BARBERSHOPS have long been the social hub of the neighborhood. Here, men gather to swap tales, debate politics, and share memories. For Joe David Garner Jr., soaking up the stories of such men in his father's Mississippi barbershop served as a pivotal part of his childhood. A compendium of witty, amusing, and sometimes tragic tales, Stories from My Father's Barbershop relates anecdotes from six men who regularly congregated in Garner Sr.'s barbershop. Spanning the early 1900s to the 1970s, these tales return to rural Mississippi at a time when educational, economic, and political barriers including the Jim Crow laws had a significant impact on these men's lives. Colorful characters bring these stories to vivid life. There's Ward Ellis, son of two poor sharecroppers and considered by many to be a genius; gambling buddies Bender Giles and Ralph Henson, who almost lost it all; college-educated Vernon Nevins, who embarks on the road trip of a lifetime; and William Walker, who rose from poverty to become a highly successful businessman. Through the power of storytelling, Stories from My Father's Barbershop provides a rich, multifaceted look at the American South during some of its most turbulent times.

My Father’s Glass Eye is Jeannie’s struggle to honour her father, her larger-than-life hero, but also the man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who died. After his funeral, Jeannie spends the next decade in escalating mania, in and out of hospitals - increasingly obsessed with the other Jeanne. Obsession turns to investigation as she plumbs her childhood awareness of her dead half-sibling and hunts for clues into the mysterious circumstances of her death. It becomes a puzzle she she must solve to better understand herself and her father. Jeannie pulls us into her unravelling with such intimacy that her insanity becomes palpable, even logical. A brilliant exploration of the human psyche, My Father’s Glass Eye deepens our definitions of love, sanity, grief, and recovery.

To his friends, Seymour Langer was one of the brightest kids to emerge from Chicago’s Depression-era Jewish West Side. To his family, he was a driven and dedicated physician, a devoted father and husband. But to his Adam, youngest son, Seymour was also an enigma: a somewhat distant figure to whom Adam could never quite measure up, a worldly man who never left the city of Chicago during the last third of his life, a would-be author who spoke for years of writing a history of the Bonus March of 1932, when twenty thousand World War I veterans descended on the nation’s capital to demand compensation. Using this dramatic but overlooked event in U.S. history as a means of understanding his relationship with his father, Adam Langer sets out to uncover why the Bonus March intrigued Seymour Langer, whose personal history seemed to be artfully obscured by a mix of evasiveness and exaggeration. The author interweaves the story of the Bonus March and interviews with such individuals as history aficionado Senator John Kerry and the writer and critic Norman Podhoretz with his own reminiscences and those of his father’s relatives, colleagues, and contemporaries. In the process, he explores the nature of memory while creating a moving, multilayered portrait of both his father and his father’s generation.

These stories by immigrant writers remind us that in a way we are all immigrants.

This book presents accounts of fieldwork conducted in French Louisiana by anthropologists and folklorists between the 1970s and 2000 and looks at the personal, ethical, political, and scientific issues researchers need to confront and resolve when they attempt to explain a modern complex culture by using the traditional tools and methods of anthropology, participant observation, and interviews. The study casts a critical look at the core anthropological concepts of field, informants, and knowledge. In line with the ongoing reassessment of these concepts, it proposes that the field, identities, and knowledge acquired through research are not set, given entities but rather are a matter of construction. It shows how the personal profiles of the researchers (native or outsider, activist or academic, man or woman, black or white) contribute to frame the research. It illustrates the shifting of these identities during and after the research in response to personal, relational, and political circumstances. It also considers the application of the knowledge derived from research in the fields of tourism, cultural activism, and language policy in the context of the cultural renaissance experienced by Cajuns and Creoles over the past decades.

A collection of short stories written by an Alabama author, Allen Woodman.

[The authors of this book] share [with you their] personal experiences with the racial healing process from racially different perspectives. [The book] defines racism as a psychological, emotional, and spiritual disorder, outlines the Institutes' two goals and the five steps to achieving them, examines why the Institutes are so effective - and so different from other programs that try to combat racism. [This book also] tells how to set up and facilitate an Institute for the Healing of Racism [and] offers guidance for existing Institutes that want to sharpen their focus. [The book is for those] who want to find a ... solution to the problem of racism.-Back cover.