Frank Carlson Library

This illustrated guide to Kansas ghost towns will delight travelers and armchair tourists alike. Organized by region, it tells the story of 100 towns that have either disappeared without a trace or are only "a shadowy remnant of what they once were." Fitzgerald chronicles each town's settlement, politics, colorful figures and legends, and eventual abandonment or decline. Ten maps and detailed intructions for finding each site are included.

Shadow of the Silk Road records a journey along the greatest land route on earth. Out of the heart of China into the mountains of Central Asia, across northern Afghanistan and the plains of Iran and into Kurdish Turkey, Colin Thubron covers some seven thousand miles in eight months. Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, he travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient...

In this exhilarating series debut, police detective William Monk must solve the mystery of his own past.
His name, they tell him, is William Monk, and he is a London police detective. But the accident that felled him has left him with only half a life; his memory and his entire past have vanished. As he tries to hide the truth, Monk returns to work and is assigned to investigate the brutal murder of a Crimean War hero and man about town....

Based on his adventures with Neal Cassady, Kerouac tells the story of two friends, whose four cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Teeming with the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac's novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "Beat". --Adapted from publisher description.

In one of his most exotic and breathtaking journeys, the intrepid traveler Paul Theroux ventures to the South Pacific, exploring fifty-one islands by collapsible kayak. Beginning in New Zealand's rain forests and ultimately coming to shore thousands of miles away in Hawaii, Theroux paddles alone over isolated atolls, through dirty harbors and shark-filled waters, and along treacherous coastlines. This exhilarating tropical epic is full of disarming...

A history of the Inca Empire and its expansion during the 15th and 16th centuries until its conquest by the Spanish under Francisco Pizarro.