Fergus M. Bordewich

No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach is a book by Anthony Bourdain and a companion to the television show of the same name. The book serves as a scrap book of the previous three seasons of the television show and has extensive photographs of Bourdain and his crew at work filming the series.

With a historian's grasp of events and a novelist's ear for story, Fergus M. Bordewich has written a grand epic of American history — focusing on the sixty years leading up to the Civil War, which brought to a climax the country's bitter division. But its beginnings can be traced to a clandestine alliance of both black and white abolitionists and slaves, who joined forces to lead tens of thousands of enslaved Americans to freedom in a movement that occupies a legendary place in the nation's imagination, but about which little has been known until now.

"In 1962, at the age of fourteen, Fergus Bordewich's life was shattered when his mother attempted to jump off a runaway horse and fell under the galloping hooves of the horse he was riding. Crouching beside her in a gathering pool of blood, he fought his mounting fear, convincing himself that she would be fine. But an hour later, in the hospital waiting room, he and his father listened in shock as the doctor told them that she was dead on arrival. At that moment, he thought to himself, I've killed my mother.". "So begins My Mother's Ghost, Fergus M. Bordewich's attempt to come to terms with the catastrophic effects of his mother's death. For all practical purposes, his childhood was over. His mother, a tough and fiercely independent woman far ahead of her times, had been the dominant figure not just in his family, but, as the executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, a confidant of senators, congressmen, and tribal leaders. And Fergus had been the son she doted on. Her death destroyed what was left of his family, and sent him into a downward spiral of guilt and despair, as his father retreated further into alcoholism and silence. By the age of twenty-seven, Bordewich himself was close to suicide." "More than thirty years later, and by now a father himself, he began a search for the real woman behind his mother's ghost."--BOOK JACKET.

In the face of the current, highly romanticized view of Native Americans, Killing the White Man's Indian bravely confronts our myths and misconceptions to reveal the realities of tribal life today. Following two centuries of broken treaties and virtual extermination of the "savage red man," Americans have recast Native Americans into another equally stereotyped role, that of eternal victims, politically powerless and weakened by poverty and alcoholism, yet whose spiritual ties with the natural world form the last, best hope of salvaging our natural environment and ennobling our souls. What will surprise many Americans, however, is that a virtual revolution is under way in Indian Country, from New England to Florida, and from New York to the Pacific Northwest. It is an upheaval of epic proportions: for the first time in generations, Indians are shaping their own destinies largely outside the control of whites, reinventing Indian education and justice, and exploiting the principle of tribal sovereignty in ways that empower tribal government far beyond most Americans' imaginations - posing profound challenges to regional economies, and both state and local governments. Based on four years of research on tribal reservations, and written without a hidden political bias or agenda, Killing the White Man's Indian takes on Native American politics and policies today in all their contradictory - and controversial - guises.

When he accidentally discovers a beautiful hidden valley inhabited by contented people, a fisherman is asked to return but only if he tells no one where he's been.

In this work, the author, a biographer provides a portrait of the father of our nation, dashing forever the stereotype of a stolid, unemotional man, and revealing an astute and surprising portrait of a canny political genius who knew how to inspire people.

The spellbinding story behind the longest debate in U.S. Senate history: the Compromise of 1850, which brought together Senate luminaries on the eve of the Civil War in a desperate effort to save the Union

From the Introduction... As Congress assembled that dank and chilly spring of 1789, the world seemed new, and Americans felt in their hearts that they stood at the dawn of a new epoch. “All ranks & degrees of men seemed to be actuated by one common impulse, to fill the galleries as soon as the doors of the House of Representatives were opened for the first time,” recalled an elderly James Kent, who as an enthralled child had watched the Congress's first stirrings. “I considered it to be a proud & glorious day, the consummation of our wishes; & that I was looking upon an organ of popular will, just beginning to breathe the Breath of Life, & which might in some future age, much more truly than the Roman Senate, be regarded as ‘the refuge of nations.' ”

The American Civil War was the first ever to be fought with railroads moving troops and the telegraph connecting civilian leadership to commanders in the field. New developments arose at a moment's notice. As a result, the young nation's political structure and culture often struggled to keep up. When war began, Congress was not even in session. By the time it met, the government had mobilized over 100,000 soldiers, battles had been fought, casualties had been taken, some civilians had violently opposed the war effort, and emancipation was underway. This set the stage for Congress to play catch-up for much of the conflict. The result was an ongoing race to pass new laws and set policies. Throughout it all, Congress had to answer to a fractured and demanding public. In Congress and the People's Contest, Paul Finkelman and Donald R. Kennon have assembled some of the nation's finest scholars of American history and law to tease apart the fraught interactions between Congress and the American people as they navigated a cataclysmic and unprecedented war. Displaying a variety and range of focus that will make the book a classroom must, the essays here show how these interactions took place-sometimes successfully, and sometimes less so.

Against the dazzling backdrop of medieval Venice and the Orient unfolds this opulent tale of exotic adventure of treasure beyond imagining -- and a love story that became a legend. Nothing in Diego's life had prepared him for what he found when he followed Marco Polo to the mysterious East. There, in the vast domain of Kublai Khan, he met the most beautiful girl he had ever seen -- Lotus Flower, whose strange eyes captured his very soul and nearly made him forget the riches he had come to claim. But Lotus Flower would not be Diego's without a struggle, for she was desired by the great Khan himself . . .