These eight stories deal with ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, war and its aftershocks prominent among them, where the reality is often much more surreal than fiction.

The distinctive way of life of the Southern Appalachian people has often been criticized, romanticized or derided, but rarely has it been understood. Yesterday's People, the fruit of many years' labor in the mountains, reveals the fears, anxieties, and hopes that underlie the mountaineers' way of thinking and acting, and thereby shape their relationships in family and community. First published in 1965, this book has been an indispensable guide for all who seek to study, work or live within the Appalachian culture.

The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us? “As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book." Bookpage Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.

This book is a compilation of seventy weekly sermons that follow the Lutheran Church Calendar Year. Written by Reverend Eldore F. Messerschmidt over fifty to sixty years ago, the things he discussed in his sermons back then still pertain to what is happening in our world today. Thus the name Yesterday's Sermons for Today's World. This is a great book for the shut-ins who no longer can attend weekly worship services or for the average person who needs a weekly inspirational pick-me-up.

The last 24 hours of Benny's life, told from his perspective.

Strange contradictions of Mexico's character. In Yesterday's Train, Terry Pindell brings us an odyssey through the most troubled part of the continent, witnessing for a year the roots of Mexico's current civil upheaval. And as always, he accomplishes much more than a journey, traveling straight to the restive heart of a land and its people.