Southern High

I love watching chemicals bond, but I avoid the practice myself. When I'm not teaching, I'm hanging out with my cat and putting together puzzles. I shy away from romantic entanglements because I know firsthand the collateral damage they cause. Until I bump into Anton and Sebastian: best friends, business partners, and former wrestling superstars at South Rock High who could barely pass my class. Catching up turns into drinking, which turns into dancing, which turns into them practicing wrestling moves on me, sans clothing.

This documentary records the events of the most celebrated mutiny in the annals of the sea: the 1789 revolt against Captain William Bligh in the West Indies. Was Bligh a sadistic disciplinarian who terrorized his crew? Or a superb and misunderstood seaman? Over 200 years later, the controversy surrounding this legendary captain still rages. The truth may lie in this narrative based on the ship’s log, in which Bligh writes of the resentful crew, ravaging storms, and uncharted islands that led to mutiny.

Ethan Wate used to think of Gatlin, the small Southern town he had always called home, as a place where nothing ever changed. Then he met mysterious newcomer Lena Duchannes, who revealed a secret world that had been hidden in plain sight all along. A Gatlin that harbored ancient secrets beneath its moss-covered oaks and cracked sidewalks.

Ask any self-respecting Louisianan who makes the best gumbo and the answer is universal: "Momma." The product of a melting pot of culinary influences, gumbo, in fact, reflects the diversity of the people who cooked it up: French aristocrats, West Africans in bondage, Cajun refugees, German settlers, Native Americans-all had a hand in the pot. What is it about gumbo that continues to delight and nourish so many? And what explains its spread around the world? A seasoned journalist, Ken Wells sleuths out the answers.

In one month, I turn thirty-five with my virginity still intact. Is there anything more embarrassing than knowing most of my French students have gotten more action than me? Je suis triste. When I accidentally reveal this secret to my close friend and co-worker Seamus, South Rock's baseball coach, he offers to help me round the bases. It has to be a joke, because Seamus is one million percent straight. There's no way he'd want to fool around with a chubby language nerd like me, even though I've harbored a secret crush on him since the day he first walked into the teachers' lounge.

Building on her critically acclaimed novel The Last Days of California and her biting collection Always Happy Hour, Miller slyly transports listeners to her unapologetic corner of the South - this time, Biloxi, Mississippi, home to 63-year-old Louis McDonald, Jr. His wife of 37 years left him, his father has passed - and he has impulsively retired from his job in anticipation of an inheritance check that may not come. One day, he stops at a house advertising free dogs and meets overweight mixed-breed Layla.

The smog beast wafted into downtown Los Angeles on July 26, 1943. Nobody knew what it was. Secretaries rubbed their eyes. Traffic cops seemed to disappear in the mysterious haze. Were Japanese saboteurs responsible? A reckless factory? The truth was much worse - it came from within, from Southern California's burgeoning car-addicted, suburban lifestyle. Smogtown is the story of pollution, progress, and how an optimistic people confronted the epic struggle against airborne poisons barraging their hometowns.

The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.

In July 1776 a pair of Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de Escalante, were charged by the governor of New Mexico with discovering a route across the unknown Southwest to the new Spanish colony in California. They had other goals as well, some of them secret: converting the indigenous natives along the way to the true faith, discovering a semi-mythical paradise known as Teguayo, hunting for sources of gold and silver, and paving the way for Spanish settlements from Santa Fe to Monterey. In strict terms, the expedition failed.

Descendants of a prominent slaveholding family, Elizabeth, Grace, and Katharine Lumpkin grew up in a culture of white supremacy. But while Elizabeth remained a lifelong believer, her younger sisters chose vastly different lives. Seeking their fortunes in the North, Grace and Katharine reinvented themselves as radical thinkers whose literary works and organizing efforts brought the nation's attention to issues of region, race, and labor. In Sisters and Rebels, National Humanities Award-winning historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall follows the divergent paths of the Lumpkin sisters.

For nearly 80 years, a huge portion of coastal South Africa was closed off to the public. With many of its pits now deemed "overmined" and abandoned, American journalist Matthew Gavin Frank sets out across the infamous Diamond Coast to investigate an illicit trade that supplies a global market. Immediately, he became intrigued by the ingenious methods used in facilitating smuggling - particularly, the illegal act of sneaking carrier pigeons onto mine property, affixing diamonds to their feet, and sending them into the air.

In the heart of Blue, a small town with big secrets, Ladybug faces the unimaginable. Her world shatters when her mother, the vibrant and loving Sophie, is found lifeless on the side of the road, leaving behind whispers of scandal and a family torn apart by grief. “Ladybug” by Crystal Senter-Brown is a poignant tale of loss, identity, and the search for truth. As Ladybug grapples with her mother’s sudden death, she must navigate the complexities of her own self-image, the weight of community judgment, and the mystery surrounding her father’s actions on that fateful night. With a ...

The unlikely man at the roiling center of this intrigue was Robert Bunch, an American-born Englishman who had maneuvered his way to the position of British consul in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew to loathe slavery and the righteousness of its practitioners. Bunch used his unique perch and boundless ambition to become a key player, sending reams of dispatches to the home government and eventually becoming the Crown's best secret source on the Confederacy.

Previous accounts of the fall of the Inca empire have played up the importance of the events of one violent day in November 1532 at the highland Andean town of Cajamarca. To some, the "Cajamarca miracle" - in which Francisco Pizarro and a small contingent of Spaniards captured an Inca who led an army numbering in the tens of thousands - demonstrated the intervention of divine providence. To others, the outcome was simply the result of European technological and immunological superiority.

A book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Denmark Vesey's Garden reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the heart of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the US slave population stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof shot nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection.

After her student was murdered for his grandfather's 1885 diary, a Professor of Archeology works with a Texas Ranger to find the killer and recover gold from a lost mine. They have a copy of the diary given to her by the deceased student. Their quest is complicated by the cryptic nature of the diary and the changes in the referenced landmarks since 1885.

♥The Bakery Romance Series ♥ He's blind... She's a victim... Blind since birth, Carl Warner is devastated after his girlfriend rejects his marriage proposal. As he struggles to deal with his pain he encounters Miriam Beech via a local food ministry. A victim, Miriam is healing from a recent trauma. She finds solace working in her bakery. She’s determined to raise her teenaged daughter, Jessica, in a wholesome environment. When problems with Jessica arise Miriam asks God for direction. Jessica deals with her pain best as she can. Unattractive, she's always felt insufficient when ...

In a suburban LA neighborhood, neighbors keep wary distance and at times collide, propelled by desire, fury, and mischief. Precocious Korean-American sisters Mira and Rosemary find their world rocked by a suicide; a charismatic and creepy drama teacher grooms his students; an aging gay horror novelist fights loneliness; and a white mother and her adopted Vietnamese daughter deal with lifelong anger issues.

In 1979 the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith withdrew Hans Kung's missio canonica. Pope Paul VI approved the censure saying, "We are obligated to declare that in his writings he fell short of integrity and the truth of the Catholic faith." Through a 1980 agreement with the Vatican, Kung is now permitted to teach, but only under secular auspices. In this acclaimed Modern Library Chronicle, Kung examines the Catholic Church through its many reformations, focusing on the people and events...

It is 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People". His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian.