The Chilean coup d'A(c)tat of 1973 was a watershed event in the history of Chile. It was also a defining moment in the life of writer Marjorie AgosA-n. This collection of prose vignettes and free verse draws upon her experiences as a child in Chile, an expatriate abroad, and a minority Jewaeven in the land she calls homeato create a striking portrait of a life of exile. The tone of the book varies as it lyrically explores the geography of Chile and weaves into it the themes of exile and oppression. At times the words become hymns to the physical beauty of her country, evoking the grandeur of this land extending to the southernmost tip of the world. At times they are intimate and melancholy, exploring personal and familial history through miniature portraits that reveal the pain of being different. Finally the tone becomes angry as she denounces the injustices committed against her friends and against the families of the disappeared during the seventeen-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Combining themes of memory, childhood, minority issues, Judaism, and political oppression, this collection contains some of AgosA-nas strongest work. Of Earth and Sea is a poetic autobiography that explores the world of Chile with eyes that see both despair and hope.
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This is a true story of the struggle, survival, and ultimate success of a large black family in south Alabama who, in the middle decades of the 20th century, lifted themselves out of poverty to achieve the American dream of property ownership. Descended from slaves and sharecroppers in the Black Belt region, this family of hard-working parents and their thirteen children is mentored by its matriarch, Moa, the author's great grandmother, who passes on to the family, along with other cultural wealth, her recipe for moonshine. Without rancor or blame, and even with occasional humor, ""The Pecan Orchard"" offers a window into the inequities between blacks and whites in a small southern town still emerging from Jim Crow attitudes. Told in straightforward prose, the story radiates the suffocating midday heat of summertime cotton fields and the biting winter wind sifting through porous shanty walls. It conveys the implicit shame in 'Colored Only' restrooms, drinking fountains, and eating areas; the satisfaction of a job well done recognized by others; the manners required of southern society; and the joyful moments, shared memories, and bonds that sustain a proud family.
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Big old trees inspire our respect and even affection. The poet Walt Whitman celebrated a Louisiana live oak that was solitary "in a wide flat space, / Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near." Groves and alleys of live oaks remain as distinctive landscape features on Louisiana's antebellum plantations, while massive individuals still cast their shade over churches, graveyards, parks, and roads. Cajuns have adopted the "Evangeline Oak" as one of their symbols. And the attachment that Louisianians feel for live oaks is equaled by that of Guatemalans for ceibas, the national tree of Guatemala. Long before Europeans came to the Americas, the ceiba, tallest of all native species, was the Mayan world tree, the center of the universe. Today, many ceibas remain as centers of Guatemalan towns, spreading their branches over the central plaza and marketplace.In this compelling book, Kit Anderson creates a vibrant portrait of the relationship between people and trees in Louisiana and Guatemala. Traveling in both regions, she examined and photographed many old live oaks and ceibas and collected the stories and symbolism that have grown up around them. She describes who planted the trees and why, how the trees have survived through many human generations, and the rich meanings they hold for people today. Anderson also recounts the natural history of live oaks and ceibas to show what human use of the landscape has meant for the trees. This broad perspective, blending cultural geography and natural history, adds a new dimension to our understanding of how big old trees and the places they help create become deeply meaningful, even sacred, for human beings.
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• The smoke of a distant shore
• The cradle
• Big feeds
• South by Southwest
• Pig sandwiches
• A moveable feast
• Backyard bliss
• The color of cue
• Of pits and poets
• Sauced
• Trophies as tall as steers
• A world of barbecue.

Barbecue: It's America in a mouthful. The story of barbecue touches almost every aspect of our history. It involves indigenous culture, the colonial era, slavery, the Civil War, the settling of the West, the coming of immigrants, the Great Migration, the rise of the automobile, the expansion of suburbia, the rejiggering of gender roles. It encompasses every region and demographic group. It is entwined with our politics and tangled up with our race relations. Jim Auchmutey follows the delicious and contentious history of barbecue in America from the ox roast that celebrated the groundbreaking for the U.S. Capitol building to the first barbecue launched into space almost two hundred years later. The narrative covers the golden age of political barbecues, the evolution of the barbecue restaurant, the development of backyard cooking, and the recent rediscovery of traditional barbecue craft. Along the way, Auchmutey considers the mystique of barbecue sauces, the spectacle of barbecue contests, the global influences on American barbecue, the roles of race and gender in barbecue culture, and the many ways barbecue has been portrayed in our art and literature. It's a spicy story that involves noted Americans from George Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama.
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• Bette Davis --Myrna Loy
• Paulette Goddard
• Alice Fay
• Ruby Keeler
• Ginger Rogers
• Aaron Copland
• Joan Blondell
• Ingrid Bergman
• Alec Guinness
• Peter Pears
• Charlotte Rampling
• Joan Fontaine
• Maggie Smith
• Louise Brooks
• James Merrill
• Barbara Stanwyck
• Olivia de Havilland
• Mia Farrow
• Linda Ronstadt
• Irwin Shaw
• Iris Murdoch
• Henry Fonda
• William Wyler
• Vincente Minnelli
• Laurence Olivier
• Julian Schnabel
• Ellsworth Kelly
• Jill St. John
• Allen Ginsberg
• Jack Nicholson
• Helmut Newton
• Jerry Brown.

This work comprises a collection of celebrity portraits, rendered both in ink drawings and in prose. Internationally known portraitist Don Bachardy made each drawing from life in the course of a few hours, sketching the actors, writers, artists, composers, directors and Hollywood elite he knew and lived among with his partner, Christopher Isherwood. Then, he made notes in his diaries on the experience of making each portrait. Made in the 1970s and 1980s, Bachardy's drawings and prose sketches capture many celebrities near the end of their careers (Ruby Keeler, Vincente Minelli, Laurence Oliver) and others at the height of their stardom (Jack Nicholson, Mia Farrow, Linda Ronstadt). Bette Davis offers to cook him lunch and haplessly overboils the beets, sits for three drawings and renders her judgement: "Yup, that's the old bag". Barbara Stanwyck threatens that she might scandalize him with her cussing. Aaron Copeland grouses, "Well, it makes me look benign". Ellsworth Kelly admits to being a fan of "The Road Warrior". Jerry Brown commissions an official portrait.
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• My Naturalist Mother-- Records-- The Other Fort Worth Basses-- On Willow Creek-- Deer Camp-- This Year's Hunt-- The Deer Pasture-- The Silent Language-- A Texas Childhood-- Colter's Creek Buck-- Aoudads-- Mary Katherine's First Deer-- Credits.
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In November, countless families across Texas head out for the annual deer hunt, a ritual that spans generations, ethnicities, socioeconomics, and gender as perhaps no other cultural experience in the state. Rick Bass's family has returned to the same hardscrabble piece of land in the Hill Country--"the Deer Pasture"--for more than seventy-five years. In A Thousand Deer, Bass walks the Deer Pasture again in memory and stories, tallying up what hunting there has taught him about our need for wildness and wilderness, about cycles in nature and in the life of a family, and particularly about how important it is for children to live in the natural world. The arc of A Thousand Deer spans from Bass's boyhood in the suburbs of Houston, where he searched for anything rank or fecund in the little oxbow swamps and pockets of woods along Buffalo Bayou, to his commitment to providing his children in Montana the same opportunity--a life afield--that his parents gave him in Texas. Inevitably this brings him back to the Deer Pasture and the passing of seasons and generations he has experienced there. Bass lyrically describes his own passage from young manhood, when the urge to hunt was something primal, to mature adulthood and the waning of the urge to take an animal, his commitment to the hunt evolving into a commitment to family and to the last wild places.
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"Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary" is an insider's view of the film studios of the 1920s - and the first from a secretary's perspective. Rich in gossip, it is also an eyewitness report of Hollywood in transition. In the summer of 1924, Valeria Belletti and her friend Irma visited California, but instead of returning home to New York, the twenty-six-year-old Valeria decided to stay in Los Angeles. She moved into the YWCA, landed a job as Samuel Goldwyn's personal and social secretary and proceeded to trip over history in the making.As she recounts in her dozens of letters to Irma, Valeria Belletti encountered every type of Hollywood player in the course of her working day: moguls, directors, stars, writers, and hopeful extras. She shares news about Valentino's affairs, Sam Goldwyn's bootlegger, the development of the "talkies, " her own role in helping to cast Gary Cooper in his first major part and much more - often in hilarious detail. She writes of her living and working conditions, her active social life, and her hopes for the future - all the everyday concerns of a young working woman during the jazz age. Alternating sophistication with naivete, Valeria's letters intimately document a personal journey while giving us a unique portrait of a fascinating era.
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• Try to keep your head in the game
• Lapdog
• Turtle and hare
• Pudge
• Designer dogs
• The White Sox
• The Big I
• Growing as you go
• New Mexico? Billboards
• Rain watching
• Saguaro Angst
• A drive down the literary road
• Angel fire
• Corrales
• The tootsie roll parade
• Trickster in the front yard
• Corrales (hearts) coyotes
• Dusty and desolate
• Rabinowitz's Albuquerque
• William deBuys and the Bosque
• Old Town
• Borsalinos and mothballs
• War news
• Harry Kinney
• Dr. Ed Staley, D.V.M.
• Harold and Val
• Norman Zollinger
• Pat McKernan
• Dr. Steven D. Hsi
• Bill Buchanan
• Tony Hillerman
• Ted and Fred
• Sonny Humphrey
• Wind poets
• The Yellow oboe
• Pawhuska's little girl
• Friendship
• Liz Thomson, police officer
• Dr. Lori Arviso Alvord
• Sandra Begay-Campbell
• Milton Hancock, heart transplant patient
• Milton's new heart
• Milton goes home
• Pay the thunder no mind
• Mia Brink, teacher
• Alex Jordan's protesters
• Alex Jordan's father
• Alex Jordan's platoon
• Richard Berthold, provocateur
• Michael Campana
• Bryan Patterson
• Sweet profanity
• Bryan walks into a courtroom
• Cruising the galaxy from the row
• Tumbling tumbleweeds
• Notah Begay III
• Dancing in the moonlight
• Language barrier
• Boos make us seem small
• Bosque birds
• No grudges
• Agron Agushi writes to us
• Snow and its snobs.

Over twenty years ago, Jim Belshaw compiled some of his newspaper columns for a book called "Semi-Native". As he is not a native New Mexican, Belshaw's wife, who is a native, decided he was entitled to that status. As Belshaw notes, 'Something about the place [New Mexico] gets inside of you and the next thing you know you've become a Semi-Native. I still am'. Belshaw has been a columnist for the "Albuquerque Journal" for nearly three decades, writing about the people who have shared a portion of their lives with him. Conversational in tone, some humorous and some tragic, these columns invite the reader to participate in the discussion. For this sequel to "Semi-Native", Belshaw returned to the columns he has written since that book appeared, selecting his favorites. He has arranged the stories into groupings dealing with his adopted state and hometown, friends (old and young) who have passed, and people and acquaintances with whom he can still commune.
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With this collection of more than 600 oral histories recalling the Great Depression, Bindas provides a detailed, personal chronicle of the 1930s from a rural Southern perspective and captures a historical era and its meaning. The Depression altered the basic structure of American society and changed the way government, business, and the American people interacted. Bindas finds his narrators saw the federal government as an agent of positive change. Though their stories reflect the general despair of the era, they also reveal the hope they found through the New Deal and their determination, after the Depression, to "create a country where security...was paramount." Collected over a period of four years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, these reminiscences from people in rural Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee are primarily concerned with lessons learned. Looking back on their youth, the narrators explore how the Depression defined their lives and their experiences, from subsistence and government assistance, to food and home life, fear and privation. Revealing a common consciousness among people who witnessed profound change and endured, these stories underscore the meaning of collective memory. Their simple tales form the larger story of how the American people continued to rely on the individualistic ethos even as they adopted and accepted the new ideology of social cooperation. Illustrated with Farm Security Administration (FSA) black and white photographs, this book is a vital testament to survivors of the Depression. Students and scholars of both the 1930s and oral history methodology will welcome this volume.
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"Things You Need to Hear" gathers memories of Arkansans from all over the state with widely different backgrounds. In their own words, these people tell of the things they did growing up in the early twentieth century to get an education, what they ate, how they managed to get by during difficult times, how they amused themselves and earned a living, and much more. Some of Margaret Bolsterli's "informants, " as she calls them, are famous (Johnny Cash, Maya Angelou, Levon Helm, Joycelyn Elders), but many more are not. Their vivid personal stories have been taken from published works and from original interviews conducted by Bolsterli. All together, these tales preserve memories of ways of life that are compelling, entertaining, and certainly well worth remembering.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)