Search results for ""author marianne wiggins""

This poetic historical novel, set between the world wars, tells the story of an American couple and their adopted son, Lightfoot. Fos, a chemist intrigued with constellations, bioluminescence and x-rays, returns from the war in France and falls in love with Opal, the daughter of a glassblower on the Outer Banks of N.C. They move to Knoxville, where Fos and an army buddy have a photography studio, and travel to summer fairs with Fos's x-ray machine. When Opal inherits a farm on the Clinch River, they move again, and live happily with Lightfoot, who had been abandoned, until the property is claimed for a TVA dam. In 1941, Fos gets a job at the Oak Ridge Laboratory-Site X in the government's race to build the bomb. Their lives proceed from innocence and fascination with "things that glow" to the day in Aug. 1945 when the atomic bomb is dropped over Hiroshima. But when Opal falls ill with radiation poisoning, Fos's great faith in science deserts him. Marianne's writing is powerful and hypnotic, and the lives of her characters beautifully follow the arc of 20th century American life and belief.

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A National Bestseller A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 Fifteen years after the publication of Evidence of Things Unseen, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins returns with a “big, bold book” (USA TODAY) destined to be an American classic: a sweeping masterwork set during World War II about the meaning of family and the limitations of the American Dream.Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the LA Water Corporation. It is here where he and his beloved wife Lou raised their twins, Sunny and Stryker, and it is here where Rocky has mourned Lou in the years since her death. As Sunny and Stryker reach the cusp of adulthood, the country teeters on the brink of war. Stryker decides to join the fight, deploying to Pearl Harbor not long before the bombs strike. Soon, Rocky and his family find themselves facing yet another incomprehensible tragedy. Rocky is determined to protect his remaining family and the land where they’ve loved and lost so much. But when the government decides to build a Japanese American internment camp next to the ranch, Rocky realizes that the land faces even bigger threats than the LA watermen he’s battled for years. Complicating matters is the fact that the idealistic Department of the Interior man assigned to build the camp, who only begins to understand the horror of his task after it may be too late, becomes infatuated with Sunny and entangled with the Rhodes family. Properties of Thirst is a “magnificent” (Colum McCann) novel that is both universal and intimate. It is the story of a changing American landscape and an examination of one of the darkest periods in this country’s past, told through the stories of the individual loves and losses that weave together to form the fabric of our shared history. Ultimately, it is an unflinching distillation of our nation’s essence—and a celebration of the bonds of love and family that persist against all odds.

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The cowboy may well be the quintessential American icon. Robb Kendrick has been photographing cowboys for twenty-five years, creating a magnificent artistic record that recalls the work of earlier photographers such as Edward S. Curtis, whose portraits of Native Americans have become classics. Kendrick even uses an early photographic process—tintype—to create one-of-a-kind photographs whose nineteenth-century appearance underscores how little twenty-first-century cowboys' ways of working and types of gear and dress have changed since the first cowboy photographs were made more than a century ago. In Still, Robb Kendrick presents an eloquent collection of tintype cowboy photographs taken on ranches across fourteen states of the American West, as well as in British Columbia, Canada, and Coahuila, Mexico. The photographs reveal the rich variety of people who are drawn to the cowboying life—women as well as men; Native Americans, Mexican Americans, and African Americans as well as Anglos. The images also show regional variations in dress and gear, from the "taco" rolled-brim hats of Texas cowpunchers to the braided rawhide reatas of Oregon buckaroos. Marianne Wiggins, author of a recent novel about Edward S. Curtis, introduces the volume, and Jay Dusard, a photographer renowned for his cowboy images, provides the afterword. Robb Kendrick tells the backstory of the project in his photographer's notes, while also interweaving stories from the cowboys themselves among the images. Both an evocative work of art and a masterful documentary record, Still honors the resilience of modern cowboys as they bring traditional ways of living on the land into the twenty-first century.

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