Echo Hill and Mountain Grove continues the story started in The Mill on Halfway Brook, in the Town of Highland, Sullivan County, New York, from 1880 to 1920. It is an account of the change from lumbering, rafting, and bluestone quarrying, to that of running boarding houses in the picturesque hamlets of Barryville, Minisink Ford, Yulan, Eldred, and Venoge located near the Delaware River. It tells the history of the Town of Highland and its townsfolk (Austin, Leavenworth, Eldred, Myers, Bodine, Bradley, Bosch, Clark, Gardner, Hallock, Mills, Boyd, Horton, Parker, Greig, Stege, Sergeant, and Tether), many of whom own boarding houses. Echo Hill and Mountain Grove is bursting with anecdotes and first person accounts about people, boarding houses, occupations, and events. It includes visits to Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New York City, and France. The narrative also gives details on the Shohola Depot, Shohola Glen, Shohola House, the Pelton Soda Factory, the Roebling Bridge, the Congregational Church Centennial, Zane Grey, two presidential assassinations, and World War I. Echo Hill and Mountain Grove contains over 900 images (photos, postcards, documents), several first person accounts, an 1881 Diary, 446 letters (150 WWI letters, including some from Lone Scout readers in 1918), 9 original maps, and an index of 1500 people, places, and events. It is the second book in the series, Memoirs from Eldred, New York, 1800 1950.

"Farewell to Eldred" concludes the story of the families who settled on either side of Halfway Brook, in the Town of Highland, New York, first read about in "The Mill on Halfway Brook," and continued in "Echo Hill and Mountain Grove." Through the eyes of her Austin and Leavenworth relatives, Louise Smith weaves an account of the daily lives of the descendants of early settlers (Austin, Leavenworth, Eldred, Myers, Bodine, Bradley, Bosch, Clark, Gardner, Hallock, Mills, Boyd, Horton, Parker, Greig, Stege, Sergeant, and Tether) who still lived in one of the the five hamlets: Eldred, Highland Lake, Yulan, Barryville, or Minisink Ford, in the Town of Highland (originally Lumberland). We meet newcomers (Frey, Hensel, Theuer, Pankow, Hainzl, Bertram, Lorphelin, and Mellan), often from New York City, who purchase and run established boarding houses still vital to the area's economy. The Erie Railway, Barryville Glass Factory (for a short while), and (later) Narrowsburg Lumber also offered employment. Some 50 first-person reminiscences tell of stills, baseball teams, radio KDKA, the arrival of electricity, boarding house life, flooding, the Depression, the search for employment, and World War II, in the years 1920 to 1950. Daily life-its joys and sorrows-is told through 1,100 photos, postcards, and documents, 150 letters, four diaries (shared by over 100 contributors) interwoven with World, National, and Local News; and Boarding House Ads. "Farewell to Eldred," the third and final book in the "Memoirs from Eldred, New York, 1800-1950" Series, includes original maps of boarding house locations, an extensive Appendix (with 1920, 1930, and 1940 Censuses), and an Index of some 2,550 people, places, and events.

TheMill on Halfway Brookrecountsthe life and times of families who settled near Halfway Brook in the heavily forested original Town of Lumberland, Sullivan County, New York. It spansthe years from 1800 to 1880, and is the first in the series,Memoirsfrom Eldred, New York, 1800-1950. The principal families in the book (Eldred, Austin, Leavenworth, and Myers) built their homes in what became the hamlet of Eldred, in the Town of Highland. Some of their friends and kinsfolk (the Clarks, Gardners, Hallocks, Hickoks, Sergeants, Van Tuyls, and others)livedin nearby hamlets (Barryville, Pond Eddy, Glen Spey, Narrowsburg, Tusten, or Bethel). The story includes references to the neighboring Pennsylvania towns of Shohola, Lackawaxen, and Mast Hope. TheMill on Halfway Brookfollows the main occupations of the community, including lumbering, tanning, river rafting, working for the D&H Canal Company, and bluestone quarrying.The Civil War chapter mentions many of the men from the Town of Highland who fought in the war, and has major excerpts from 50 letters written by Corporal Sherman S. Leavenworth. Thenarrative weaves vignettes of townsfolk, preachers, Congregational and Methodist Churches, regional and national events with historical information, censuses, an 1875 biography, Church records, and familyland documents. The book has 300 photos and postcards, 17 old and new maps, and 200 letters (1845-1880). TheMillon Halfway Brookis fully indexed, with names of over 900 people, places, and events.

Zane Grey, renowned as an author for his portrayals of the rugged Wild West, completed his first Western, The Heritage of the Desert, in just four months in 1910. This compelling work which deals powerfully with Mormon culture in Utah in 1890 rapidly became a bestseller.

The Kingdom of Lesotho is a mountainous enclave in southern Africa, and like mountain zones throughout the world it is isolated, steeped in tradition, and home to few outsiders. The people, known as Basotho, are respected in the area as the only tribe never to be defeated by European colonizers. Greg Alder arrives in Tsoeneng in 2003 as the village's first foreign resident since 1966. Back then, the Canadian priest who had been living there was robbed and murdered in his quarters. Set up as a Peace Corps teacher at the village's secondary school, Alder finds himself incompetent in so many unexpected ways. How do you keep warm in this place where it snows but there is no electricity? How do you feed yourself where there are no grocery stores let alone restaurants? Tsoeneng is a world apart from his home in America, but Alder persists in adapting. He learns to grow food, he learns to speak the strange local language, and he makes enough friends such that he is eventually invited to participate in initiation rites. Yet even as he seems accepted into the Tsoeneng fold, he sees how much of an outsider he will always remain-and perhaps want to remain. The Mountain School is insightful and candid, at times accepting and at times rebellious. It is the ultimate tale of the transplant.

No. 3 of each volume contains the annual report and minutes of the annual meeting.

Snow Mountain Passage is a powerful retelling of the most dramatic of our pioneer stories—the ordeal of the Donner Party, with its cast of young and old risking all, its imprisoning snows, its rumors of cannibalism. James Houston takes us inside this central American myth in a compelling new way that only a novelist can achieve. The people whose dreams, courage, terror, ingenuity, and fate we share are James Frazier Reed, one of the leaders of the Donner Party, and his wife and four children—in particular his eight-year-old daughter, Patty. From the moment we meet Reed—proud, headstrong, yet a devoted husband and father—traveling with his family in the "Palace Car," a huge, specially built covered wagon transporting the Reeds in grand style, the stage is set for trouble. And as they journey across the country, thrilling to new sights and new friends, coping with outbursts of conflict and constant danger, trouble comes. It comes in the fateful choice of a wrong route, which causes the group to arrive at the foot of the Sierra Nevada too late to cross into the promised land before the snows block the way. It comes in the sudden fight between Reed and a drover—a fight that exiles Reed from the others, sending him solo over the mountains ahead of the storms. We follow Reed during the next five months as he travels around northern California, trying desperately to find means and men to rescue his family. And through the amazingly imagined "Trail Notes" of Patty Reed, who recollects late in life her experiences as a child, we also follow the main group, progressively stranded and starving on the Nevada side of the Sierras. Snow Mountain Passage is an extraordinary tale of pride and redemption. What happens—who dies, who survives, and why—is brilliantly, grippingly told.

Nineteen-year-old Cowney Sequoyah yearns to escape his hometown of Cherokee, North Carolina, in the heart of the Smoky Mountains. When a summer job at Asheville's luxurious Grove Park Inn and Resort brings him one step closer to escaping the hills that both cradle and suffocate him, he sees it as an opportunity. The experience introduces him to the beautiful and enigmatic Essie Stamper—a young Cherokee woman who is also working at the inn and dreaming of a better life. With World War II raging in Europe, the resort is the temporary home of Axis diplomats and their families, who are being held as prisoners of war. A secret room becomes a place where Cowney and Essie can escape the white world of the inn and imagine their futures free of the shadows of their families' pasts. Outside of this refuge, however, racism and prejudice are never far behind, and when the daughter of one of the residents goes missing, Cowney finds himself accused of abduction and murder. Even As We Breathe invokes the elements of bone, blood, and flesh as Cowney navigates difficult social, cultural, and ethnic divides. Betrayed by the friends he trusted, he begins to unearth deeper mysteries as he works to prove his innocence and clear his name. This richly written debut novel explores the immutable nature of the human spirit and the idea that physical existence, with all its strife and injustice, will not be humanity's lasting legacy.

How can creatures made from dust become members of God's household "forever"? In this New Studies in Biblical Theology volume, Michael Morales explores the narrative context, literary structure and theology of Leviticus, following its dramatic movement from the tabernacle to the temple—and from the earthly to the heavenly Mount Zion in the New Testament.

An Armenian immigrant’s journey from the author of Dreams of Bread and Fire. “Haunting and convincing . . . There’s a fairy-tale quality to the prose” (Joyce Carol Oates, The New Yorker). Zabelle begins in a suburb of Boston with the quiet death of Zabelle Chahasbanian, an elderly widow and grandmother whose history remains vastly unknown to her family. But as the story shifts back in time to Zabelle’s childhood in the waning days of Ottoman Turkey, where she survives the 1915 Armenian genocide and near starvation in the Syrian desert, an unforgettable character begins to emerge. Zabelle’s journey encompasses years in an Istanbul orphanage, a fortuitous adoption by a rich Armenian family, and an arranged marriage to an Armenian grocer who brings her to America where the often comic interactions and battles she wages are forever colored by shadows from the long-lost world of her past. “Kricorian is able to transform oral history into her own distinctive, accomplished prose. As in Toni Morrison’s work, the act of simple remembering is not enough; Zabelle, like Morrison’s best work, is a lovely and artful piece.” —Time Out New York