Presents nearly fifty essays by American writer Gore Vidal, spanning 1992-2000 and discussing such topics and people as Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Charles Lindbergh, the CIA, and the national security state.

On a frigid April night, a classically trained opera singer, five months pregnant, and her husband, a former marine biologist, disembark an Amtrak train in La Plata, Missouri, assemble two bikes, and pedal off into the night, bound for a homestead they've purchased, sight unseen. Meanwhile, a horticulturist, heir to the Great Migration that brought masses of African Americans to Detroit, and her husband, a product of the white flight from it, have...

Terry Tempest Williams presents a sharp-edged perspective on the ethics and politics of place, spiritual democracy, and the responsibilities of citizen engagement. By turns elegiac, inspiring, and passionate, The Open Space of Democracy offers a fresh perspective on the critical questions of our time.

"Here are eighteen stories of astonishing range and precision. A housewife drinks alone in her Connecticut living room. A guillotine glimmers above a sleepy town green. A pre-recorded customer service message sends a caller into a reverie of unspeakable yearning. With the deft touch and funhouse-mirror perspectives for which he has won countless admirers, Steven Millhauser gives us the towns, marriages, and families of a quintessential American lifestyle...

Uses the metaphor of a disease to explore how society has been affected by Americans' obsessive quest for material gain.

"In 1979, Louis Malle traveled into the heart of Minnesota to capture the everyday lives of the men and women of a prosperous farming community. He returned six years later, during Ronald Reagan's second term, to find drastic economic decline. Free of stereotypes about America's heartland, God's Country, commissioned for American public television, is a stunning work of emotional and political clarity." -- container.