With hard work and good luck, David "Big Nose" Calloway navigates Houston's Jim Crow era and civil rights achievements to become a member of the once segregated Walnut Grove Country Club. There, he meets Jonathan Knapp a fellow businessman. Jonathan tries hard to befriend David. However, David remains aloof and distant. Will Jonathan's anger at being rejected send him on a quest for revenge and expose a secret both men share? Excerpt: The leg was good luck to David. It kept him out of the army during WWII. Army Doctor smiled at the big black shirtless boy thick as a chifferobe. Then he smiled at David's bulging crotch. "That nigger is packing a sack of walnuts there!" David stood with his pants around his ankles. The doctor nodded at his left leg big as a phone post. However, the doctor's smile vanished, when he looked below David's right knee at what looked like a gnarled piece of hickory. Still, the Old southerner steeped in a belief that Negroes were workhorses, made David walk and jump. He squeezed the good leg with his hand, massaged the good strong calf and then the weak one. He measured the leg from crotch to ankle, wrote down the numbers on a chart, and studied the chart marked with other men's numbers. He sized up David's withered leg next to a scrawny white boy's good leg and told himself he didn't see much of a difference. Get it Now!

This book resituates Francis Sylvester Mahony in an early nineteenth-century literary-historical context, counteracting the efforts of twentieth-century literary historians to obscure his contribution to the emergence of a distinctive Irish Catholic fiction in English. This volume re-explores his ambivalent role as a Catholic unionist contributor to the progressive Tory London periodical, Fraser’s Magazine, examining his use of translation to map out an alternative literary aesthetic of the peripheries. The book also traces the development of his political thinking in his Italian journalism for Charles Dickens’ Daily News, in which he responded to the events of the Famine by finding common cause with Young Ireland, and looks afresh at his final incarnation as a British Liberal commentator on Irish and European affairs for the Globe newspaper. More broadly, the book seeks to re-evaluate Mahony’s cosmopolitan writings in relation to the multifaceted, transnational perspectives on Irish, British, and European affairs presented in his essays and journalism.