Jamie was an orphan at an early age who grew up with his aunt and uncles. After a difficult childhood and teenage years, he went to university and married the girl next door. He had an interesting career, and the people who figure in the novel are his family and friends. We follow him through his adult life and successful career until his death.

We meet three retired amateur musicians who meet regularly to play together and entertain one another with impromptu story telling. Sometimes, but by no means always, the tales are prompted by musical associations: they are always whimsical, ironic, sad, thought-provoking, or heartwarming. The three musicians are Velly, the cellist; Traffy, the pianist; and Pickle, the violinist, and they are all determined to enjoy life in retirement. We must not leave out Jessie, Vellys wife, who provide...

Winner of an Abraham Lincoln Institute Book AwardThough not blind to Abraham Lincoln's imperfections, Black Americans long ago laid a heartfelt claim to his legacy. At the same time, they have consciously reshaped the sixteenth president's image for their own social and political ends. Frederick Hord and Matthew D. Norman's anthology explores the complex nature of views on Lincoln through the writings and thought of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Mc...

This is the story of George (known far and wide as Keyhole) Purvis, and his life as a salmon fisherman on the River Tweed from the 1950s to the 1980s.At school they called him stupid, thanks to severe dyslexia that went undiagnosed for decades. But George wasn't one to let anything slow him down. He spent his life chasing new ventures and new adventures, with unstoppable energy and endless good humour. Along the way he collected a huge pile of medals from several different sports, ...

With fresh and provocative insights into the everyday reality of politics in post-Soviet Central Asia, this volume moves beyond commonplaces about strong and weak states to ask critical questions about how democracy, authority, and justice are understood in this important region. In conversation with current theories of state power, the contributions draw on extensive ethnographic research in settings that range from the local to the transnational, the mundane to the spectacular, to provid...

How does Southern food look from the outside? The form is caught in constantly dueling stereotypes: It’s so often imagined as either the touchingly down-home feast or the heartstopping health scourge of a nation. But as any Southern transplant will tell you once they’ve spent time in the region, Southerners share their lives in food, with a complex mix of stories of belonging and not belonging and of traditions that form identities of many kinds.Cornbread Nation 7, edited ...

A Nation Gone Under is a diligent commentary and conservative polemic that addresses the rise of secularism and progressivism in the United States, and it offers a Christian response for battling socialist or communist ideals and reestablishing Constitutional values.