Everyone has a story to tell, myself included, and though I will never claim mine is any more spectacular or important than the next, I will say that if I had a book from someone else who had dealt with the kinds of issues I was, it would have literally changed my life. It is with that in mind that I present my raw, honest, and most intimate thoughts I somehow worked through after just surviving an uphill battle with cancer, only to get married, and subsequently divorced... All before I could legally drink. But writing in a journal, I think, saved my life. I was able to talk about all of the sad, depressing, angry, mean, and just plain odd things that went through my mind at such a confusing point in my life. Every page bleeds emotion, and every mark screams with honesty. By no means does The Dead-Heart Diaries read like a typical book/memoir/autobiography, or whatever you want to classify it as; it reads like words poured straight from the heart into a pen, and I can only classify it as Honesty.

This book is a classic narrative of modern exploration; a story of adventure, enterprise and patient scientific exploration, illustrated by photographs taken on the expedition. The Simpson is a sand-ridge desert extending 200 miles (322 km) west to east, the ridges running parallel from north to south at roughly quarter-mile (0.4 km) intervals, some reaching as high as 100 feet (30 m). Madigan planned a ground crossing in the winter of 1939. A party of nine, including a biologist, a botanist, a photographer and a radio operator, with nineteen camels, made the exhausting crossing from Andado station in the Northern Territory to Birdsville in twenty-five days. It verified Madigan's previous conclusions that the area was a wasteland. This last classic Australian exploration adventure pioneered the use of mobile radio communication; national broadcasts were made through the Australian Broadcasting Commission from desert camps. The scientific results were published and also a popular accound, Crossing the Dead Heart (Melbourne, 1946). He saw the 'Dead Heart' as a land of everlasting sand-ridges and salt-encrusted clay-pans; while his conclusions seemed correct then, within twenty years the area was criss-crossed by petroleum explorers. - Australian Dictionary of Biography

The body of a man with a crushed skull is found in outback Australia. Discovered hidden nearby is a letter containing cryptic clues to the location of a massive gold find in the unchartered Dead Heart of Australia. Greedy rumours fly, when a wife arrives to collect her dead husbands belongings. Not only is the not-entirely-bereaved widow out for a take, but also local authorities find themselves overrun by those willing to kill for a chance to find the gold. Speaking of killing, who bashed in the victims skull? Obese Sergeant Gillings is on the case with the help of his officers and trackers. The roguish Bob and his lover, Chaenee, are on the hunt as well. Australian Aborigines in the Dead Heart are on a rampage because strangers enter their forbidden territory. These gold-hungry adventurers have to fight each other, wild natives, and the unforgiving terrain itself on the perilous path to striking it rich.

The queer recluse, the shambling farmer, the clannish hill folk—white rural populations have long disturbed the American imagination, alternately revered as moral, healthy, and hardworking, and feared as antisocial or socially uncouth. In Peculiar Places, Ryan Lee Cartwright examines the deep archive of these contrary formations, mapping racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural twentieth-century United States. Sensationalized accounts of white rural communities’ aberrant sexualities, racial intermingling, gender transgressions, and anomalous bodies and minds, which proliferated from the turn of the century, created a national view of the perversity of white rural poverty for the American public. Cartwright contends that these accounts, extracted and estranged from their own ambivalent forum of community gossip, must be read in kind: through a racialized, materialist queercrip optic of the deeply familiar and mundane. Taking in popular science, documentary photography, news media, documentaries, and horror films, Peculiar Places orients itself at the intersections of disability studies, queer studies, and gender studies to illuminate a racialized landscape both profoundly ordinary and familiar.

Books 1 & 2 of the Bass Reeves Trilogy adapted for the Paramount+ miniseries Lawmen: Bass Reeves All heroes have fatal flaws and a moment of defining hubris, but few rise from the ashes to achieve greater heights. In 1884 Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves was arrested for murder and placed among his own prisoners in Hell on the Border, the infamous federal jail in Fort Smith, Arkansas. It was the single greatest setback of his illustrious career, but it wouldn't be his last mistake or trial by fire. In The Forsaken and the Dead we meet Reeves again. In the 1890s, past his prime, Reeves proceeds through the valleys and shadows of Indian and Oklahoma Territories. Despite his caution and innovations as a lawman and detective, his nation no longer seems a product of his own making--so much like his children and his marriage to Jennie. While a modern world implodes around him and demons from his past continue to haunt his present, he remains resolute in his faith that he can be a steady rider on a pale horse.