Town Politics

A look at how commercialization has transformed youth sports from fun into a heavily commercialized and profitable venture. Examining the youth sports economy from many sides - the major corporations, the small entrepreneurs, the coaches, the parents, and, of course, the kids - Hyman probes the reasons for rapid changes in what gets bought and sold in this lucrative marketplace. He reveals the effects on kids and profiles the individuals and communities bucking this destructive trend of commercialization.

Early one morning in the summer of 1999, authorities in the tiny West Texas town of Tulia began a roundup of suspected drug dealers. By the time the sweep was done, over 40 people had been arrested and one of every five black adults in town was behind bars, all accused of dealing cocaine to the same undercover officer, Tom Coleman.

In the summer of 1860, more than 50 years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women.

A cursed violin, a witch with a shattered past, and the enemy sworn to silence her magic. Isadora Valen hides her power behind sugared pastries and enchantments whispered into the crust. But when forbidden magic flares during the Veil Festival, she’s marked by the realm’s most sacred relic—and by the man ordered to destroy her. Lachlan Daeven is a royal warden bound by duty and scarred by betrayal. Hunting rogue mages is what he does best. But when Isadora’s magic intertwines with his own, a soulbond sparks—violent, undeniable, and impossible to sever. She’s a fugitive with a ...

Follow 39-year-old veteran Mark Landry as he returns home, having retired from an American government black ops unit. In a small town north of Boston with a rich history, Landry finds that the only girl he has ever loved, Luci Alvarez, is now an extraordinary policewoman at the precarious center of a community's struggles with change, amid a powder keg of fear and paranoia not seen since colonial times.

On a November night in 1990, Cathy Robertson is murdered in her home outside Chillicothe, Missouri. After law enforcement conduct a haphazard investigation, the sheriff’s office puts the case in the hands of a Kansas City private eye with his own agenda. In a close-knit town still reeling from the aftereffects of the farming crisis, friends and neighbors abruptly fracture into opposing camps. Mark Woodworth, a Robertson family neighbor, eventually receives four life sentences for a crime that a growing group of local supporters believe he didn’t commit.

Dewey's Nine Lives offers nine funny, inspiring, and heartwarming stories about cats - all told from the perspective of "Dewey's Mom", librarian Vicki Myron. The amazing felines in this audiobook include Dewey, of course, whose further never-before-told adventures are shared, and several others Vicki found out about when their owners reached out to her.

In The Other Side of the River, his eagerly awaited new book, Kotlowitz takes us to southern Michigan. Here, separated by the St. Joseph River, are two towns, St. Joseph and Benton Harbor. Geographically close, they are worlds apart, a living metaphor for America's racial divisions: St. Joseph is a prosperous lakeshore community and 95 percent white, while Benton Harbor is impoverished and 92 percent black. When the body of a black teenaged boy from Benton Harbor is found in the river, unhealed wounds and suspicions between the two towns' populations surface as well.

In The Company Town, Hardy Green, who has covered American business for over a decade, offers a compelling analysis of the emergence of these communities and their role in shaping the American economy, beginning in the country's earliest years....

The Constant Gardener (Abridged): The beautiful Tessa Quayle is murdered near Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya, the birthplace of mankind. And her putative African lover and travelling companion has vanished from the scene of the crime. Tessa’s husband, a career diplomat and amateur gardener at the British High Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. On his way he meets terror, violence and conspiracy, but his greatest discovery is the woman he barely had time to love.

In the fall of 1973, the Greek oil shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, husband of President John F. Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and arguably the richest man in the world, proposed to build an oil refinery on the New Hampshire coast, in the town of Durham. But three women vehemently opposed the project. Small Town, Big Oil is the story of how the residents of Durham, led by three women, out-organized, out-witted, and out-maneuvered the governor, media, and Onassis cartel to hand the powerful Greek billionaire the most humiliating defeat of his business career.

Art critics can KILL a career but MURDERING the ARTIST??!! Deception and secrecy permeate the intricate tapestry of Tumblebrook’s past revealing hidden agendas and veiled vendettas. But when the town's revered coppersmith is discovered dead, whisperings of mystery eclipse the fall festival celebration. A perceptive innkeeper, Amelia Farnsworth trades guest registers for crime-solving when her cozy sanctuary becomes the epicenter of intrigue. Supported by her clever feline companion, Lady Grey, and the lively Clara, Amelia delves into the enigma surrounding the coppersmith’s death. ...

After covering racial unrest in the remote northwest corner of his home state of Nebraska in 1999, journalist Stew Magnuson returned four years later to consider the larger questions of its peoples, their paths, and the forces that separate them. Examining Raymond Yellow Thunder’s death at the hands of four White men in 1972, Magnuson looks deep into the past that gave rise to the tragedy. Situating long-ranging repercussions within 130 years of context, he also recounts the largely forgotten struggles of American Indian Movement activist Bob Yellow Bird.

Discover a different kind of small-town detective in the debut novel of the Sean Colbeth Investigates series. How well do you know the people close to you – really, truly, know them? That’s the question Police Chief Sean Colbeth finds himself asking when a local university professor living in the small seaside village of Windeport, Maine is found dead in the bed of his late-model powder blue pickup truck, surrounded by five-gallon jugs of water. While it’s clear he’s been shot, there’s no bullet, no gun, and no clear reason why the geriatric head of the Extension Service would be ...

Raymond Unwin was a prominent architect and engineer from the late 19th and early 20th century. He helped popularize the Arts and Crafts movement and was one of the first English voices in the town planning movement. Town Planning in Practice was published in 1909 and still resonates with planners and urban designers today. It reflects on discussions that are still happening to this day including the design of buildings, plots of land, and neighborhood streets.

There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child – the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land’s End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn’t seem like a place that would welcome strangers. Before long, however, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour.

Two years have passed since the events that no one wants to think about. Everyone has tried to move on, but there’s something about this place that prevents it. The residents continue to grapple with life’s big questions: What is a family? What is a community? And what, if anything, are we willing to sacrifice in order to protect them? As the locals of Beartown struggle to overcome the past, great change is on the horizon. Someone is coming home after a long time away.

Fall is bursting out all over Vermont, and while the rest of the Congress enjoys its recess, Senator Bernie Sanders has returned to his beloved home state for a weekend of events in Eagle Creek, “America’s #1 Leaf Peeping Destination.” It’s up to intern and Eagle Creek native Crash Robertson to keep the senator on schedule—and out of trouble. Crash’s hopes for a quiet homecoming are dashed, however, when the lifeless body of a community banker with ties to “Big Maple” is found in Lake Champlain.

Over the past several years, Hardwick, Vermont, a typical hardscrabble farming community of three thousand residents, has jump-started its economy and redefined its self-image through a local, self-sustaining food system unlike anything else in America.

The ruins of Pompeii, buried by an explosion of Vesuvius in 79 CE, offer the best evidence we have of everyday life in the Roman empire. This remarkable book rises to the challenge of making sense of those remains, as well as exploding many myths: the very date of the eruption, probably a few months later than usually thought, or the hygiene of the baths that must have been hotbeds of germs, or the legendary number of brothels, most likely only one, or the massive death count, maybe less than 10 per cent of the population.