Sun up to Sun down is a story about the son of a sharecropper, named Leotis. Sharecropping was a system designed after the Civil War ended, by plantation owners. Under this system the rich got richer while the poor remained poor. It continued many years after the Civil War ended. This is not your typical down on the farm story. The field hand worked in the cotton fields, chopping cotton from sunrise tjo sun set. Some elderly field hands would say that one had to work from dusk til dawn, or...

Frequently overlooked in the search of knowing and acting wisely are some important philosophical and cultural ideas and questions. The kpim of Social Order boldly captures such ideas and questions for awareness through critical thinking. The current volume in the Kpim Book Series makes the point that for a systematic analysis and significance of Social Order to be attained, we need to ask, What is the kpim or central core of Social Order of things? Where does the deepest layer, notion, sy...

A terrific Linwood Barclay novella - written specially for the World Book Day Quick Reads promotionKeisha Ceylon is a psychic. At least, that's what she passes herself off as. The truth is, Keisha's real powers have more to do with separating troubled families from their money than actually seeing into the netherworld. Keisha watches the news for stories of missing family members. She gives it a few days, then moves in, tells these families she's had a vision, that...

In this riveting novel, two boys discover the true meaning of family and the sacrifices it requires.Two-time Newbery Honor winner Gary D. Schmidt delivers the shattering story of Joseph, a father at thirteen, who has never seen his daughter, Jupiter.After spending time in a juvenile facility, he’s placed with a foster family on a farm in rural Maine. Here Joseph, damaged and withdrawn, meets twelve-year-old Jack, who narrates this emotional coming of age st...

This is Margaret’s story, one of four true stories from the book GI Brides.“Margaret’s eyes were on the handsome officers who milled around the US Army headquarters. But it was one young second lieutenant that she particularly looked out for… And she secretly deteThe room was filled with GIs – some playing pool, some jostling for control of rmined to make him hers.”An attractive young English girl, Margaret finds herself working at the US Army headquarters in London, where ...

Peter Orner zeroes in on the strange ways our memories define us: A woman's husband dies before their divorce is finalized; a man runs for governor of Illinois and loses much more than an election; two brothers play beneath the infamous bridge at Chappaquiddick. Employing the masterful compression for which he has been widely praised, Orner presents a kaleidoscope of individual lives viewed in startling, intimate close-up.Whether writing of Geraldo Rivera's attempt to reveal the co...

This “viscerally powerful . . . compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era” won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review).Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Oral History Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation.

“An American classic.” —The New YorkerIn An Hour Before Daylight, Jimmy Carter, bestselling author of Living Faith and Sources of Strength, recreates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm before the civil rights movement forever changed it and the country.Carter writes about the powerful rhythms of countryside and community in a sharecropping economy, offering an unforgettable portrait of his fathe...

When a man is found dead at his doorstep on the edge of Walden Pond, naturalist and writer Henry David Thoreau follows his highly developed moral compass to track down the killer. A short story by an Edgar short story winner.

“This book tells what it means to be a woman when you are poor, when you are proud, and when you are a hillbilly.”First published in 1973, Skye Moody’s Hillbilly Women shares the stunning and raw oral histories of nineteen women in twentieth-century Southern Appalachia, from their day-to-day struggles for survival to the personal triumphs of their hardscrabble existence. They are wives, widows, and daughters of coal miners; factory hands, tobacco graders, cotton mill worke...

Growing Up in Mississippi is a true story. Berthas story. But more than that, it is the story of what it was like for many young black girls of her generation to be born into poverty and to grow up surrounded by the meanest forms of racial discrimination. To be educated in run down, second rate schools, marry early and work long hours for low pay just to keep food on the table. Read about the wayward Uncle Wigley, a cursed character among many black families who resorted to inflicting abuse o...

In 1905, in Washington, D.C., a young newly-trained nurse is called to the White House for special duty. With the money earned on that venture, she sets out on a cross-country trip by train for California. Along the way, the young woman encounters events and people whose stories enthrall and excite. These anecdotes are recorded over the years, 1905 and 1908 in the young womans diary. Upon her death in 1946, the diary disappears. The missing diary is discovered by a boy who, for some myster...