Bøger af Byron Grush

The years between the stock market crash of 1929 and the end of World War II in 1945 were the years of the Great Depression. Nearly 13 million people, about 25 percent of the work force was unemployed. Many became homeless and took refuge in makeshift shanty communities called Hoovervilles. The decade between 1930 and 1940 saw severe droughts, floods, and high temperatures. The resulting Dust Bowl sent migrates west to California. Young people took to hoboing, riding the rails and living in hobo jungles. The administration of President Franklin Roosevelt took action with many social programs, but recovery was slow. This is the story of a few of those people, their good times and bad. It is a story of a young man's brush with organized crime, another's life jumping freights and picking fruit, an aspiring blues musician encountering racism both in the north and the south, and two young women who will find and then lose love. It tells the story of the eagles on the silver dollar who will someday grin―but the cost will be great.

A dozen short stories set in Wisconsin, inspired by historical fact and legend: giants, balloonists, circus performers, rampaging elephants, escape artists, gangsters, spiritualists and many other fascinating personages and events drawn from the union of fact and fantasy, history and imagination.

A Cabinets of Curiosities of short stories. The disparate juxtaposition of Frito pies and the burning of Old Man Gloom, the fatal flight of the Wingfoot, Le Petit Théâtre Du Vieux Carré, the Salles des Glaces, equestrians Rose Dockrell and George Holland, the CSS Alabama vs. the USS Kearsage, Al Capone and the 226 Club, The Yellow Kid, and Doc W's antique dentist's drill. With as little similarity as a narwhale's tusk has to an astrolabes Islamique, the commonality here is the quasi-genre of Historical Fiction. Love and tragedy, time travel and nostalgia, and some nice big explosions.

The year is 1868. A young Native American boy, a Wintu, leaves the reservation in the Mendocino County of California to search for his father, a white man, who had been taken in by the tribe after an attack by a bear. His journey, and that of his sister, a companion from another tribe, and a young Chinese "Daughter of Joy," follow the Iron Trail of the First Transcontinental Railroad as it is completed, and as its Last Spike is driven into the hearts and minds and hopes of America's indigenous people.

Once Upon a Gold Rush is an old-fashioned adventure story filled with colorful characters, framed against the California gold rush of the 1850s. Based on a (somewhat) true story, it follows two brothers, James and John Grosh, and their sister, Mary Jane, on an overland journey by ox-drawn wagon, from the prairies of Illinois, across the plains and mountains of the wild, unsettled territories, to the Trinity River valley of Northern California. There they mine for gold and witness the beginning of the end of a way of life for the Native American inhabitants of the Golden State. John returns to Illinois by ship, sailing around Cape Horn, a voyage that he will not soon forget. Their lives are touched by people and events leading up to the American Civil War. This historical novel is the continuation of the saga of the Grosh family, begun in the book, All the Way by Water.

A historical novel about a pioneer family's journey from Western Pennsylvania to the Northern Illinois prairie by flatboat along canals, the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers in 1846. Based on a true story.

The genealogical family tree of the family Grush with roots in Pennsylvania and Illinois as far back as the eighteenth century, with biographies, obituaries, stories, and some photos. This particular branch of Grush is centered on the lineage of Joseph to Christopher to Philip to Isaac, settled or born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, then migrating to Ogle County in Northern Illinois. The origin of the family was of French Huguenots escaping religious persecution to Germany and then Holland to come to the new world. The book should be of value to researchers.

Time travelers abroad in a universe of improbability. A sequel to The Death of Time. Follow John Dillinger, Mary Shelley, Templar Grand Master Jacques de Moray, General Wei Shan, and others as they journey through the Catacombs of Paris, a Jurassic jungle, and a planet at the edge of eternity. These, and the alchemist, the scientist, the girl from a planet of deadly plague, the alchemist's apprentice, an evil scientist from the far future, and Scheherazade the cat with one thousand and one lives are swept up by a whirlwind of temporal chaos with only Mother Time to look after them. Historical science fiction told not as fantasy, but as the preposterous reality of multiple universe theory.

A young man walks cemeteries, photographing tombstones and posting data on a website as an aid for genealogists. He meets a girl. He starts to see ghosts. A contemporary tour of Pennsylvania's small towns and local ghosts.

A historical fiction novel set in 1912 Chicago. "The murder victim is slumped over his desk, a bullet hole in his forehead, a pool of blood spreading slowly on the green felt blotter on which he lies. The only door to the room is locked and bolted from the inside..." thus began the narrative presented as an intellectual puzzle by my friend and companion, Rodney Morton. What I didn't expect was that the game would be interrupted by a real-life murder-one that involved a former girl friend and her family. Now I had two mysteries to unravel.

A young girl on vacation at the Palm Beach hotel The Breakers thinks she discovers a murder. Violet might only have been twelve, but she was worldly. When her mother brought her and her sisters to Palm Beach, she hadn't expected to discover the body of a murdered man, or to be pursued by his killer. Nor had she expected a lady would be careless with a curling iron...

On February 20, 1954, President Dwight David Eisenhower boarded a flying saucer which had landed at Muroc Field (later called Edward's Air Force Base) to meet and negotiate a treaty with aliens from another planet. The aliens offered to share their advanced technology if, and only if, the humans would dismantle their nuclear weapons and cease polluting the Earth. Eisenhower refused, knowing that the Soviet Union was also testing nuclear devices. The aliens would not interfere in human affairs, they said, if they were allowed to abduct and study a few specimens of humankind. Eisenhower agreed. Some of those who were taken to the alien's base on the dark side of the moon learned of the real plans the aliens had for Earth and humanity. Would they be able to escape and warn Earth before it was too late?

Paris at the end of the Second Empire: Napoleon III and the disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, the rise and fall of the Commune, the early Impressionists, love, absinthe, and La Vie Parisienne. Emile-Claire and her ward, Teo Presume, and their companion, Phoebe Stapleton find themselves in Paris during the final decade of the Second empire. Their lives will be intertwined with artists, soldiers, and Communards, from the cafes to the barricades.

Halley's Comet traces an elliptical orbit around our Sun, coming closest to it at a point called its Perihelion, about every 75 years. It may be visible from Earth as it nears and then leaves its Perihelion, and observations of the comet have been recorded since 467 BC. In each of those years something extraordinary happened. This volume is an attempt to tell at least some of those stories. Most of what you will read here is fact, or what passes as fact in the genre of History. Some of it is fanciful, exaggerated, or confused. Interspersed with historical narrative I have added some fictional characters and fictional events. And I have asked the question, is 1P/Halley a dispassionate observer or an incessant actor?Beginning near the beginning, our stories encounter the famous, the infamous, and the lesser-known players in the drama of world history. We meet, among others, Mark Twain, some residents of pre-dynastic Egypt, Aeschylus, Xerxes, Judas Maccabee, Pharaoh Ptotemy VI, Emperor Cheng of the Han Dynasty, Saint Brendan of Ireland, Viking King Harald Hardraad, William the Conqueror, Genghis Khan, Giotto, Dante, Vlad the Impaler (aka Dracula), Jeanne d' Arc, Moctezuma, Juan Diego who saw the Virgin of Guadalupe, the settlers of the Popham Colony on the coast of Main, Edmond Halley, the Bideford witches, Mary Campbell who was captured by Native Americans, and the crew of the Challenger shuttle.