English Local

With travel tips and culture in our guidebooks written by a local, it is never too late to visit Puerto Vallarta. Greater than a Tourist: Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco, Mexico, by author Lucia Julieta Palomera Leyva, offers first-hand and personal insight into the best ways to visit the friendliest city in the world, Puerto Vallarta. Most travel books tell you how to travel like a tourist. Although there is nothing wrong with that, as part of the Greater Than a Tourist series, this book will give you candid travel tips from someone who has lived at your next travel destination.

Lone Star Nation is the gripping story of Texas' precarious journey to statehood, from its early colonization in the 1820s to the shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad by the Mexican army, from its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches to its day of liberation as an upstart republic.

Martin A. Lee traces the dramatic social history of marijuana, from its origins to its emergence in the 1960s as a defining force in a culture war that has never ceased. Lee describes how the illicit marijuana subculture overcame government opposition and morphed into a dynamic, multibillion-dollar industry. Colorful, illuminating, and at times irreverent, this is a fascinating listen for recreational users and patients, students and doctors, musicians and accountants, Baby Boomers and their kids, and anyone who has ever wondered about the secret life of this ubiquitous herb.

Apples, a common New England crop, have been called the United States' most endangered food. The iconic Texas Longhorn cattle is categorized at critical risk for extinction. Unique date palms, found nowhere else on the planet, grow in California’s Coachella Valley, but the family farms that caretake them are shutting down. Apples, cattle, dates―these are foods that carry significant cultural weight. But they’re disappearing. In Endangered Eating, culinary historian Sarah Lohman travels the country learning about the distinct ingredients at risk of being lost.

In Pilgrims and Puritans, the authors begin in the year 1620 in England and end in New England in the year 1676. The book recounts the religious, political, and social history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its influence on our lives today. The narrative follows various groups of settlers from their departure from England through arrival in the New World and their often violent conflicts with the native peoples of the Americas. The authors examine a number of issues that arose in the new society that was founded and the rise and fall of the "city on a hill."

Travel YouTuber Drew Binsky, who has visited every country in the world, shares everything you need to know to go anywhere you want. In 2021, Drew Binsky completed his 10-year journey to travel to every country in the world—all 197 of them. Now, for the first time, Drew reveals his wildest stories and best moments, even from places the United Nations deems the most “dangerous.” As you’ll discover with him as your guide, the world is more accessible than you think, and no matter where you’re from, people have more in common than they do differences.

Are you captivated by the melodic Arabic language, but feel chained by the barriers of script, pronunciation, and dialect variations? Do you aim to grasp the Levantine dialect of Arabic for enhanced travel experiences, deepened cultural understanding, or for academic or professional advancement? Language learning, especially for Arabic, can seem overwhelming. Still, it doesn’t have to be complicated, especially with a guide specifically tailored to help you overcome these hurdles, with practicality and fun in equal measure!

One week in late 1999, more than 50,000 people converged on Seattle. Their goal: to shut down the World Trade Organization conference and send a message that working-class people would not quietly accept the runaway economic globalization that threatened their livelihoods. Though their mission succeeded, it was not without blowback. In the oral history One Week to Change the World, award-winning journalist DW Gibson pieces together a complex and compelling account of what really went down in Seattle.

At the height of the Great Depression, Sam Babb, the charismatic basketball coach of tiny Oklahoma Presbyterian College, began dreaming. Like so many others, he wanted a reason to have hope. Traveling from farm to farm, he recruited talented, hardworking young women and offered them a chance at a better life: a free college education if they would come play for his basketball team, the Cardinals. Despite their fears of leaving home and the sacrifices faced by their families, the women followed Babb and his dream.

For nearly a decade, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Justin Davidson has explained the ever-changing city of New York to his readers at New York magazine, introducing new buildings, interviewing architects, tracking the way the transforming urban landscape shapes who New Yorkers are. Now, his extensive, inspiring knowledge will be available to a wide audience.

Ingerval is the Country of the Dead. Funerals are happy occasions in Ingerval, and the King is planning for his to be the most decadent in the country's long memory. He does not know that, unlike every lord before him, he will not return to rule alongside his ancestors. He will die the true death, sparking a succession crisis that throws the noble families into chaos.

The Everglades was America's last frontier, a wild country long after the West was won. In this book Michael Grunwald chronicles how a series of visionaries tried to drain and "reclaim" it and how Mother Nature refused to bend to their will; in the most harrowing tale, a 1928 hurricane drowned 2,500 people in the Everglades. But the Army Corps of Engineers finally tamed the beast with levees and canals, converting half the Everglades into sprawling suburbs and sugar plantations.

This Spanish audiobook is the perfect way to learn how to speak just like the locals do so that when you finally go on your dream vacation, you won’t have to worry about sticking out like a sore thumb! In just 60 days, you’ll be able to understand important grammar rules, learn entertaining conversation starters, and understand local slang words and phrases everyone uses.

As an aspiring novelist in his early twenties, Cory Leadbeater was presented with an opportunity to work for a well-known writer whose identity was kept confidential. Since the tumultuous days of childhood, Cory had sought refuge from the rougher parts of life in the pages of books. Suddenly, he found himself the personal assistant to a titan of literature: Joan Didion. In the nine years that followed, Cory shared Joan’s rarefied world, transformed not only by her blazing intellect but by her generous friendship and mentorship.

Ronnie Earle was a Texas legend. During his three decades as the district attorney responsible for Austin and surrounding Travis County, he prosecuted corrupt corporate executives and state officials, including the notorious US congressman Tom DeLay. But Earle maintained that the biggest case of his career was the one involving Frank Hughey Smith, the ex-convict millionaire, alleged criminal mastermind, and Dixie Mafia figure. With the help of corrupt local authorities, Smith spent the 1970s building a criminal empire in auto salvage and bail bonds.

Immediately after two hijacked jets struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Dennis Smith volunteered in the rescue effort. Having spent his career as both a respected writer and a member of one of the city's busiest firehouses, Smith became determined to use his unique background to tell the story of the disaster and its aftermath with the empathy and understanding that only an insider could bring to it. In this audio memoir, he has collected astonishing first-person testimony.

Sudhir Venkatesh, acclaimed sociologist at Columbia University and author of Gang Leader for a Day, returns to the streets to connect the dots of New York's divergent economic worlds and crack the code of the city's underground economy. Based on Venkatesh's interviews with prostitutes and socialites, immigrants and academics, high end drug bosses and street-level dealers, Floating City exposes the underground as the city's true engine of social transformation and economic prosperity - revealing a wholly unprecedented vision of New York.

With travel tips and culture in our guidebooks written by a local, it is never too late to visit Barbados. Greater than a Tourist- Barbados by Maria Belgrave offers the inside scoop about Barbados. Most travel books tell you how to travel like a tourist. Although there is nothing wrong with that, as part of the Greater than a Tourist series, this audiobook will give you candid travel tips from someone who has lived at your next travel destination.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud has long been the most famous vendetta of the southern Appalachians. Over the years it has become encrusted with myth and error. Scores of writers have produced accounts of it, but few have made any real effort to separate fact from fiction. Novelists, motion picture producers, television script writers, and others have sensationalized events that needed no embellishment. Using court records, public documents, official correspondence, and other documentary evidence, Otis K. Rice presents an account that frees, as much as possible, fact from fiction, event from legend.

With travel tips and culture in our guidebooks written by a local, it is never too late to visit Merida. Greater Than a Tourist: Merida, Yucatan, Mexico by Regi Galgano updates you on the new gay wedding law and weekend dry laws. It offers insights into cultural quirks that baffle newcomers, like why hacienda chimneys are so high and toilets are so low. It gives you 78 tips on how to live like a local for four days in Mexico’s safest city. Slow down, stay in one place, and get to know the people and culture.