What do two murders, a kidnapping, and an immense fortune have to do with an aging lumberyard? Nothing, unless it is Fannelli's family-owned lumber yard, the oldest lumberyard in the country. Come along as young Jeremy Lingemi, the newest employee in the year 1977, tries to uncover, with the help of the old lumber company's spirits, the many answers. Who is doing the killings? Is the mob involved? And are they connected in any way to the owners of the Fannelli Lumberyard? Is there really a hidden fortune somewhere in the old lumber yard? And can the spirits lead Jeremy to the treasure before he, or anyone else, dies? Hidden deep inside are the answers to this deadly mystery.

This is a story of a boy growing up in a Boston suburb near where his ancestors had settled three centuries before. He attends elite private schools and Union Theological Seminary, training to be a Protestant pastor. He marries Annette and they raise four children in suburban Rochester and the inner-city neighborhoods of Buffalo, New York. They help Saul Alinsky create a mass-based community organization to empower the dispossessed. Annette teaches social work at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Always moving West, they settle in Berkeley, California. They lose their political innocence during the Vietnam War, join a commune and are blind-sided by the power of cults. The family backpacks every summer in the Sierra Nevada. Annette teaches in the University of California School of Public Health. Howard, trained now as a sociologist of religion, advises groups planning to begin new churches in West Coast suburbs. Through meditation, creative use of their imagination, and workshops at Esalen, they explore aspects of themselves that had been cut off by their East Coast upbringing. They move to Benicia, California, where Annette blocks the railroad tracks over which munitions trains pass; Howard has a compelling dream of descent into the Void. After his ten-year pastorate, they retire to Claremont, California, where Annette dies in 1997.

Extended essays and four-color photos highlight 75 buildings and sites on Minnesota's National Register of Historic Places, from the grand and polished to the simple and unadorned.

In William Faulkner, Richard Godden traces how the novelist's late fiction echoes the economic and racial traumas of the South's delayed modernization in the mid-twentieth century. As the New Deal rapidly accelerated the long-term shift from tenant farming to modern agriculture, many African Americans were driven from the land and forced to migrate north. At the same time, white landowners exchanged dependency on black labor for dependency on northern capital. Combining powerful close readings of The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and A Fable with an examination of southern economic history from the 1930s to the 1950s, Godden shows how the novels' literary complexities--from their narrative structures down to their smallest verbal emphases--reflect and refract the period's economic complexities. By demonstrating the interrelation of literary forms and economic systems, the book describes, in effect, the poetics of an economy. Original in the way it brings together close reading and historical context, William Faulkner offers innovative interpretations of late Faulkner and makes a unique contribution to the understanding of the relation between literature and history.