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This classic story of a boy, a dog, and small-town America is "a rich experience all around.... Skip turns out to be a dog worth writing about.... I'd take him home in a shot" (The New York Times Book Review). In 1943 in a sleepy town on the banks of the Yazoo River, a boy fell in love with a puppy with a lively gait and an intelligent way of listening. The two grew up together having the most wonderful adventures. My Dog Skip belongs on the same shelf as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Russell Baker's Growing Up. It will enchant readers of all ages for years to come. A major motion picture form Warner Brothers, starring Kevin Bacon, Diane Lane, Luke Wilson, Frankie Muniz, and "Eddie" from the TV show Frasier (as Skip), and produced by Mark Johnson (Rain Man).
At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris found a living emblem of that baroque strain in the American character called "southern." Beginning on the summer practice fields, Morris follows Marcus Dupree through each game of his senior varsity year. He talks with the Dupree family, the college recruiters, the coach and the school principal, some of the teachers and townspeople, and, of course, with the young man himself. As the season progresses and the seventeen-year-old Dupree attracts a degree of national attention to Philadelphia neither known nor endured since "the Troubles" of the early sixties, these conversations take on a wider significance. Willie Morris has created more than a spectator's journal. He writes here of his repatriation to a land and a people who have recovered something that fear and misdirected loyalties had once eclipsed. The result is a fascinating, unusual, and even topical work that tells a story richer than its apparent subject, for it brings the whole of the eighties South, with all its distinctive resonances, to life.
A father and son's eloquent portrait and personal evocations of modern Mississippi An exerpt from the book: "Through the years two of the most singular extremes have been the desire, on the one hand, to dwell forever with all the myths and trimmings of a vanished culture which may never have truly existed in the first place, certainly not the way we wished it to, and the frantic compulsion, on the other, to reforge ourselves as an appendage of the capitalistic, go-getting, entrepreneurial North. . . . Between these two extremes there have been complex lights and shadings, and considerable ambivalence and suffering. Mississippians watch the same television as other Americans, frequent the same shopping malls and national franchise chainstores and fast-food establishments, and live in the same kind of suburbias. . . . At the new century it is the juxtapositions of Mississippi, emotional and in remembrance, and the tensions of its paradoxes that still drive us crazy. . . . In my work on this book certain ironies never failed to tease me." -- Willie Morris, 1999 Few writers have ever approached their native terrains with such an inclusive and compassionate understanding as Willie Morris. This book, his last, circles back home where he started. To love it and discover it one more time, he and his son David Rae take us on a trip through contemporary Mississippi. Who could express so passionately an understanding of the Mississippi landscape? Who could capture so unerringly the state's contrasting and often contradictory faces? For his readers the answer is Willie Morris. For Morris it is his photographer son. Surveying the familiar yet always strangely evocative panorama that became his literary terrain, My Mississippi contemplates the realities of the present day, assesses the most vital concerns of the citizens, gauges how the state has changed, and beholds what Mississippi is like as it enters the twenty-first century. This southern homeland to which Morris returned after terminating his career as a New York editor remained for him a tantalizing mystery, the touchstone for all his thoughts, and one of the last unique places in America. For Morris, despite its flaws, Mississippi is beloved. With father and son in their peregrinations we witness what they see and hear -- "the bugs on our windshield in the Delta springtime, the off-key echoes of high-school bands from the little Piney Woods football fields in the autumn, the supple twilights and sultry breezes on 'the Coast,' the hunting camps and picnics, and parades and pilgrimages, the catfish ponds and graveyards, the roadhouses and joints near the closing hour, the art galleries and concert halls, the riverboat casinos and courthouse squares, the historical landmarks of the old and the industrial complexes of the new." "It has been a pleasure," Morris says, "more than that, an honor, to collaborate with my son on this project." The son grew up in New York City, seeing his father's native land from the perspective of an outsider. As an adult he has chosen to live in or near Mississippi and has spent the past twenty years traveling and photographing the state. In a thoughtful and provocative photographic narrative entitled "Look Away," he presents striking, full-color images of his Mississippi. This complementary collaboration of father and son unites their separate visions and shared love of a place that remains infinitely intriguing for everyone. Willie Morris (1934-1999) wrote many books, including North Toward Home, The Courting of Marcus Dupree, and After All, It's Only a Game (all available from the Univer-sity Press of Mississippi). David Rae Morris is a photojournalist who lives and works in New Orleans. His photos have appeared in Time, Newsweek, USA Today, The New York Times, and many other magazines and newspapers.
Autobiography -- World War II Why did the German people tolerate the Nazi madness? Maria Ritter's life is haunted by the ever-painful, never-answerable German Question. Who knew? What was known? Confronting the profound silence in which most postwar Germans buried pain and shame, she attempts in this memoir to give an answer for herself and for her generation. Sixty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, she reflects on the nation's oppressive burden and the persecution of the contemporary consciousness. 'We received what we deserved, ' my grandfather said after the war, and I believed him. His stare out the window spoke of bitterness and solemn resignation in the face of God's punishment and pity for us all. In probing the dark shadows of wartime, she reconstructs the voice of her childhood. With a determined search for remnants of her past during a visit to her homeland, Ritter retrieves memories and emotions from places, personal stories, and letters. As she interweaves them with events in her family's struggle to survive the war and its aftermath, she creates a tragic tapestry. She recalls the weary odyssey from Poland to Leipzig with refugees in 1943 and remembers being sheltered there beside her grandfather. She returns to Dresden to rekindle memories of the firebombing in 1945. She revisits the remote Saxony countryside where she and her mother crossed the border from East to West Germany in flight from the Communists in 1949. She relives the pain of learning that her father will never return from the war. On a Memorial Day many years later, Ritter's longstanding, unresolved grief overflows as she writes a posthumous letter to him. She suffers in the heartbreaking memory of her valiant mother, who overcame loss and grief along the road to freedom and a new home. Ritter's memoir sweeps through German history of the 1930s and '40s as she meditates on how she and her people figure in the tragic story of defeat and debacle. In her recollections, in listening to the voices of her kin, and in speaking out about the past, she finds the humane way to healing and reconciliation. Maria Ritter is a clinical psychologist in San Diego, California.
Fear and What Follows is a riveting, unflinching account of the author's spiral into racist violence during the latter years of desegregation in 1960s and 1970s Baton Rouge. About the memoir, author and editor Michael Griffith writes, “This might be a controversial book, in the best way—controversial because it speaks to real and intractable problems and speaks to them with rare bluntness.” The narrative of Parrish's descent into fear and irrational behavior begins with bigotry and apocalyptic thinking in his Southern Baptist church. Living a life upon this volatile foundation of prejudice and apprehension, Parrish feels destabilized by his brother going to Vietnam, his own puberty and restlessness, serious family illness, and economic uncertainty. Then a near-fatal street fight and subsequent stalking by an older sociopath fracture what security is left, leaving him terrified and seemingly helpless. Parrish comes to believe that he can only be safe by allying himself with brute force. This brute influence is a vicious, charismatic racist. Under this bigot's terrible sway, Parrish turns to violence in the street and at school. He is even conflicted about whether he will help commit murder in order to avenge a friend. At seventeen he must reckon with all of this as his parents and neighbors grow increasingly afraid that they are “losing” their neighborhood to African Americans. Fear and What Follows is an unparalleled story of the complex roots of southern, urban, working-class racism and white flight, as well as a story of family, love, and the possibility of redemption.
William Weaks Morris was a writer defined in large measure by his Southern roots. A seventh generation Mississippian, he grew up in Yazoo City frequently reminded of his heritage. Spending his college years at the University of Texas and at Oxford University in England gave Morris a taste of the world and, at the very least, something to write home about. This volume is a comprehensive reference work dealing with Willie Morris' life and works. It is also a literary biography based on hundreds of primary sources such as letters, newspaper articles and interviews. The principal focus is on Morris' literary legacy, which includes works such as North Toward Home, New York Days and My Dog Skip.
Lying in a hospital bed, José P. Ramirez, Jr. (b. 1948) almost lost everything because of a misunderstood disease. When the health department doctor gave him the Handbook for Persons with Leprosy, Ramirez learned his fate. Such a diagnosis in 1968 meant exile and hospitalization in the only leprosarium in the continental United States—Carville, Louisiana, 750 miles from his home in Laredo, Texas. In Squint: My Journey with Leprosy, Ramirez recalls being taken from his family in a hearse and thrown into a world filled with fear. He and his loved ones struggled against the stigma associated with the term “leper” and against beliefs that the disease was a punishment from God, that his illness was highly communicable, and that persons with Hansen's disease had to be banished from their communities. His disease not only meant separation from the girlfriend who would later become his wife, but also a derailment of all life's goals. In his struggle Ramirez overcame barriers both real and imagined and eventually became an international advocate on behalf of persons with disabilities. In Squint, titled for the sliver of a window through which persons with leprosy in medieval times were allowed to view Mass but not participate, Ramirez tells a story of love and perseverance over incredible odds.