A tale of a lifelong passion for a WWII aircraft that changed the author’s life: “It is almost like an adventure novel except it is true” (Air Classics). This book tells the story of a Dutch boy who grew up during the 1950s in postwar Borneo, where he had frequent encounters with an airplane, the Douglas DC-3, a.k.a. the C-47 Skytrain or Dakota, of World War II fame. For a young boy living in a remote jungle community, the aircraft reached the proportions of a romantic icon as the essential lifeline to a bigger world for him, the beginning of a special bond. In 1957, his family left the island and all its residual wreckage of World War II, and he attended college in The Hague. After graduation, he started a career as a corporate executive—and met the aircraft again during business trips to the Americas. His childhood passion for the Dakota flared up anew, and the fascination pulled like a magnet. As if predestined, or maybe just looking for an excuse to come closer, he began a business to salvage and convert Dakota parts, which meant first of all finding them. As the demand for these war relic parts and cockpits soared, he began to travel the world to track down surplus, crashed, or derelict Dakotas. He ventured deeper and deeper into remote mountains, jungles, savannas, and the seas where the planes are found, usually as ghostly wrecks but sometimes still in full commercial operation. In hunting the mythical Dakota, he often encountered intimidating or dicey situations in countries plagued by wars or revolts, others by arms and narcotics trafficking, warlords, and conmen. The stories of these expeditions take the reader to some of the remotest spots in the world, but once there, one is often greeted by the comfort of what was once the West’s apex in transportation—however now haunted by the courageous airmen of the past.

In a clever take on the “night at the museum” theme, a little mouse with a genius for collecting leads picture book readers—and seek-and-find aficionados—on a thrilling nocturnal adventure. Dakota Crumb: Tiny Treasure Hunter is both a rollicking story with a dash of danger and, in its final eye-popping spreads, a seek-and-find challenge. As the clock in the great museum tick-tocks past midnight, a little mouse with a sack and a treasure map scurries past the guards. Plucky and intrepid Dakota Crumb scours the museum for artifacts, including the famous Purple Jewel of Cairo (a gumdrop stashed in an exhibit). By day, the little mouse shares her carefully curated finds with fellow tiny creatures that flock to Miss Crumb’s tiny Mousehole Museum. A feast for sharp-eyed readers—who’ll delight in circling back after the story to pore over the illustrations in search of treasure—this gently suspenseful tale, splashed with soft, dusky hues, evokes a world of wonders after dark.

This book describes the Saga of the best Flying Boat ever made, the Consolidated PBY Catalina. This iconic WWII Sea Patrol Bomber evokes strong nostalgia related to its wartime heroic role as a Rescue aircraft in search for downed crews and as a ship convoy guard against the ever-looming Submarine attacks.

Ella Cara Deloria devoted much of her life to the study of the language and culture of the Sioux (Dakota and Lakota). The Dakota Way of Life is the result of the long history of her ethnographic descriptions of traditional Dakota culture and social life. Deloria was the most prolific Native scholar of the greater Sioux Nation, and the results of her work comprise an essential source for the study of the greater Sioux Nation culture and language. For years she collected material for a study that would document the variations from group to group. Tragically, her manuscript was not published during her lifetime, and at the end of her life all of her major works remained unpublished. Deloria was a perfectionist who worked slowly and cautiously, attempting to be as objective as possible and revising multiple times. As a result, her work is invaluable. Her detailed cultural descriptions were intended less for purposes of cultural preservation than for practical application. Deloria was a scholar through and through, and yet she never let her dedication to scholarship overwhelm her sense of responsibility as a Dakota woman, with family concerns taking precedence over work. Her constant goal was to be an interpreter of an American Indian reality to others. Her studies of the Sioux are a monument to her talent and industry.

Danger hunts down an ex-soldier and his trusty coyote in this Western series debut from the New York Times–bestselling authors of the Smoke Jensen series. Meet Hunter Buchanon, a towering mountain of a man who learned how to track prey in Georgia, kill in the Civil War, and prospect in the Black Hills of Dakota. Now he’s trying to live a peaceful gun-free life—but fate has other plans for him . . . When Hunter rescued a wounded coyote pup—and named him Bobby Lee—he had no idea the cute little varmint would grow up to be such a loyal companion. Coyotes aren’t known to be man’s best friend. Most of them are as fierce and wild as the Black Hills they roam. But Bobby Lee is different. When Hunter is ambushed on the road, Bobby Lee leaps to his defense. And when the attacker tries to shoot Bobby Lee, Hunter returns the favor by hitting the man with a rock. By the time the smoke clears, the coyote-loving ex-Confederate is covered in blood—and the other guy’s got a knife in his chest. Now Hunter has to explain it all to the local sheriff. Which is going to be tough. Because the man he just killed is the sheriff’s deputy . . .

The vaunted power of the Mage's College. Unbounded freedom among the Wolfmen. The best of both worlds. Recent college grad Sam King was hoping for a backpacking trip across Europe as a graduation present. Instead he's going to get a different kind of trip: a three-month stint in the ultimate immersive gaming experience. As a lifelong geek, gamer, and outsider, it's a better gift then he'd ever dreamed. But when he jumps feetfirst into the world of Eternium, run by CAL, the Certified Altruistic Lexicon, it's not exactly what he expected. All he wants is to quest, game, grind some levels, and get his hands on awesome loot. You know, have fun! But the Mage's College seems to have a very different definition of fun, one involving study, blisteringly strict regulations, aristocratic hierarchy, and tons of pay to play. Sam crosses the College and finds himself running for his life with a back-talking book that is far more than it seems and a class that no one has even heard of. If he can navigate the deadly College politics and the looming war with the barbaric Wolfmen, he might just find the fun and adventure he was looking for.

An episodic log of some of the author's more memorable hours aloft in peace and as a member of the Air Transport Command in war.

Minnesota's Will Weaver has been a hunter since he was a young boy, following in the footsteps of his father, a dedicated and seasoned outdoorsman. As he writes, "in the fall, when Canada geese came through and when partridge season opened, [we] heard the far-off thudding report of shotguns--and in November the heavier poom-poom! of deer rifles." Hunting frames Weaver's childhood memories, his relationship with his father, and his own definition of self. And although one side of his family lineage includes men who would not hunt, or go to war, or carry a rifle, Weaver is caught off guard when his son and daughter show no interest in upholding the tradition of the hunt. The Last Hunter is a twenty-first-century collection of deeply personal tales--a truly American story. Weaver's heartfelt rendering sweeps us along on a family journey from an isolated North Dakota farm "built around a fork and shovel" to postmodern America. Grounded in telling and luminous detail, The Last Hunter is an examination of family, life on the land, and those things we hold dear enough to want to carry along, one generation to another. Praise for Will Weaver: ". . . his stories view America's heartland with a candid but charitable eye." --New York Times on A Gravestone Made of Wheat ". . . pitch perfect. Superb." --Kirkus Reviews on Full Service " Weaver . . . is a writer of uncommon natural talent. He's that rare Real Thing, a writer writing eloquently, often between the lines but always with an undertow of passion about what he knows, where he lives, what he's been through." --Los Angeles Times Will Weaver is a writer of many books, including Red Earth, White Earth; Sweet Land: New & Selected Stories; and Full Service, one of several of his award-winning young adult novels. An avid outdoorsman, Weaver lives with his wife in Bemidji.

A wry memoir of growing up, coming out, and going back to the land as a lesbian feminist in the rural Midwest of the 1960s and 70s Dianna Hunter was a softball-loving, working-class tomboy in North Dakota, surviving the threat of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Mutually Assured Destruction in the shadow of a strategic air command base. Communists and antiwar hippies were the enemy, but lesbians were a threat, too: they were unhealthy, criminal, and downright insane. It took Dianna a while to figure out that she was one, a little longer to discover how she fit in with her new communities in the city and the countryside. This is her story—a frank account by turns comic and painful of a well-behaved Midwestern girl finding her way through polite denial and repression and running head-on into the eye-opening events of the 1960s and ’70s before landing on a dairy farm. A bumpy route takes Dianna to the Twin Cities, then to rural Minnesota and Wisconsin as—by way of the antiwar movement, women’s liberation, and a dose of lesbian feminism—she and her friends try to establish a rural utopia free of sexual oppression, violence, materialism, environmental degradation—and men. They dream big, love as they see fit, and make do until they don’t. Dianna buys a dairy farm and, with it, a new set of problems thanks to the Reagan-era farm crisis. A firsthand account of the lesbian feminist movement at its inception, Wild Mares is a deeply personal, wryly wise, and always engaging view of identity politics lived and learned in real life and, literally, on the ground, flourishing in the fertile soil of a struggling dairy farm in the American heartland.

Johnstone Country Where the Wild Things Roam When the Civil War ended, Hunter Buchanon and his coyote sidekick Bobby Lee forged a new life in the Black Hills, Dakota Territory. Now they’ll have to fight to the death to keep it . . . THERE’S COYOTES IN THEM THERE HILLS Ex-Rebel tracker Hunter Buchanon is down on his luck. He lost his family’s ranch in a fire. He lost his gold to a thief. And he just might lose his fiancée—a beautiful saloon girl named Annabelle—to a stinking-rich rival. But Hunter’s not ready to give up just yet. He’s got a temporary sheriff’s badge, a long-range plan to rebuild his ranch, and his loyal coyote Bobby Lee by his side to make things right. Too bad it all goes wrong—when Annabelle gets kidnapped . . . The mayhem begins with a stagecoach robbery in the Black Hills town of Tigerville. It won’t end until Sheriff Hunter Buchanon gets back his girl and his gold—on a long, dusty trail of bloodsoaked vengeance . . . Live Free. Read Hard.