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"In 1971, Jim Brown moved to Birmingham with his young family to start his first full-time teaching job at Samford University. Within days, he was fishing on the Cahaba River; soon, the entire Brown family was regularly exploring the river's twists and turns and the myriad creatures living there. A European historian by training, Brown began to broaden his areas of expertise to fulfill the range of his teaching responsibilities. As his intellectual horizons expanded, Brown quickly became fascinated with the history, culture, and environment of his new home. In the years to come, Brown's curiosity would lead him on a series of literal and investigative journeys across Alabama's physical and cultural landscape which he endeavored to bring back to the classroom. Upon retirement in 2016, Brown set to work weaving together an account of the encounters and activities that unfolded in his early years in Alabama as the state slowly made him into one of its own. Incorporating personal experiences and insights drawn from a lifetime of learning and teaching, the resultant memoir begins with his first brush with the Cahaba River and spans topics ranging from salamander migration, shape note singing (with Wayne Flynt, no less), disappearing arts and crafts traditions, land use patterns over time, historic preservation, experiential education, birds, bats, railroad hollers, and more than a few fish tales along the way. Interspersed throughout with insights drawn from Brown's academic career, Distracted by Alabama traces a very personal, historically informed, and idiosyncratic profile of a region in transition in the mid to late twentieth century. It also stands as testament to the ideals and value of liberal arts education in a society"--
Writer Barnes tells the story of a corrupt, crime-ridden city, examining events that unfolded during 1916-1955. Phenix City had been a 19th-century refuge from law enforcement for 120 years until three men in succession challenged the status quo. To reconstruct the story the author draws on notes and private papers of the principals and investigators; depositions, trial transcripts, and court records; daily newspaper coverage; and transcripts of wire-tapped recordings of the city's gamblers and politicians. No index or bibliography. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Using the history of Alabama and the stories of her pioneering ancestors, Lella Warren created the Whetstone clan who settled Alabama in the 1820s, helped lead it into the prosperity of the 1850s, and fought for it in the War Between the States. The historical background of Foundation Stone is authentic, but, more, it is a compelling story about believable characters. The story of these people—three generations of Whetstones—captures the American pioneering spirit. As an unidentified reviewer described the novel, “Lella Warren’s ‘Foundation Stone’ is the long, well-told chronicle of a family that loved and hoped and struggled in a difficult world, unaware that they symbolized an era and a way of life.” Foundation Stone was published in September 1940 and was on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list September 1940-February 1941, along with Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again.
In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.
Stories of living in Alabama.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This “superbly written true-crime story” (The New York Times Book Review) masterfully brings together the tales of a serial killer in 1970s Alabama and of Harper Lee, the beloved author of To Kill a Mockingbird, who tried to write his story. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members, but with the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative assassinated him at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the reverend himself. Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee, who spent a year in town reporting on the Maxwell case and many more trying to finish the book she called The Reverend. Cep brings this remarkable story to life, from the horrifying murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South, while offering a deeply moving portrait of one of our most revered writers.
Change is inevitable. We all know this and yet it does not make the decisions that go along with change any more palatable. Often we wait, as if circumstance itself will alter. Then later, if we are wise, we acknowledge that we control only ourselves and
There is no college ball more passionate and competitive than football in the Southeastern Conference, where seven of the twelve schools boast stadiums bigger than any in the NFL and 6.5 million fans hit the road every year to hoot and holler their teams to victory. In September 2006, popular sports columnist and lifelong University of Tennessee fan Clay Travis set out on his "Dixieland Delight Tour." Without a single map, hotel reservation, or game ticket, he began an 8,000-mile journey through the beating heart of the Southland. As Travis toured the SEC, he immersed himself in the bizarre game-day rituals of the common fan, brazenly dancing with the chancellor's wife at a Vanderbilt frat party, hanging with University of Florida demigod quarterback Tim Tebow, and abandoning himself totally to the ribald intensity and religious fervor of SEC football. Dixieland Delight is Travis's hilarious, loving, irreverent, and endlessly entertaining chronicle of a season of ironic excess in a world that goes a little crazy on football Saturdays.
"Janie Treeborne lives on an orchard at the edge of Elberta, Alabama, and in time, she has become its keeper. She tells the story of its people: of Hugh--her granddaddy--determined to preserve Elberta's legacy through his art; of his wife Maybelle, who shook the town when she became its first female postmaster, then again when she died a sudden and mysterious death; of her lover Lee Malone, a black orchardist and musician harvesting from a land where he is less than welcome; of the local legend Ricky Birdsong, who scored touchdown after touchdown, only to run headlong into tragedy"--