, having established himself as a military intellectual of remarkable insight, he became an icon to service personnel of all ranks, as well as many prominent defense officials, politicians, and scholars. General Gray was a critical force behind the changes needed to prepare marines for the new millennium. He is now recognized as one of the finest commandants in fifty years. The Journey of a Warrior brings to the fore the journey of a most unusual individual: a warrior, a leader, a thinker, and a patriot. It is not written as a biography but rather as a retrospective of a unique marine whose impact on his institution was both untraditional and perhaps underappreciated. The Marine Corps is better for his unselfish and dedicated journey to faithfully serve his country. Brigadier General Edwin H. Simmons, USMC Retired, Marine Corps Historian Emeritus, appears to have best captured General Gray's character when he wrote, General Al Gray is imaginative, iconoclastic, articulate, charismatic, and compassionate. His Marines love him.

Fascinated by the nature of the Jewish identity, Doeblin, the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, a non-practising Jew in Berlin in the 1920s, decided to visit Poland to try to discover his Jewish roots. This book is a record of that journey.

This book describes the history of the author’s grandparents, parents and other relatives from 1905 until about 1946 with a few details of a much later period. It gives an insight into their daily lives and the problems encountered during World War I, the various revolts in Germany following that war and its hyper inflation period, the crisis years during the 1930s, World War II and life in the Nazi concentration camps. It is based on the voluminous diaries kept during the war by the author’s mother and an uncle, on extensive recorded interviews with them and research by the author in various archives.

From life in his war-torn homeland to his quest for the American dream, Alfred Langer's determination and faith helped him surmount overwhelming obstacles and hardships to reach A New Beginning.

Adventure, shipwreck, storms and survival on the high seas. ENDURANCE is the story of one of the most astonishing feats of exploration and human courage ever recorded. In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men set sail for the South Atlantic on board a ship called the Endurance. The object of the expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland. In October 1915, still half a continent away from their intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in ice. For five months Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways on one of the most savage regions of the world. This utterly gripping book, based on first-hand accounts of crew members and interviews with survivors, describes how the men survived, how they lived together in camps on the ice for 17 months until they reached land, how they were attacked by sea leopards, the diseases which they developed, and the indefatigability of the men and their lasting civility towards one another in the most adverse conditions conceivable.

Experience “one of the best adventure books ever written” (Wall Street Journal) in this New York Times bestseller: the harrowing tale of British explorer Ernest Shackleton's 1914 attempt to reach the South Pole. In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurance became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization. In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.

The breakthrough modern sports novel The Contender shows readers the true meaning of being a hero. This acclaimed novel by celebrated sportswriter Robert Lipsyte, the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in YA fiction, is the story of a young boxer in Harlem who overcomes hardships and finds hope in the ring on his path to becoming a contender. Alfred Brooks is scared. He’s a high-school dropout, and his grocery store job is leading nowhere. His best friend is sinking further and further into drug addiction. Some street kids are after him for something he didn’t even do. So Alfred begins going to Donatelli’s Gym, a boxing club in Harlem that has trained champions. There he learns it’s the effort, not the win, that makes the boxer—that before you can be a champion, you have to be a contender. ALA Best of the Best Books for Young Adults * ALA Notable Children’s Book * New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age