A breakaway bestseller since its first printing, AllSouls takes us deep into Michael Patrick MacDonald's Southie,the proudly insular neighborhood with the highest concentration ofwhite poverty in America. Rocked by Whitey Bulger's crime schemesand busing riots, MacDonald's Southie is populated by sharply hewncharacters like his Ma, a miniskirted, accordion-playing singlemother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children.Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silence,MacDonald tells his family story here with gritty but movinghonesty.
Amid the aristocratic ranks of the Confederate cavalry, NathanBedford Forrest was untutored, all but unlettered, and regarded asno more than a guerrilla. His tactic was the headlong charge,mounted with such swiftness and ferocity that General Shermancalled him a "devil" who should "be hunted down and killed if itcosts 10,000 lives and bankrupts the treasury." And in a war inwhich officers prided themselves on their decorum, Forresthabitually issued surrender-or-die ultimatums to the enemy andoften intimidated his own superiors. After being in command at thenotorious Fort Pillow Massacre, he went on to haunt the South asthe first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Now this epic figure is restored to human dimensions in anexemplary biography that puts both Forrest's genius and hissavagery into the context of his time, chronicling his rise fromfrontiersman to slave trader, private to lieutenant general,Klansman to -- eventually -- New South businessman and racialmoderate. Unflinching in its analysis
For Malcolm Jones, his parents’ disintegrating marriage was atthe center of life in North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s. Hisfather, charming but careless, was often drunk and away from home;his mother, a schoolteacher and faded Southern belle, clung to thepast and hungered for respectability. In Little Boy Lost ,Jones—one of our most admired cultural observers—recalls achildhood in which this relationship played out against the largercracks of society: the convulsions of desegregation and a popularculture that threatens the church-centered life of his family. Herichly evokes a time and place with rare depth and candor, givingus the fundamental stories of a life—where he comes from, who hewas, who he has become.
In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island ofSri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat andintoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India,"Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of hisDutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and familymemoir by an exceptional writer.
Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insularNew Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by hermother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hidingher before they finally banish her altogether. After giving herbaby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the MiddleEast, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally herblood. She returns to New England and stitches together a life thatencircles her silenced and invisible grief. When he is twenty-one,her lost son finds her. Hall learns that he grew up in grittypoverty with an abusive father—in her own father's hometown. Theirreunion is tender, turbulent, and ultimately redemptive. Hall'sparents never ask for her forgiveness, yet as they age, she offersthem her love. What sets Without a Map apart is the way in whichloss and betrayal evolve into compassion, and compassion intowisdom.
With his signature style and grace, Willie Morris, arguably oneof this country's finest Southern writers, presents us with anunparalleled memoir of a country in transition and a boy coming ofage in a period of tumultuous cultural, social, and politicalchange. In North Toward Home , Morris vividly recalls the South ofhis childhood with all of its cruelty, grace, and foibles intact.He chronicles desegregation and the rise of Lyndon Johnson in Texasin the 50s and 60s, and New York in the 1960s, where he became thecontroversial editor of Harper's magazine. North TowardHome is the perceptive story of the education of an observantand intelligent young man, and a gifted writer's keen observationsof a country in transition. It is, as Walker Percy wrote, "atouching, deeply felt and memorable account of one man'spilgrimage."
If you had to give America a voice, it’s been said more thanonce, that voice would be Willie Nelson’s. For more than fiftyyears, he’s taken the stuff of his life—the good and the bad—andmade from it a body of work that has become a permanent part of ourmusical heritage and kept us company through the good and the badof our own lives. So it’s fitting, and cause for celebration, thathe has finally set down in his own words a book that does justiceto his great gifts as a storyteller. In The Facts of Life ,Willie Nelson reflects on what has mattered to him in life and whathasn’t. He also tells some great dirty jokes. The result is a bookas wise and hilarious as its author.
After two thousand years of flawed history, here at last is amagnificent new biography of Mary Magdalene that draws her out ofthe shadows of history and restores her to her rightful place ofimportance in Christianity.Throughout history, Mary Magdalene hasbeen both revered and reviled, a woman who has taken on manyforms—witch, whore, the incarnation of the eternal feminine, thedevoted companion (and perhaps even the wife) of Jesus. In thisbrilliant new biography, Bruce Chilton, a renowned biblicalscholar, offers the first complete and authoritative portrait ofthis fascinating woman. Through groundbreaking interpretations ofancient texts, Chilton shows that Mary played a central role inJesus’ ministry and was a seminal figure in the creation ofChristianity. Chilton’s de*ions of who Mary Magdalene was and what she didchallenge the male-dominated history of Christianity familiar tomost readers. Placing Mary within the traditions of Jewish femalesavants, Chilton presents a visionary figure who was fully imm
Book De*ion Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherlessand unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 1727 he wasso renowned he was given a state funeral—an unheard-of honor for asubject whose achievements were in the realm of the intellect.During the years he was an irascible presence at Trinity College,Cambridge, Newton imagined properties of nature and gave themnames—mass, gravity, velocity—things our science now takes forgranted. Inspired by Aristotle, spurred on by Galileo’s discoveriesand the philosophy of Descartes, Newton grasped the intangible anddared to take its measure, a leap of the mind unparalleled in hisgeneration. James Gleick, the author of Chaos and Genius, and one of the mostacclaimed science writers of his generation, brings the reader intoNewton’s reclusive life and provides startlingly clear explanationsof the concepts that changed forever our perception of bodies,rest, and motion—ideas so basic to the twenty-first century, it cant
After her astonishing testimony in the Clarence Thomashearings, Anita Hill ceased to be a private citizen and became apublic figure at the white-hot center of an intense national debateon how men and women relate to each other in the workplace. Thatdebate led to ground-breaking court decisions and major shifts incorporate policies that have had a profound effect on ourlives--and on Anita Hill's life. Now, with remarkable insight andtotal candor, Anita Hill reflects on events before, during, andafter the hearings, offering for the first time a complete accountthat sheds startling new light on this watershed event.Only afterreading her moving recollection of her childhood on her family'sOklahoma farm can we fully appreciate the values that enabled herto withstand the harsh scrutiny she endured during the hearings andfor years afterward. Only after reading her detailed narrative ofthe Senate Judiciary proceedings do we reach a new understanding ofhow Washington--and the media--rush to judgment. And only a
