Emily Carson was an elementary schoolteacher married for ten years to a real estate broker named Sam. One day Sam unexpectedly vanished. She picked up the missing person's case of her husband when local police were unable to come up with any results and they closed the file. She hired a private investigator to help her find out what happened to Sam and why. What she learned along the way about her husband's family was disturbing. He never spoke of his past or his childhood. She went on a life-altering experience in quest of solving the disappearance. She placed her life in harm's way by what she discovered and what she had to do to protect her life. From the FBI to the organized crime family of her husband, she navigated through one deception after another. She met David Kimbro and learned more about herself and how far she would go to survive.
Trial attorney Bob Steadman, 93, was inspired to write I Killed Sam, based on his ground-breaking defense of a battered woman in 1957, when most of the country accepted and supported spouse abuse. Despite the long, legal odds, the fictional attorney Bob Nichols tries a never-before-tried-strategy of positing a dual defense, which, on the surface, appears contradictory: self-defense and temporary insanity. This fictionalized account of the Flint, Michigan, trial is more than a legal trial, replete with unexpected plot turns and the drama of a young, small-town lawyer trying to juggle his obligations to his client and to his fledgling law practice. There's also romance-Nichols is in love with Betty, the defendant and his high school sweetheart whom he should never have let go. Nichols is tortured by the thought of losing his long-shot, legal gamble, which would mean forever losing Betty to a life sentence in prison.
The 19th Century in America was remarkable for many things that formed and shaped the new country that was rapidly expanding from ocean to ocean. Men like the fictional characters, Sam Ogden and Clyde Patterson had been among the first to participate in the wilderness trapping bonanza spawned by the beaver trade and the culture of the top hat. Now, it is the 1840's, and the need for beaver pelts is over. The West was about to see the first signs of a real Western migration, the Oregon Trail. Sam Ogden had invested his "wealth," from his days as a trapper, in the General Store of a southern Colorado settlement, at Grand Junction. With his wife, the Mandan woman, Little Fire, Sam has settled down and is beginning to raise a family. His reputation with the Long Rifle, the frontier Hawken rifle, followed him into the more stable life of the settlement. The Indians at the Rendezvous, started calling him "Sam Long Rifle." His partner, Clyde Patterson, a veteran of the War of 1812, and quite a bit older than "Young Sam," has also taken up life in the settlement. They both became embedded in the process of the western frontier, as it developed the first signs of what the two former trappers called disdainfully, "civilization." Grand Junction was evolving partly because of Clyde and Sam and partly despite them. In the young life of Sam Ogden, several years have gone by since the last time he decided to write down the events of his life on the frontier. During the intervening years he has fathered two children and made many new friends as part owner of the General Store at Grand Junction. In the previous volume, "Finding a Firestone," Sam has indulged in his fascination with gemstones and gold, found in the Rocky Mountain Wilderness. In this volume, called "Sam Long Rifle," he and his family are gifted with an amazing large dog, a Pyrenean Sheepdog, they named Ruffian. Also, a hunting expedition has brought an English Nobleman, John, Earl of Wickham to the territory. The Earl has hired "Sam Long Rifle" as his guide into the high Rockies. Let the adventures begin.
A revelatory, magisterial biography of Sam Shepard--the dark, rugged genius of modern American theater and film, "the poet laureate of America's emotional badlands" (Jack Kroll). Sam Shepard was a true American original. A theater and film icon who lived life on a mythic scale, Shepard became an embodiment of the fierce independence and wild freedom of the American West. Taking us from the creative explosion of downtown New York City in the 1960s to Bob Dylan's legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour, from Hollywood backlots and film shoots in the Mojave Desert to the horse ranches where Shepard went to escape it all, Robert M. Dowling's biography reveals this playwright, actor, and filmmaker as we've never known him before. In this authoritative and gripping biography, acclaimed biographer Robert M. Dowling dives into Shepard's psyche, his imagination and his soul, to craft the most comprehensive and revelatory account yet of Shepard's enduring work and tumultuous life. Ranging from Shepard's romances with icons like Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, and Jessica Lange, to his groundbreaking artistic contributions to theater and film like True West, Buried Child, The Right Stuff, Days of Heaven, and Paris, Texas, Dowling draws on previously untapped archival resources and the help of members of Shepard's family, close friends, lovers, and collaborators to place this artistic legacy in the context of the historic upheavals that compelled this extraordinary writer to so vividly record the American zeitgeist. In this biography, we see Shepard's life, and his era, in all its splendor and chaos, from the 1960s counterculture to the rise of Trumpism. Situating the facts of Shepard's spirited and darkly complex personality alongside keen analyses of Shepard's ingenious writing, this new biography couples rich storytelling with scholarly rigor to present the definitive biography of one of America's most innovative and troubled creative geniuses.
Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling author Robert Dugoni’s coming-of-age story is, according to Booklist, “a novel that, if it doesn’t cross entirely over into John Irving territory, certainly nestles in close to the border.”Sam Hill always saw the world through different eyes. Born with red pupils, he was called “Devil Boy” or Sam “Hell” by his classmates; “God’s will” is what his mother called his ocular albinism. Her words were of little comfort, but Sam persevered, buoyed by his mother’s devout faith, his father’s practical wisdom, and his two other misfit friends.Sam believed it was God who sent Ernie Cantwell, the only African American kid in his class, to be the friend he so desperately needed. And that it was God’s idea for Mickie Kennedy to storm into Our Lady of Mercy like a tornado, uprooting every rule Sam had been taught about boys and girls.Forty years later, Sam, a small-town eye doctor, is no longer certain anything was by design—especially not the tragedy that caused him to turn his back on his friends, his hometown, and the life he’d always known. Running from the pain, eyes closed, served little purpose. Now, as he looks back on his life, Sam embarks on a journey that will take him halfway around the world. This time, his eyes are wide open—bringing into clear view what changed him, defined him, and made him so afraid, until he can finally see what truly matters.Winner of Suspense Magazine’s Crimson Scribe Award.
Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling author Robert Dugoni’s coming-of-age story is, according to Booklist, “a novel that, if it doesn’t cross entirely over into John Irving territory, certainly nestles in close to the border.”Sam Hill always saw the world through different eyes. Born with red pupils, he was called “Devil Boy” or Sam “Hell” by his classmates; “God’s will” is what his mother called his ocular albinism. Her words were of little comfort, but Sam persevered, buoyed by his mother’s devout faith, his father’s practical wisdom, and his two other misfit friends.Sam believed it was God who sent Ernie Cantwell, the only African American kid in his class, to be the friend he so desperately needed. And that it was God’s idea for Mickie Kennedy to storm into Our Lady of Mercy like a tornado, uprooting every rule Sam had been taught about boys and girls.Forty years later, Sam, a small-town eye doctor, is no longer certain anything was by design—especially not the tragedy that caused him to turn his back on his friends, his hometown, and the life he’d always known. Running from the pain, eyes closed, served little purpose. Now, as he looks back on his life, Sam embarks on a journey that will take him halfway around the world. This time, his eyes are wide open—bringing into clear view what changed him, defined him, and made him so afraid, until he can finally see what truly matters.Winner of Suspense Magazine’s Crimson Scribe Award.
The first half of the nineteenth century in the American West was marked by an intense spirit of national pride and frontier determination. The politicians were the ones who stoked the flames of national pride that would eventually bring the territory of California into the American union. From the year 1803 when the Louisiana Purchase brought the entire Rocky Mountain territory under the control of the American government, men called free trappers were moving about throughout the territory and in their own way claiming it for the new owners. Their activities, and their aggression toward the Native Americans who inhabited the region, where source of conflict and violence. Where the Lewis and Clark expedition had gone through the entire Western territory all the way to the Pacific Ocean and back without engaging in open conflict with the natives, things were gradually changing in that regard. Tribes which it always thought with one another were now considering the white settlers as invaders of their territories and the danger to their ancient traditions. The men who took part in this process of expansion, and invasion, took it for granted that their Native American counterparts could not be trusted for the most part. The story is Samuel Ogden Leonard, the Mountain Man, began in eighteen twenty when he was just sixteen years old. In the summer of that year he met a consummate mountain man, Clyde Patterson, who had been a companion of one of the first, is not the first mountain man, John Coulter. After Coulter's death in the war of eighteen twelve, Patterson continued his life as a mountain man, mostly alone as a free trapper. He saw in Young Sam Ogden, not just the makings of a mountain man but the makings of a great mountain man he was fascinated with the experience that Young Sam had already had in the short time that he had spent in the Rocky mountain region. He wanted to pass on to his prot g , the skills that would make him one of the greatest mountain men to ever live. In order to do that, young Samuel had to learn the secrets that are revealed in this volume, "Winter Down."
