From slaughters, shootouts, and massacres to maulings, lynchings, and natural disasters, Cowboys, Mountain Men, and Grizzly Bears cuts to the chase of what draws people to the history and literature of the Wild West. Matthew P. Mayo, noted author of Western novels, takes the fifty wildest episodes in the region's history and presents them in one action-packed volume. Set on the plains, mountains, and deserts of the West, and arranged chronologically,...

Eva Traube Abrams, a semi-retired librarian in Florida, is shelving books one morning when her eyes lock on a photograph in a magazine lying open nearby. She freezes; it's an image of a book she hasn't seen in sixty-five years--a book she recognizes as The Book of Lost Names.

Solomon Northup (born c.1807) was an American abolitionist and author. Born free to a freed slave and a free African American woman, he was a professional violinist, farmer and landowner until he was offered a job as a musician in Washington D.C., where he was drugged and kidnapped by slavers. He was sold to a painter in New Orleans and remained in bondage for 12 years until a Canadian plantation worker alerted the authorities in New York. He was...