Jim Ross – författare

C. Curry Bohm was a talented and highly regarded landscape artist who is most commonly associated with Brown County, Indiana. Most consider him a leader of the second generation of Brown County painters. However, Curry's career and success expanded well beyond the borders of Brown County. The artist was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1894. Much of his artistic training was received in Chicago. The Illinois metropolis served as an important focus for his career development and an outlet for exhibitions until the 1950s. Curry permanently moved to Brown County in 1930. Many of his works during the first half of his career portrayed landscapes painted in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. Later, harbor and marine landscapes painted along coastal sites in Massachusetts and Maine provided new challenges and satisfaction for him over the second half of his career. Curry garnered success in all these artistic arenas. He won major awards at the Chicago Palette & Club in the early 1930s. He was awarded multiple exhibition prizes in East Coast shows during the 1950s. His Smoky Mountain and East Coast landscapes were major painting subjects for his showing in the Indiana Hoosier Salon exhibitions, from 1929-1967, where he won over 25 awards, including two Best in Show Awards. Curry Bohm thus became one of the leading painters in the Indiana arts community during the 20th century.

Route 66 is a beloved and much studied symbol of twentieth-century America. But until now, no book has focused on the bridges that spanned the rivers, creeks, arroyos, and railroads between Chicago and Santa Monica. In this handsome volume, Route 66 authority and veteran writer and photographer Jim Ross examines the origins and history of the bridges of America's most famous highway, structures designed to overcome obstacles to travel, many of them engineered with architectural aesthetics now lost to time.Featuring hundreds of Ross's own photographs, Route 66 Crossings showcases bridges ranging in design from timber to steel and concrete, and provides schematics, maps, and global coordinates to help readers identify and locate them. Ross's comprehensive accounting of structures along the Mother Road's various alignments includes bridges still in use, those that have vanished or have been abandoned, and the few consciously preserved as monuments. He also recognizes ancillary structures that enhanced safety and helped facilitate traffic, such as railway grade separations, tunnels, and pedestrian underpasses.Ross seeks to encourage ongoing preservation of the structures that remain. In brilliant color and precise detail, Route 66 Crossings expands our knowledge of the bridges that linked America's first all-weather national highway.

This is the thoughtful, action-packed memoir of one American soldier’s combat tour in Vietnam in 1970. It opens with a tense ambush patrol and doesn’t let up through a year of hair-raising night watches, soggy humps through the jungle, and deadly encounters with the North Vietnamese. The author served as a rifleman, machine gunner, tunnel rat, and demolitions man with the U.S. Army’s 25th “Tropic Lightning” Infantry Division and the 1st Cavalry Division. His memoir focuses on the experiences of the men on the ground in Vietnam and the realities of combat, and the result is moving and unforgettable, one of the very best in a crowded field of Vietnam War memoirs.

First-time travelers to Florida often imagine the state as just a vacationland or a swamp—a place to visit and to leave behind. But the writers in this collection discover the truth that everyone who’s lived in the state knows. When you venture into Florida you won’t find what you expect, and what you do find will stay with you forever. The authors of these essays come to Florida for different reasons. Love, fortune, family, rest, natural beauty, or a fresh start. They encounter a place so diverse that it defies easy categorization. Lauren Groff describes her experience settling in Florida after growing up in the Northeast and finds an affinity with the strong-willed writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who grew to resent the cities of her past and embraced the wild lands that inspired The Yearling. Cuban-born Susannah Rodríguez Drissi travels to Miami and learns what the city does and doesn’t mean for Cuban Americans. Deesha Philyaw comes to the state to care for her mother, who is dying of cancer. Rick Bragg seeks out the beauty of the Gulf of Mexico and writes about how it was threatened by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. In these stories, Florida is more than a setting—it’s a character of its own. It stirs up hurricanes and rainstorms, enchants with natural springs and cypress forests, and endures in the face of pollution. For all of these writers, Florida is a force that brings about moments of personal insight and growth, a place where hard lessons are learned and true joy is experienced. Their essays illustrate that the places we inhabit put a stamp on us, even if we only call them home for a season.

THE NEW LEGAL THRILLER FROM JIM ROSS, PERFECT FOR FANS OF JOHN GRISHAM AND LJ ROSSHawk’s Justice takes the reader into the murky world of the Royal Courts of Justice, where a senior judge is found murdered. Tom Hawk, one of England’s youngest judges, is handpicked to take the dead man’s place in a high-profile trial, and he begins to sense that the courts hold deeper secrets than he ever imagined. Before long, Hawk finds himself hunting a killer who has already struck once within the court’s secure walls.