TRUE STORIES FROM THE NEAR SOUTH is a collection of short fi ction set for the most part in the rural Mid-South. Some of the stories have more urban settings, but all take place in that long-ignored and little-understood area of America where the South meets the mountains. In time, they are set in the mid-twentieth century. They span the period from early industrialization to the invasion of modern American culture carried on the wings of television. Some are sad and some funny, but all tell of a people lost in the middle of American culture.

Interested in journalism and creative writing and want to write a book? Read inspiring stories and practical advice from America’s most respected journalists. The country’s most prominent journalists and nonfiction authors gather each year at Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Telling True Stories presents their best advice—covering everything from finding a good topic, to structuring narrative stories, to writing and selling your first book. More than fifty well-known writers offer their most powerful tips, including: • Tom Wolfe on the emotional core of the story • Gay Talese on writing about private lives • Malcolm Gladwell on the limits of profiles • Nora Ephron on narrative writing and screenwriters • Alma Guillermoprieto on telling the story and telling the truth • Dozens of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists from the Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and more . . . The essays contain important counsel for new and career journalists, as well as for freelance writers, radio producers, and memoirists. Packed with refreshingly candid and insightful recommendations, Telling True Stories will show anyone fascinated by the art of writing nonfiction how to bring people, scenes, and ideas to life on the page.

One book containing the ENTIRE four books of the House on South Street series in one place! Added insight and comments make this collection a worthwhile addition to your library. Read it again and again...

Since its inception in the early 1830s, southern frontier humor (also known as the humor of the Old Southwest) has had enduring appeal. The onset of the new millennium precipitated an impressive rejuvenation of scholarly interest. Beyond Southern Frontier Humor: Prospects and Possibilities represents the next step in this revival, providing a series of essays with fresh perspectives and contexts. First the book shows the importance of Henry Junius Nott, a writer virtually unknown and forgotten who mined many of the principal subjects, themes, tropes, and character types associated with southern frontier humor, followed by an essay addressing how this humor genre and its ideological impact helped to stimulate a national cultural revolution. Several essays focus on the genre's legacy to the post-Civil War era, exploring intersections between southern frontier humor and southern local color writers--Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Sherwood Bonner. Mark Twain's African American dialect piece "A True Story," though employing some of the conventions of southern frontier humor, is reexamined as a transitional text, showing his shift to broader concerns, particularly in race portraiture. Essays also examine the evolution of the trickster from the Jack Tales to Hooper's Simon Suggs to similar mountebanks in novels of John Kennedy Toole, Mark Childress, and Clyde Edgerton and transnational contexts, the latter exploring parallels between southern frontier humor and the Jamaican Anansi tales. Finally, the genre is situated contextually, using contemporary critical discourses, which are applied to G. W. Harris's Sut Lovingood and to various frontier hunting stories.

As a cop in the small town of Kaufman, Texas for over 20 years, Captain Black has seen his share of the sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, side of every day life. In his book "Captain Black- True Stories of a Small Town Cop" he takes you along with him as he deals with everything from an angry elderly woman with a sledgehammer and a dead mouse, to the hunt for a cold-blooded assassin who gunned down Kaufman County Assistant District Attorney Mark Hasse on the courthouse square, and the desperate attempt to find the killer after he struck again, viciously murdering the District Attorney Mike McClelland, and his wife Cynthia, inside their Forney, Texas home. If you think that small town cops only write tickets and drink coffee, you will definitely change your outlook after reading this book!

Blackfella's Point lies on the Towamba River in south-eastern New South Wales. This work is a history for every Australian who is interested in the story of settler-Australia's relations with indigenous people, what happened between them, and how they came to confront the truth about their past.

“[TRUE SOUTH] does several things at once. On one level, it’s a biography . . . On another, it’s a lucid recap of many of the signal events of the civil rights movement . . . A warm and intelligent book.”—The New York Times “No one is better suited to write this moving account of perhaps the greatest American documentary series ever made. . . . [Else] tells the story with the compassion and eloquence it deserves.”—Adam Hochschild, author of KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST, BURY THE CHAINS, and TO END ALL WARS The inside story of Eyes on the Prize, one of the most important and influential TV shows in history. Published on the 30th anniversary of the initial broadcast, which reached 100 million viewers. Henry Hampton’s 1987 landmark multipart television series, Eyes on the Prize, an eloquent, plainspoken chronicle of the civil rights movement, is now the classic narrative of that history. Before Hampton, the movement’s history had been written or filmed by whites and weighted heavily toward Dr. King’s telegenic leadership. Eyes on the Prize told the story from the point of view of ordinary people inside the civil rights movement. Hampton shifted the focus from victimization to strength, from white saviors to black courage. He recovered and permanently fixed the images we now all remember (but had been lost at the time)—Selma and Montgomery, pickets and fire hoses, ballot boxes and mass meetings. Jon Else was Hampton’s series producer and his moving book focuses on the tumultuous eighteen months in 1985 and 1986 when Eyes on the Prize was finally created. It’s a point where many wires cross: the new telling of African American history, the complex mechanics of documentary making, the rise of social justice film, and the politics of television. And because Else, like Hampton and many of the key staffers, was himself a veteran of the movement, his book braids together battle tales from their own experiences as civil rights workers in the south in the 1960s. Hampton was not afraid to show the movement’s raw realities: conflicts between secular and religious leaders, the shift toward black power and armed black resistance in the face of savage white violence. It is all on the screen, and the fight to get it all into the films was at times as ferocious as the history being depicted. Henry Hampton utterly changed the way social history is told, taught, and remembered today.

Combining history with discussions of dramatic cinema, Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies examines how film has portrayed Latin America from the late fifteenth century to the present. The book opens with an introduction on the visual presentation of the past in the movies, while the rest of the book consists of essays that explore the best feature films on Latin America from the professional historian's perspective.

What is the role of the church in society? What role did the church play in South Africa ? during apartheid, in the struggle against apartheid and during the period of transformation? The essays collected and published in this volume deal with questions such as these. They are all occasional pieces. They were written over two decades and reflect the times in which they originated ? always intended for specific audiences, always addressing issues of the particular moment.

What does it mean to be Reformed Christians in the world today ? and in Africa and South Africa? What does it mean to commemorate the legacy of John Calvin (1509-1564) after 500 years ? in a modern world characterised by democracy, by popular notions of human dignity and human rights, by worldwide struggles for individual freedoms and for social justice, by a global economy in crisis ? when social historians argue about the lasting contribution of Calvin and his followers precisely with respect to all these modern phenomena? The 28 essays by Dirkie Smit selected for this volume deal with such questions.