West Academic

Tired of the pace and noise of life near London and longing for a better place to raise their young children, Mary J. MacLeod and her husband, George, encountered their dream while vacationing on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides. Enthralled by its windswept beauty, they soon were the proud and startled owners of a near-derelict croft house - a farmer’s stone cottage - on “a small acre” of land. Mary assumed duties as the island’s district nurse.

Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of the Southwest Indian tribes. This classic work is a penetrating and insightful study of the Powell’s career, from the beginning of the Powell Survey, in which Powell and his men famously became the first to descend the Colorado River, to his eventual expulsion from the Geological Survey.

It Began with a Dream is the story of Dr. Gladys B. West, who played an integral role in the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS) as a mathematician with navy. Born in 1930, in the poor farming community of Sutherland, Virginia, she rose from poverty despite segregation, The Great Depression, and Jim Crow laws to become one of the first professional black women hired at the Dahlgren Naval Proving Grounds in Virginia (now Dahlgren Surface Naval Warfare Center). Dr. West takes us on her incredible life journey in this heartwarming and unforgettable memoir.

Once upon Atari is an intimate view into the dramatic rise and fall of the early video game industry, and how it shaped the life of one of its key players. This book offers eye-opening details and insights delivered in a creative style that mirrors the industry it reveals. An innovative work from one of the industry’s original innovators.

This book equips social work students with the tools to develop a social work identity. It provides a critical examination of the knowledge base of social work – from human growth and development to social work research – and explores how a practitioner's own values, principles and experience combine to shape their social work identity and practice alongside this.

Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, the award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists - from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches - braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West. What is the future of a region beset by droughts and fires, by fracking and drilling?

Between 1800 and 1920, an extraordinary cast of bold innovators and entrepreneurs - individuals such as Cyrus McCormick, Brigham Young, Henry Wells and James Fargo, Fred Harvey, Levi Strauss, Adolph Coors, J. P. Morgan, and Buffalo Bill Cody - helped lay the groundwork for what we now call the American West. They were people of imagination and courage, adept at maneuvering the rapids of change, alert to opportunity, persistent in their missions.

George Bird Grinnell, the son of a New York merchant, saw a different future for a nation in the thrall of the Industrial Age. With railroads scarring virgin lands and the formerly vast buffalo herds decimated, the country faced a crossroads: Could it pursue Manifest Destiny without destroying its natural bounty and beauty? The alarm that Grinnell sounded would spark America's conservation movement. Yet today his name has been forgotten - an omission that John Taliaferro's commanding biography now sets right with historical care and narrative flair.

How do we come by our worldviews and philosophies? What impact did Christianity have on the worldviews that are common to Western civilization? Why You Think the Way You Do traces the development of the worldviews that underpin the Western world. Professor and historian Glenn S. Sunshine...

Appetite for America is the incredible real-life story of Fred Harvey - told in depth for the first time ever. As a young immigrant, Fred Harvey worked his way up from dishwasher to household name. With the verve and passion of Fred Harvey himself, Stephen Fried tells the story of how this visionary built his business from a single lunch counter into a family empire whose marketing and innovations we still encounter in myriad ways. Inspiring, instructive, and hugely entertaining, Appetite for America is historical biography that is as richly rewarding.

Longtime fly fisherman Quinn Grover had contemplated the “why” of his fishing identity before, more recently, becoming focused on the “how” of it. He realized he was a dedicated fly fisherman, in large part, because public lands and public waterways in the West made it possible. In Wilderness of Hope Grover recounts his fly-fishing experiences with a strong evocation of place, connecting those experiences to the ongoing national debate over public lands.

The Mianzi Code is a strategic guide to thriving at an American university—academically, socially, and professionally—by mastering the unspoken rules that shape status, trust, and opportunity. You already know how to work hard. But in the U.S., success isn’t driven by effort alone. It’s driven by how clearly you communicate value, how confidently you participate, and how effectively you build relationships—often in ways that feel unfamiliar (or even uncomfortable) to students raised in Chinese cultural norms. This book helps you translate your strengths into the American context ...

‘The people generally are out for a Republic and they propose to get it.’ – County Inspector RIC, West Galway, July 1920 The period 1913–22 witnessed extraordinary upheaval in Irish society. The Easter Rising of 1916 facilitated the emergence of new revolutionary forces and the eruption of guerrilla warfare. In Galway and elsewhere in the west, the new realities wrought by World War One saw the emergence of a younger generation of impatient revolutionaries. In 1916, Liam Mellows led his Irish Volunteers in a Rising in east Galway and up to 650 rebels took up defensive positions at ...

In Custody MD: Fighting for the Woo, Dr. Adwoafuaa Nwokocha delivers a raw, gripping memoir chronicling her descent into the high-stakes hell of family court. What begins as a love story between two med school students unravels into a devastating custody battle against her ex-husband—an elite cardiac surgeon with the money, lawyers, and manipulative tactics to weaponize the legal system. Told with vulnerability, humor, and razor-sharp clarity, this book is far more than a courtroom drama. It's a powerful indictment of how race, gender, and power intersect in modern custody disputes.

This audiobook follows the saga of more than 100 influential men and women who together wove the story of early Western frontier America. The engaging account of their lives forms a unique tapestry of human experience.

Due to horrible physical deformities, he spent much of his life as a fairground freak. He was hounded, persecuted, and starving, until his fortune changed and he was rescued, housed, and fed by the distinguished surgeon, Frederick Treves. The subject of several books, a Broadway hit, and a film, Joseph Merrick has become part of popular mythology. Here, in this fully revised edition containing much fresh information, are the true and un-romanticized facts of his life.

The magical island of Chynchin is facing conquerors from abroad and something sinister from within in this “immersive…engaging” (Kirkus Reviews) Caribbean-inspired dark fantasy from the Grand Master Award–winning author Nalo Hopkinson. Veycosi, in training as a griot (a historian and...

Jon Hunner’s concise account of Oppenheimer’s life and the emergence of an Atomic West distills a vast literature for students and general listeners. In this brisk, engaging biography, the author recounts how Oppenheimer helped locate the atomic weapons research lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and helped establish leading physics departments at the University of California–Berkeley and Caltech.

"No women need apply." These four discouraging words of admonition often greeted female physicians looking for jobs in the frontier-era West. Despite the dire need for medical help, it seemed most trappers, miners, and emigrants would rather suffer and die than be treated by a female doctor. Nevertheless dozens of highly trained women headed West, where they endured hardship and prejudice as they set broken limbs, performed operations, delivered generations of babies - and solidified a place for women in the medical field.

Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West (October 6, 1924 to January 2, 1999), Director Emeritus, Neuropsychiatric Institute, University of California at Los Angeles, was an American psychiatrist and longtime contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its Project MKUltra. Margaret Thaler Singer, Ph. D., was an Emeritus Adjunct Professor of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley. The following recording is from a 1998 conference.