This book is the first deconstruction of the Wright Brothers' myth. They were not — as we have all come to believe—two halves of the same apple. Each had a distinctive role in creating the first "flying machine."How could two misanthropic brothers who never left home, were high-school dropouts, and made a living as bicycle mechanics have figured out the secret of manned flight? This new history of the Wright Brothers' monumental accomplishment focuses on their early years of trial and error at Kitty Hawk (1900-1903) and Orville Wright's epic fight with the Smithsonian Institute and Glenn Curtis. William Hazelgrove makes a convincing case that it was Wilbur Wright who designed the first successful airplane, not Orville. He shows that, while Orville's role was important, he generally followed his brother's lead and assisted with the mechanical details to make Wilbur's vision a reality. Combing through original archives and family letters, Hazelgrove...

"There are two groups of people in the world. Really only two groups. The people who loved high school and the people who hated high school. And everyone knows what group they are in."Paul and Julie Clampet want their autistic son Toby to have a great senior year in high school. They want him to catch a winning touchdown, ride in the homecoming parade, and go to the homecoming dance. After being expelled from his high school they find a broken down school in Indianna where they hire the teachers and kids to conspire to give their son his best year ever. Funny, poignant, a comment on the times we live in, My Best Year is up there with Perotta's Election for diagramming the heartbreak and triumph that is high school.

The Pitcher, is a classic story of baseball, the price of dreams, and the lessons of life. A mythic baseball story about a broken down World Series Pitcher is mourning over the death of his wife and an underprivileged Mexican-American boy who lives across the street and wants to learn to pitch.

When the sixteen year old daughter of a prominent attorney is raped in a woodshed and a logger found shot the next morning, Deputy Sheriff Reuger London becomes embroiled in a war between environmentalists, the Ojibwa Indians fighting for their timber rights, and the ruthless son of a powerful logger.

Ricky is a senior and all seems to be going well when Bailey Hutchinson moves in from Texas and has an almost hundred mile an hour fastball. Fernando comes back and demands money from Ricky when he hears MLB Scouts are interested in him. After a bad pitch hits him in the head he has to go back to throwing rocks with The Pitcher to find himself again.

On January 6, 2017, a lone gunman took five lives and wounded eight people at Fort Lauderdale Airport. This book is about the Lauderdale shooting told from the perspective of bestselling author William Hazelgrove, who just happened to be there with his wife and children.Though focused on one terrifying incident that the author witnessed, this story is also a prototype of American shootings showing the interplay of victims, police, media, the shooter, and what constitutes this peculiar American form of violence. The author documents the perverse chain of events that set the stage for this tragedy: the failure of police and the FBI to stop this troubled Iraq War veteran, who had earlier approached them and said point-blank that he was hearing voices telling him to kill others; the incredible fact that his weapon was taken and then given back to him, the very gun that would kill five people and shut down a major airport for forty-eight hours; and the...