For author Renee Carter Tench, April 17, 2008, was the first day of the rest of her life. It was the day she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Tench spent more and more time reflecting on her past experiences and examining her life. In Memoirs of a Bootleggers Daughter, she tries to understand the reason and purpose behind all of the chaos in growing up the child of alcoholic parents. The lone survivor of the Carter family who lived at the end of the dirt road in Hickory, North Carolina, Tench shares the stories of her tumultuous childhood. She tells how, by the grace of God and taking advantage of the opportunities He provided, she broke the cycle of alcoholism in her family, a cycle that began even before her grandfather and father became bootleggers. She often felt looked down on because of the spectacle she and her family often made. Memoirs of a Bootleggers Daughter narrates how Tench started out at the end of one dirt road and ended up at the end of another and the wild journey in between, a journey she would be happy to take again.

The generation that toiled through the Great Depression and won the Second World War has become known as “the greatest generation.” But not all of them qualified for that exaggerated epithet in the eyes of their own children. In this tender but unsparing memoir, Mary Cimarolli remembers a world in which the family home was lost to foreclosure, her father made his way by bootlegging, and school was a haven to hide from her brother’s teasing. Her stories are about struggle and survival, making do and overcoming, and, ultimately, reconciliation. From her perspective as a child, she describes the cotton stamps and other programs of the New Deal, the yellow-dog Democrat politics and racism of East Texas, and the religious revivals and Old Settlers reunions that gave a break from working in the cotton patch. The colorful colloquialisms of rural East Texas that dot the manuscript help express both the traditionalism of the region and its changes under the impact of modernization, electrification, and the coming of war. Along with these regional and national trends, Cimarolli skillfully interweaves the personal: conflict between her parents, the death of her brother a few days before his sixteenth birthday, and her own inner tensions.

In a beautiful and touching memoir, Mona Sizer brings the l930's and 40's to life as she lived them on a farm in South Texas. Intended for her daughter Rachel, she shares them with her readers as well in this warm-hearted recounting of the problems and pleasures facing women alone in a world suddenly threatened by World War II. The author is a popular writer of more than twenty historical romance novels, ten books of Texas history, biography, and true crime, a book of poetry, and numerous other works. She happy to report that to this day, she has never considered selling the family farm.

This study of collective American memory exposes the historical phenomenon of self-directed American imperialism, still frequently ignored or denied in the United States. Over the course of the 250 years of its history, this has taken the form of African American slavery, thwarted black motherhood, same-race slavery (both white and African American) as well as the extermination of indigenous American peoples. On the literary level, the study helps to broaden, or even modify, the present perspective on the oeuvres of four major American writers, i. e., William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Cormac McCarthy, by pointing to the intertwining of their themes, motifs, and techniques of writing to form an intricate pattern of the intertextualized collective memory of the American nation.

National bestseller An ALA Notable Book Three-term poet laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life. Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her "poet-warrior" road. A musical, kaleidoscopic, and wise follow-up to Crazy Brave, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice. Harjo listens to stories of ancestors and family, the poetry and music that she first encountered as a child, and the messengers of a changing earth—owls heralding grief, resilient desert plants, and a smooth green snake curled up in surprise. She celebrates the influences that shaped her poetry, among them Audre Lorde, N. Scott Momaday, Walt Whitman, Muscogee stomp dance call-and-response, Navajo horse songs, rain, and sunrise. In absorbing, incantatory prose, Harjo grieves at the loss of her mother, reckons with the theft of her ancestral homeland, and sheds light on the rituals that nourish her as an artist, mother, wife, and community member. Moving fluidly between prose, song, and poetry, Harjo recounts a luminous journey of becoming, a spiritual map that will help us all find home. Poet Warrior sings with the jazz, blues, tenderness, and bravery that we know as distinctly Joy Harjo.

This story is my story of growing up in those hard times of the great depression and WW2. I was taught right from wrong early and for the most part was left alone. There was no involvment with parents like Little League baseball or tackle football or neighborhood clubs. We were expected to pass in school, and be home for dinner and on time.I guess it could be called a period of benign neglect. If you were a poor player in any sport you didn´t play until you got better. Mom and Dad never even knew that you were no good. If you were really upset about not playing your father might play with you and give you some tips to make you better. In no case would he talk to any of your playmates to allow you to play. If you got lousey marks and your parents were called to school, it was your fault, not the teachers nor the politicians or anybody else.Your fault and you better improve or else. This system seemed to work. Certainly better than the current one. Books are now being written about how great my generation was. I never thought about it. All I know is we handled all the crap that was thrown at us and for the most part we were on our own. Nobody used drugs.We were afraid of them and rightly so. When I started writing, my experiences were remembered strongly in large bursts, so much so that it has taken over four hundred pages just to get me through college.The most surprising element of remembering was how strongly the girls in my life came back. I really liked the women I got to know and they made life more than tolerable for me. I was in heavy air combat in WW2 and yet to this day when the war is mentioned my first thought is about my English girl friend, a beautiful female British soldier that I didn´t spend three days in London with, because I was shipped home early. Life at Princeton was difficult because the learning was hard, basketball took big hunks of time and girls were very scarce. I used the language of my day so the sexual encounters may sound dirty. I never thought of them that way.I was discriminating in my choices and I like to think my girls were just as choosey when they selected me. I was an only child to very young parents. My father was a local bootlegger in Atlantic City. He had worked for the political boss of the area and was protected from being arrested for his illigal activity. I was always scared that he would be arrested anyway. Neither my mother nor my father were well educated. My mother made it through first year of high school. My father made it through 8th grade. I always thought both were very smart. Their friends seemed to think they were smart also. My father always seemed to have several millionairs as friends. He dressed neat even in the heart of the depression. My mother dressed very smartly and her picture made the newspapers on several occasions during celebration of the Easter parade. Both my parents had good personalities and after I got over my shy period I became known as the personality kid in local sports circles. I guess there was some rub off. Both my father and my mother learned about the stock market by reading the newspaper and as soon as money accumlated from the business each invested. They both did very well. My father worked by evaluating several stocks while my mother folllowed tips from friends. I guess my father shared some of the business income because mother always had plenty of cash to spend. One thing I remember is that on major expenditures like a new car or a house my parents always had serious discussions to help make the decision. The thing about my father that always surprised me was on special occassions he might buy mother a mink coat or a diamond ring or necklace. This was always a big surprise to everyone. Then they would go to dinner at some fancy restaurant to celebrate. This was after they had made some money of course. When I had acknowledged to myself that I was smart I sometimes used to try to figure

The author's shares her mother's journey through life as found in her journal. Lodemiah Goodman Eades had a hard life, as did many of her generation. Along with several of her siblings she spent many years growing up in the Mills Home Baptist Orphanage of Thomasville, North Carolina. Interspersed are the author's (Lodemiah's daughter's) own memories of the family.

A startling rise and retreat In the 1920s, a reborn Ku Klux Klan slithered into South Dakota. Bold at times, the group intimidated citizens in every county. KKK anti-Catholicism sentiment resulted in the murder of Father Arthur Belknap of Lead. Idealized Gutzon Borglum, sculptor of Mount Rushmore, operated as a white supremacist and KKK leader. In 1925, animosity between the KKK and Fort Meade soldiers came to a clash one night in Sturgis. The clatter of two borrowed .30 caliber Browning cooled machine guns split the air over the heads of a Klan gathering across the valley. Author Arley Fadness follows the Klan's trail throughout the Rushmore state.

South Dakota has always had an intermittent relationship with prohibition. Constantly changing legislation kept citizens, saloonkeepers, bootleggers and other scofflaws on tenterhooks, wondering what might come next. The scandalous indiscretions of the lethal Verne Miller and the contributions of "agents of change" like Senators Norbeck and Senn kept ne'er-do-wells on edge. In 1927, the double murder of prohibition officers near Redfield dominated headlines. From the Black Hills stills of Bert Miller to the Sioux Falls moonshine outfit buried under Lon Vaught's chicken house, uncork these oft-overlooked and tumultuous eighteen years in state history. In the first book of its kind, award-winning journalist Chuck Cecil delivers the boisterous details of an intoxicating era.