Alan Weisman
Description
Alan H. Weisman, an American author, professor, and journalist, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He holds a bachelor's degree in literature and a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. From 2004 to 2013 he was Laureate Professor in Journalism and Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona. He has also taught writing and journalism at Prescott College and Williams College and has been a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia. He has written several books and won numerous international awards for his work in journalism and literature. His reports from around the world have appeared in leading magazines, and in several anthologies. He is also a producer of radio documentaries for Homelands Productions, creating reports for National Public Radio and American Public Media. Source: Wikipedia
Books
Countdown
A petty thief and a convicted murderer find themselves entangled in a deadly reality TV game and a heart-pounding attraction for each other.
Lone Star
An Echo in My Blood
"As a child, award winning journalist Alan Weisman had often heard his father tell the family legend of how Communists murdered his grandfather in the Ukraine. But years later, he meets a long-estranged uncle who recounts a very different version. His search to determine the truth leads Weisman from his Minnesota boyhood to Chernobyl and finally back to the monstrous pogroms of the Russian Revolution. On the way, he learns that many of his family's stories have been altered, and discovers a universal reality: that all immigrant families, in order to survive in a new world, must create protective myths like the one that hides the true fate of his grandfather."--BOOK JACKET. "While unraveling his own tangled heritage, Weisman's work for a National Public Radio series titled Vanishing Homelands introduces him to a new generation of immigrants wrenched from their native soil, all desperate to reinvent themselves. These encounters become a resonant counterpoint to Weisman's personal search. His often harrowing adventures in places like rebel-torn Colombia and even under Antarctica's ozone hole strangely begin to echo his father's saga through turn-of-the-century Russia, the Depression, World War II, and the McCarthy era. Ultimately, they help to reveal his family's truth, and show how history - and secrets - echo through generations."--BOOK JACKET.
Gaviotas
In 1971, a group of Colombian visionaries and technicians, reasoning that surging populations must someday learn to inhabit even the world's harshest regions, decided to prove they could thrive in one of the most brutal environments on earth: their country's barren, rain-leached eastern savannas. For nearly three decades the scientists, artisans, rural peasants, ex-urban street kids, and Guahibo Indians living in the village called Gaviotas have elevated phrases like sustainable development and appropriate technology from cliche to reality. Sixteen hours from the nearest major city, they invented windmills light enough to convert mild tropical breezes into energy, solar collectors that work in the rain, soil-free systems to raise edible and medicinal crops, solar "kettles" to sterilize drinking water, and ultra-efficient pumps to tap deep aquifers - pumps so easy to operate, they're hooked up to childrens' seesaws. The United Nations named the village a model for the developing world. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has called Paolo Lugari the "inventor of the world." The story of Gaviotas, a village alchemizing peace and prosperity in a stricken land, will change the way you think about that world.
Tales of Terror and Detection (Ms. Found in a Bottle / Mystery of Marie Roget / Oblong Box / Purloined Letter / William Wilson)
Ms. Found in a Bottle Mystery of Marie Roget Oblong Box [Purloined Letter]( [William Wilson](
The world without us
Mel is tormented by thoughts that she may be responsible for her best friend's suicide attempt.