This startlingly personal memoir from the award-winning screenwriter of "Children of a Lesser God" weaves a tale of stark beauty and devastating truth about a shy girl's struggle to process the troubling legacy of her famous parents. 8 pages of photos.

When a couple are killed on an isolated road in North Carolina they leave behind an orphaned son and grieving relatives who must decide between them who will be his caretaker, in a compulsive novel exploring the nature of family.

"Keeney delivers a riveting and propulsive story about a nine-year battle to save sacred ground that was the site of the largest labor uprising in American history. . . . He unveils a powerful playbook on successful activism that will inspire countless others for generations to come." --Eric Eyre, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic In 1921 Blair Mountain in southern West Virginia was the site of the country's bloodiest armed insurrection since the Civil War, a battle pitting miners led by Frank Keeney against agents of the coal barons intent on quashing organized labor. It was the largest labor uprising in US history. Ninety years later, the site became embroiled in a second struggle, as activists came together to fight the coal industry, state government, and the military- industrial complex in a successful effort to save the battlefield--sometimes dubbed "labor's Gettysburg"--from destruction by mountaintop removal mining. The Road to Blair Mountain is the moving and sometimes harrowing story of Charles Keeney's fight to save this irreplaceable landscape. Beginning in 2011, Keeney--a historian and great-grandson of Frank Keeney--led a nine-year legal battle to secure the site's placement on the National Register of Historic Places. His book tells a David-and-Goliath tale worthy of its own place in West Virginia history. A success story for historic preservation and environmentalism, it serves as an example of how rural, grassroots organizations can defeat the fossil fuel industry.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The author of The Road to Character explores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world. “Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.”—The Washington Post Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment. In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose. In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.

Provides a complete guide to the study, design, construction and management of landslide and slope engineering measures for mountain roads, with emphasis on low-cost. The geographical focus is on the tropics and sub-tropics, but is also highly relevant to other regions where heavy rain, steep slopes and weak soils and rocks combine to create slope instability. The causes and mechanisms of landslides are described, and the hazards they pose to mountain roads are illustrated. Methods of desk study, field mapping and ground investigation are reviewed and illustrated, with emphasis on geomorphological and engineering geological techniques. The design and construction of alignments, earthworks, drainage, retaining structures, the stabilization of soil slopes and rock slopes, and the control of erosion on slopes and in streams covered. Slope management as part of road maintenance and operation is reviewed, and procedures for risk assessment and works prioritization are described.

A heinous crime. A genuine heroine. A quest for justice. The defendant, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, led his victim down that old Jake's Mountain Road and into the valley of the shadow of death. Then he came out alone; he left her there. And now, your path is clear. It is the time to be strong. The State is obliged to ask you to cast out from the living this Daniel Brian Lee, for it was he who dared to pluck the very flower of humanity! -Thomas Rusher, District Attorney for the State of North Carolina You must now be aware, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that a weakness in the wall of a minute blood vessel in the defendant's brain set in motion a sequence of events that led to unbelievable human tragedy. You now know the dispensing of justice is not simple and sometimes requires an awesome measure of intelligence, maturity, and compassion. You also know that to execute a brain damaged person is to demean this State and this nation. Has our great State come to that? Have we come to that? -Chester Whittle, Defense Attorney for Daniel Brian Lee

Journalism professor Adam Colbert has come home to Albuquerque after a reporting career that took him all over the world. A nineteenth century adobe house with a mansard roof that he admired as a boy is now his home on Mountain Road. He loves the old neighborhood and the road that once connected Albuquerque with the Sandia Mountains. But some unwelcome new neighbors are the organizers of a twenty-week abortion ban initiative on the fall municipal election ballot. Adam’s journalism students write investigative stories about the initiative and its backers, which puts him in the crosshairs of a corrupt university regent who supports the anti-abortion campaign. Two women, one a young anti-fascist vagabond and the other a gorgeous and ambitious graduate student, enter his life and dramatically influence his political activism and his romantic experience.

In traversing the earth and living with the wilderness from Africa to the California Sierras, author Hoover Liddell came to realize the great energy of youth as we struggle to educate our planet and ourselves. Mountain Road is his journey of life and travel through the planet's cities and towns as well as his time in San Francisco and living inside its schools. From a mountain road out of Africa, humankind continues its journey into a timeless universe. Human freedom is not dwelling in the past or the future but in the remarkableness and freshness of the present, where the adventure is. His journey from the Nigerian rainforests and desert across Africa through the Serengeti plains and the mountain road of Kilimanjaro takes him to the mountains of the Sierras. In his expeditions he discovers moments of vibrant energy and days of staying alive that are more profound than all the years of teaching in the schools. He finds the wilderness empowers us to find our own way and deepens our capabilities as we educate ourselves and the earth. Of what meaning is school or life itself if we are not serious and motivated for the adventure to educate the planet?

This is the extraordinary story of the road to recovery of Matt who, at the tail end of 2010 at the age of twenty-three, suffered a life-altering brain injury. Awakening from a six-week coma, he couldn't talk or even sit up in bed unsupported. It was clear that he wouldn't be able to resume his career as a water sports instructor, nor did it look very likely that he would be able to pursue his passion for skiing. However, Matt had other ideas. When he regained the ability to speak, he declared that his first post-injury goal was to be skiing by the end of the year. The fact that he couldn't actually walk was but an obstacle to be overcome in due course. This turned out to be the first of many more challenging goals yet to come... The Road to the Top of the Mountain allows the reader to accompany Matt on his recovery path as, supported by friends, family and the ski community at large, he battled his way back to an independent life with many adventures on the way in Europe and America.