In 1842, in the foothills of the Catskills, eccentric farmer Lester Howe and a neighbor began conducting lengthy and primitive explorations below ground at Howe's Scoharie Country farm. Each time the two returned, mud-covered, to the surface, they spoke of a cavern system that amazed them with its extent and complexity. Local Native Americans had known of the cave long before-they called it "Otsgaragee," the Cave of the Great Galleries-but Howe's chance rediscovery was the first chapter in the dramatic tale of one of America's oldest and greatest commercial caves. Just as dramatic as the caverns' features-walls of colored floorstone, gigantic columns of stalactites and stalagmites, murderously tight squeezes and vast open galleries-is the story of their evolution from natural wonder to tourist attraction. Noted natural historian Dana Cudmore examines this spectacular natural phenomenon, which is greeted by nearly a quarter of a million visitors each year. Packed with fascinating historical photographs, The Remarkable Howe Caverns Storyis a remarkable and compelling account of man's interaction with nature. "An interesting local history that should intrigue spelunkers and expand awareness of a site already well known to visitors of New York State's Leatherstocking region." ( Booklist) "Spelunkers and local history buffs will relish this engaging account." ( Publishers Weekly)

A basic examination of how caves are formed.

The story of Stephen Bishop, a slave and early explorer and guide at Mammoth Cave, Kentucky.

Winner of the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale “Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. . . . Wolk proves to be the perfect guide for this type of adventure: nimble, learned, funny and sincere. . . . All of the Marvels is magnificently marvelous. Wolk’s work will invite many more alliterative superlatives. It deserves them all.” —Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. Yet not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing—nobody’s supposed to. So, of course, that’s what Wolk did: he read all 27,000+ comics that make up the Marvel Universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown. And then he made sense of it—seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk’s hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years, from the atomic night terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day—a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders. As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; it’s also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patterns—the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story’s progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way it all feeds into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but it’s also a revelation for readers who don’t know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.

Paris, 1890. When Sherlock Holmes finds himself chasing an art dealer through the streets of Paris, he’s certain he’s smoked out one of the principals of a cunning forgery ring responsible for the theft of some of the Louvre’s greatest masterpieces. But for once, Holmes is dead wrong. He doesn’t know that the dealer, Theo Van Gogh, is rushing to the side of his brother, who lies dying of a gunshot wound in Auvers. He doesn’t know that the dealer’s brother is a penniless misfit artist named Vincent, known to few and mourned by even fewer. Officialdom pronounces the death a suicide, but a few minutes at the scene convinces Holmes it was murder. And he’s bulldog-determined to discover why a penniless painter who harmed no one had to be killed–and who killed him. Who could profit from Vincent’s death? How is the murder entwined with his own forgery investigation? Holmes must retrace the last months of Vincent’s life, testing his mettle against men like the brutal Paul Gauguin and the secretive Toulouse-Lautrec, all the while searching for the girl Olympia, whom Vincent named with his dying breath. She can provide the truth, but can anyone provide the proof? From the madhouse of St. Remy to the rooftops of Paris, Holmes hunts a killer—while the killer hunts him.

When his mother dies, a little boy is angry at his loss but does everything he can to hold onto the memory of her scent, her voice, and the special things she did for him, even as he tries to help his father and grandmother cope.

Here is the first archaeological evidence of the truth of the gospel stories to emerge in modern times. Unique about this site, is that it contains archaeological evidence that comes to us from the very time of the personalities and events described in the Gospels. For here is the largest ritual bathing pool ever found in the Jerusalem area, found indeed in the village where John the Baptist was born, showing unmistakable signs of ritual use in the first century AD and containing the earliest ever Christian art, depicting John the Baptist as well as the three crosses of the crucifixion. By using the forensic techniques available to the modern archaeologist Gibson - a working field archaeologist of the highest credentials - and his international team of experts will be able to draw information from the drawings, pottery, coins, bones, remains of a ritual fire, pieces of cloth etc found in the cave and, by matching these up with the contemporary literary sources, allow them to shed light on each other.This is a unique opportunity to build up a picture of the very first Christians, how they lived and even what they believed.As Gibson writes- 'By fitting together all the new archaeological facts with the basic historical information that has been available (sometimes even buried) in scholarly literature for a long time -I believe I am able to throw an amazing amount of light on the personality and mission of John the Baptist -the man, the prophet.Who was he? Where did he come from? What were his beliefs and what was the baptism all about?...

“An enchanting, ghostly story that had me in its grip until the last page."—Jennifer A. Nielsen, New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of The False Prince “Keep calm and carry on.” That’s what Katherine Bateson’s father told her, and that’s what she’s trying to do: when her father goes off to the war, when her mother sends Kat and her brother and sister away from London to escape the incessant bombing, even when the children arrive at Rookskill Castle, an ancient, crumbling manor on the misty Scottish highlands. But it’s hard to keep calm in the strange castle that seems haunted by ghosts or worse. What’s making those terrifying screeches and groans at night? Why do the castle’s walls seem to have a mind of their own? And why do people seem to mysteriously appear and disappear? Kat believes she knows the answer: Lady Eleanor, who rules Rookskill Castle, is harboring a Nazi spy. But when her classmates begin to vanish, one by one, Kat must uncover the truth about what the castle actually harbors—and who Lady Eleanor really is—before it's too late.

The dramatic story of several generations of cavers whose exciting and dangerous explorations in Kentucky's limestone labyrinths culminated in the big connection between the Flint Ridge Cave System and Mammoth Cave, forming the longest cave in the world.