homes and haunts

Archival photographs and text describe the history, buildings, social life and customs of George Washington's estate known as Mount Vernon in Virginia.

Young Rhoda enjoys visiting the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park Zoo, and other places with her beloved grandfather, the famous wildlife artist, Charles R. Knight.

Youth fiction writer Ralph Fletcher fondly recalls his childhood years in the town of Marshfield, Massachusetts, growing up with his eight siblings in a traditional Catholic family during the 1950s and 1960s.

"... examines Adolf Hitler's time in Munich between 1918 and 1926, the years when Hitler shed his awkward, feckless persona and transformed himself into a savvy opportunistic political operator who saw himself as Germany's messiah. The story of Hitler's transformation is one of a fateful match between man and city. After opportunistically fluctuating between the ideas of the left and the right, Hitler emerged as an astonishingly flexible leader of Munich's right-wing movement. The tragedy for Germany and the world was that Hitler found himself in Munich; had he not been in Bavaria in the wake of the war and the revolution, his transformation into a National Socialist may never have occurred."--Provided by publisher.

Discusses the life of Ernest Hemingway, beginning with early influences in Oak Park, Illinois, then his first job in Kansas City, and on to adventures in Italy, France, Spain, Key West, and Cuba, and reflects on those individuals and locations that inspired him, as well as the influence his critics had on his writing.

In Arles, Vincent van Gogh was seized by a dramatic passion for painting. Inspired by the lights and colors when he first arrived in this little town hundreds of miles from his native Holland in 1888, in just over a year he painted several hundred works in a frenzy of artistic activity. Van Gogh in Arles is a stirring account that reflects the hectic artistic pace of the artist's time in Arles. It describes how he achieved the pinnacle of artistic perfection, and how a constant, self-inflicted pressure took its toll, causing him to be admitted into a sanatorium.

The author provides an account of his experiences after he agreed to take a herd of "rogue" wild animals into his game reserve in South Africa that were otherwise going to be exterminated.

Tells the story of the designing and building of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater.