Michael Sullivan

Tom Rea

Find the perfect pig or cut of pork, determine the best roasting style to use, and get ready to roast a pig to perfection! This complete guide covers basic roasting techniques using a selection of the most common joints and cuts, from loin chops to pork shoulder, so you can enjoy roast pig as an everyday meal. Then, it builds on those skills to move onto the joy of roasting a whole pig, spit-roast or Caja China style, for a truly unforgettable event. To top it off, learn to create stylish restaurant-style pork dishes using the methods you’ve explored, and match the perfect side dishes to your home-roasted pig.

From Oven-Roasted Tenderloin to Slow-Roasted Pulled Pork Shoulder to the Spit-Roasted Whole Hog

How to Roast a Pig

After its unearthing from the Wyoming badlands in 1899, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie set out to display his prized dinosaur, the most complete fossil skeleton ever unearthed, that soon set off a public storm of interest for these incredible creatures around the world.

The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's Dinosaur

Bone Wars

Devil’s Gate—the name conjures difficult passage and portends a doubtful outcome. In this eloquent and captivating narrative, Tom Rea traces the history of the Sweetwater River valley in central Wyoming—a remote place including Devil’s Gate, Independence Rock, and other sites along a stretch of the Oregon Trail—to show how ownership of a place can translate into owning its story. Seemingly in the middle of nowhere, Devil’s Gate is the center of a landscape that threatens to shrink any inhabitants to insignificance except for one thing: ownership of the land and the stories they choose to tell about it. The static serenity of the once heavily traveled region masks a history of conflict. Tom Sun, an early rancher, played a role here in the lynching of the only woman ever hanged in Wyoming. The lynching was dismissed as swift frontier justice in the wake of cattle theft, but Rea finds more complicated motives that involve land and water rights. The Sun name was linked with the land for generations. In the 1990s, the Mormon Church purchased part of the Sun ranch to memorialize Martin’s Cove as the site of handcart pioneers who froze to death in the valley in 1856. The treeless, arid country around Devil’s Gate seems too immense for ownership. But stories run with the land. People who own the land can own the stories, at least for a time.

Owning the Land, Owning the Story

Devil's Gate

With a New Foreword by Matthew C. Lamanna and a New Afterword by Tom Rea Less than one hundred years ago, Diplodocus carnegii—named after industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie—was the most famous dinosaur on the planet. The most complete fossil skeleton unearthed to date, and one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered, Diplodocus was displayed in a dozen museums around the world and viewed by millions of people. Bone Wars explains how a fossil unearthed in the badlands of Wyoming in 1899 helped give birth to the public’s fascination with prehistoric beasts. Rea also traces the evolution of scientific thought regarding dinosaurs and reveals the double-crosses and behind-the-scenes deals that marked the early years of bone hunting. With the help of letters found in scattered archives, Tom Rea recreates a remarkable story of hubris, hope, and turn-of-the-century science. He focuses on the roles of five men: Wyoming fossil hunter Bill Reed; paleontologists Jacob Wortman—in charge of the expedition that discovered Carnegie’s dinosaur—and John Bell Hatcher; William Holland, imperious director of the recently founded Carnegie Museum; and Carnegie himself, smitten with the colossal animals after reading a story in the New York Journal and Advertiser. What emerges is the picture of an era reminiscent of today: technology advancing by leaps and bounds; the press happy to sensationalize anything that turned up; huge amounts of capital ending up in the hands of a small number of people; and some devoted individuals placing honest research above personal gain.

The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's Dinosaur, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Tom Rea traces the evolution of scientific thought regarding dinosaurs and reveals the deception, hostility, and sometimes outright aggression present in the early years of fossil hunting. This book details one of the most famous—and notorious—dinosaur skeletons ever discovered: Diplodocus carnegii, named after Andrew Carnegie.

Tom Rea

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