Hope Takes Flight American Century Book 2

Just years before America witnessed the turn of the century, the three eldest Stuart children left their home in the hills of Arkansas to pursue their dreams in the land of opportunity. Now they are back for a family reunion at the humble home they left years ago. In an unforeseeable turn of events, their visit is cut short when Lylah and Amos are required to return to the city as the world edges closer to war. Within months they find themselves and their brother Gavin deeply involved in the war efforts, but not in the ways they had ever expected. And as the conditions in Europe worsen, they must face a startling reality: before it's all over, the war could claim the life of one of their own. Will the Stuarts survive these tumultuous times and return to their family safe and sound? Or will World War I forever change the lives they know?

As a new decade begins, the United States enters the war in Korea. From Hollywood to the Ozarks, the sons and daughters of Will and Marian Stuart are living out their dreams and living the good life. The next generation of Stuarts has everything they could possibly want. Will they continue the family's legacy of faith as they launch out to pursue dreams of their own? Book 6 of the American Century series follows several of the younger Stuarts as they cope with war, disappointment, and shattered hopes. Returning to their roots on the family farm in Arkansas, they find love and healing in unexpected ways.

It is the tumultuous 1960s: Kennedy, Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, and youth culture are on everyone's minds and lips. Prosperity and progress are undergirded with a sense of uneasiness for the Stuart family, along with the rest of the country. With a movie deal on the horizon, Bobby Stuart's star may be rising, but his descent into celebrity drug culture might be his undoing. And young love is blooming between two people who never expected it. Gilbert Morris fans will be delighted with his foray into a colorful and controversial decade. Dawn of a New Day is the final, never-before-published conclusion to the popular American Century series.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A TODAY SHOW #ReadWithJenna BOOK CLUB PICK • The unforgettable story of a daredevil female aviator determined to chart her own course in life, at any cost: an “epic trip—through Prohibition and World War II, from Montana to London to present-day Hollywood—and you’ll relish every minute” (People). After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There--after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates--and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times--collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction Winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature New York Times Bestseller Los Angeles Times Bestseller Named One of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Named a Best Book of the Year by Newsweek, The Denver Post, BuzzFeed, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly Named a "Must-Read" by Flavorwire and New York Magazine's "Vulture" Blog A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the sacred tenets of the United States Constitution, urban life, the civil rights movement, the father-son relationship, and the holy grail of racial equality—the black Chinese restaurant. Born in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens—on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles—the narrator of The Sellout resigns himself to the fate of lower-middle-class Californians: "I'd die in the same bedroom I'd grown up in, looking up at the cracks in the stucco ceiling that've been there since '68 quake." Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, he spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father's pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family's financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. All that's left is the bill for a drive-thru funeral. Fueled by this deceit and the general disrepair of his hometown, the narrator sets out to right another wrong: Dickens has literally been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment. Enlisting the help of the town's most famous resident—the last surviving Little Rascal, Hominy Jenkins—he initiates the most outrageous action conceivable: reinstating slavery and segregating the local high school, which lands him in the Supreme Court.

Taking Flight explores the emergence of commercial aviation between the world wars—and in the midst of the Great Depression—to show that the industry’s dramatic growth resulted from a unique combination of federal policy, technological innovations, and public interest in air travel. Historian M. Houston Johnson V traces the evolution of commercial flying from the US Army’s trial airmail service in the spring of 1918 to the passage of the pivotal Air Commerce Act of 1938. Johnson emphasizes the role of federal policy—particularly as guided by both Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt—to reveal the close working relationship between federal officials and industry leaders, as well as an increasing dependence on federal assistance by airline, airframe, and engine manufacturers. Taking Flight highlights the federal government’s successful efforts to foster a nascent industry in the midst of an economic crisis without resorting to nationalization, a path taken by virtually all European countries during the same era. It also underscores an important point of continuity between Hoover’s policies and Roosevelt’s New Deal (a sharp departure from many interpretations of Depression-era business history) and shows how both governmental and corporate actors were able to harness America’s ongoing fascination with flying to further a larger economic agenda and facilitate the creation of the world’s largest and most efficient commercial aviation industry. This glimpse into the golden age of flight contributes not only to the history of aviation but also to the larger history of the United States during the Great Depression and the period between the world wars.

A charismatic businessman casts a dark spell over others in this psychologically suspenseful novel by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Black Prince. Mischa Fox’s name is known throughout London, though he himself is rarely seen. Enigmatic and desired, vicious yet sympathetic, he is a model of success, wealth, and charisma. When Fox turns his entrepreneurial gaze on a small feminist magazine known as the Artemis, his intoxicating influence quickly begins to affect the lives of those involved with the paper: the fragile editor, Hunter; generous Rosa, who splits her time and affections between her brother and two other men; innocent Annette, whose journey from school to the real world ends up being more fraught than she could have foreseen; and their circle of friends and acquaintances, all of whom find themselves both drawn to and repulsed by Fox. Told with dark humor, keen wit, and intense insight into the seductive nature of power, The Flight from the Enchanter is an intricate and dazzling work of fiction from the author of The Sea, The Sea and Under the Net, “one of the most significant novelists of her generation” (The Guardian).

A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeys—and reawakens our capacity to be amazed. The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight—a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity—to the realm of the mundane. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who left academia and a career in the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to reimagine what we—both as pilots and as passengers—are actually doing when we enter the world between departure and discovery. In a seamless fusion of history, politics, geography, meteorology, ecology, family, and physics, Vanhoenacker vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries; above mountains, oceans, and deserts; through snow, wind, and rain, renewing a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity that affords us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form.