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Great American Websites: An Online Discovery of a Hidden America

Computers & Technology

Renehan, Edward

Web Development & Design

McGraw-Hill/Osborne Media

<div>The name Charles Stewart Mott is today most widely recognizable when used in connection with the word Foundation. Established by the General Motors mogul in 1926, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation has made grants in excess of $3 billion over the past nine decades, both in Mott's adopted hometown of Flint, Michigan, and around the world. But philanthropy is only one reason the life of Mott--entrepreneur, industrialist, banker, mayor, and sometimes even cowboy--is worth knowing about today. Mott was born ten years after the death of Abraham Lincoln and one year before the 1876 centennial of the founding of the United States. He not only lived through the most dramatic technological shift and period of economic growth that had yet been known, but he actively participated in and contributed to these events as a major innovator and leader at General Motors, as a public official, and as a philanthropist who in many ways reinvented the nonprofit model. Known widely as Mr. Flint, Mott was elected three times as the city's mayor and played a central role in modernizing and expanding its infrastructure and institutions. In office, Mott helped transform Flint from a town capable of efficiently accommodating a population of roughly thirteen thousand in the first decade of the twentieth century to a modern metropolis capable of hosting an industrial middle class of more than one hundred thousand. This vivid biography portrays a complex, brilliant, often contradictory, and ultimately fascinating man. His life--both as a record of himself and as a reflection of his times--makes for a good and important story that will be enjoyed by readers interested in Michigan history and politics, the automotive industry, and global philanthropy.</div>

The Life of Charles Stewart Mott: Industrialist, Philanthropist, Mr. Flint

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN REGIONAL

"Excellent, a truly enjoyable and informative read." - STEVE BUSCEMI, actor/director "Edward Renehan does a great job of shining a light into this dark episode of American history." - BILLY BRAGG "I loved this book ... Bravo!" - JULIE GARFIELD, daughter of blacklisted screen-actor John Garfield "Fascinating, surprising, moving, inspiring." - ARTHUR GOLDWAG, author of THE NEW HATE: A HISTORY OF FEAR AND LOATHING ON THE POPULIST RIGHT Blacklists. Political witch-hunts. Congressional inquisitions. Loyalty oaths. And one brave banjo-wielding patriot willing to risk prison and professional ruin rather than acquiesce ... "Pete [was] blacklisted during the McCarthy era and had a hard time, but he never stopped." - BOB DYLAN "I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked ...." - PETE SEEGER, testifying before the House Select Committee on Un-American Activities, August 1955

Pete Seeger vs. The Un-Americans: A Tale of the Blacklist

Arts & Literature

New Street Communications, LLC

One of the most famous moments of the Sixties - and one which continues to this day to be grossly misconstrued, mistold, and loaded with undeserved meaning - is the night in July of 1965 when Bob Dylan played an electric set (or at least tried to play an electric set) at the Newport Folk Festival: an event after which, supposedly, the culture of the Sixties was never quite the same again. Even Dylan's most pre-eminent chronicler Sean Wilentz has mischaracterized this evening as the night when “[Alan] Lomax along with Pete Seeger led the old guard that objected to the blasts of white-boy electricity, including Dylan's.” Seeger biographer David Dunaway speaks of Dylan understanding that at Newport “the electric guitar meant a declaration of war” and that, intensely ambitious, he sought publicity by smuggling “rock into the citadel of folk music.” In this narrative, battle lines were drawn, a fight waged, and a revolution begun. The over-simplification is too attractive to resist. Our tribal memory absolutely yearns for Dylan's abbreviated, 15-minute performance to be a pivot point not just from acoustic to electric, but also from traditional to commercial, from topical to cynical, and from roots to revolution. We also want Newport to be a “citadel of folk music,”and to be comfortable with any number of other safe, easy assumptions. For this symbology to work, however, we need an “old guard” to rebel against, and a youthful “new guard” to do the rising up. We also need to believe that traditional acoustic music cannot be (and was not at that time already) commercial, that electric music can never be traditional, that electric music is always commercial, that the Newport Fest (only a few years old) represented some sort of “hallowed ground” of acoustic music, and that various other straight lines apply. They don't. In this book, critically-acclaimed author Edward Renehan examines how and why.

Dylan at Newport, 1965: Music, Myth, and Un-Meaning

Arts & Photography

Music

Now filmed as The Mercy starring Colin Firth &amp; Rachel Weisz Windcheck Magazine (Nov/Dec 2016): Absorbing and insightful ... utterly unforgettable. Practical Sailor (Jan 2017): Adds a new depth of storytelling to a tale of madness that many sailors are familiar with. Points East Magazine (July 2017): Crowhurst made his own bed, and unfortunately he lay in it, too. He flew too close to the sun, and his story done right, as it is in Desperate Voyage, never grows old. Praise from Steven Callahan, New York Times bestselling author of Adrift: Desperate Voyage provides readers precious insights through concentration on the backstory and how Crowhurst's basic personality drove him inexorably towards disaster, and like a dangerous vortex, dragged his family, friends, and supporters into his sphere. ... Simply fascinating. More Praise: Ed Renehan's Desperate Voyage, the retelling of Donald Crowhurst's tragic voyage during the 1968/69 Golden Globe Race, is a finely honed account of what has become offshore sailing's most enduring story. Drawing on an array of sources, Renehan's Crowhurst is Shakespearean: narcissistic and reviled but also sympathetic, a flawed human consumed by ambition. Although I've known this story forever, Renehan's fresh, haunting narrative had me hoping for a new ending, a better outcome this time around. Alas, it's not to be. You just keep reading until it breaks your heart. - John Kretschmer, author of Sailing a Serious Ocean, At the Mercy of the Sea, Flirting With Mermaids, and Cape Horn to Starboard Edward Renehan’s Desperate Voyage is incisive, haunting, and absorbing. For those, like me, initially unfamiliar with this great sea drama, it is a perfect introduction to the story of Donald Crowhurst and the Golden Globe Race of 1968. Crowhurst is flawed and complicated, a tragic and captivating figure, and Renehan’s retelling, Shakespearean in scope, is wonderfully crafted and endlessly fascinating. - William Boyle, author of the critically-acclaimed Gravesend and Death Don’t Have No Mercy On a dismal day at the end of October, 1968, a weekend sailor by the name of Donald Crowhurst set out from England in a flimsy trimaran, hoping to win the London Sunday Times "Golden Globe" race and become the first solo sailor to circumnavigate the world nonstop. His was an exercise in over-arching ambition, delusion, and tragedy such as the world has seldom known. Before it was over, the world media would be subject to a fraud of enormous proportions, and Crowhurst would die a madman in the middle of the Atlantic. What he left behind was a shattered boat, a shattered family, and this incredible story. Includes exclusive photos by Eric Loss. Further illustrations by Tricia Highsmith.

Desperate Voyage: Donald Crowhurst, The London Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, and the Tragedy of Teignmouth Electron

Sports & Outdoors

Water Sports

"John is so calm, so poised, so much at home with himself, so much a familiar spirit of the forests," wrote Walt Whitman of his friend, the naturalist and writer John Burroughs. "He is a child of the woods, fields, hills - native to them in a rare sense (in a sense almost a miracle)." Henry James called Burroughs "a more humorous, more available and more sociable Thoreau. James wrote that "the minuteness of Burroughs's observation, the keenness of his perception, give him a real originality, and his sketches have a delightful oddity, vivacity, and freshness." Burroughs was born in 1837, the same year that Henry Thoreau graduated from Harvard. Along with Thoreau and John Muir, he was one of the nineteenth century's most popular and preeminent nature writers. In the course of his long life, Burroughs authored more than twenty-eight books on natural history and literature. Writing during the increasingly industrial decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Burroughs stayed constant to the transcendental message of his idols - Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. During what Mark Twain called the "faithless" era of the Gilded Age, Burroughs urged his readers to go to the woods to develop a relationship with nature that did not "vulgarize it and rob it of its divinity." In this outstanding new book - the first full biography of John Burroughs to be published since 1925 - Edward J Renehan, Jr. draws on a wealth of previously unpublished manuscripts, journals, and letters to reveal the life of the dean of American nature writers. Renehan describes Burroughs's relationships with some of the most notable figures of his time, including Jay Gould, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Edison, John Muir, E. H. Harriman, Andrew Carnegie, Oscar Wilde and especially Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Ford, with whom he developed complicated and enduring friendships.

John Burroughs: An American Naturalist

Chelsea Green Pub. Co

This title is the ideal companion, providing even the veteran programmer with valuable resources.

1001 Programming Resources

Programming Languages

Jamsa Pr

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Books by Renehan, Edward