Summary

The narratives throughout Gary Fincke’s sixth collection of short stories contain newsworthy events that are chronicled secondhand: the shooting of a policeman, the murder of a house flipper, the firing of a teacher for punching a violent student, the accidental drowning of a gay man in a flood, and a fire somewhat accidently set by a juvenile smoker in a school.

Despite these surprising events, the narrator of each story is an ordinary person caught up in the action but preoccupied by other things, whether zombie movies, collecting unusual words, the oddity of other people’s sexual habits, or what to do in retirement. 

These shocking incidents become both central and peripheral to the narrative, as Fincke portrays the fluctuating emotions and self-protective reflections of fathers, sons, and husbands, creating a world where individuals rarely understand each other, yet still arrive at moments of compassion, tolerance, perseverance, and familial love.

Contents

Coming Soon.    

Author

Gary Fincke is the Charles Degenstein Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. Winner of the 2003 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the 2003 The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, and the 2010 Stephen F. Austin Poetry Prize for recent collections. He has published twenty-seven books of short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction as well as the novel How Blasphemy Sounds to God. He is the author of The Proper Words for Sin, a finalist for the 2014 Paterson Fiction Prize.

Reviews

"A Room of Rain is a group of seamless short stories, by an old master of the form.  Gary Fincke has never hesitated to ask hard questions in his work, and these stories are determined to take the toughest situations by the horns."
Madison Smartt Bell is the author of twelve novels, including the Haitian Revolutionary trilogy of All Soul's Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and The Stone That The Builder Refused

For years, Gary Fincke has quietly built a reputation as one of the nation's finest storytellers. This glorious collection shows him at the peak of his powers--funny, gritty, provocative."
Cary Holladay, author of The Deer in the Mirror

"Gary Fincke is one of the most reliable and prolific writers out there, and A Room of Rain is clearly one of his strongest collections. In this world that seems so quick to stick labels on everything, Fincke goes around ripping off all the stickers. He convincingly blurs the line between what is taboo and what is not, refusing to allow readers to back away into safety; these stories illustrate the notion that we are all have taboo thoughts, that beneath the surface, none of us are “ordinary,” none of us “pure.” At his best, he reminds me of Richard Yates—Fincke flat out knows how to write."
Jim Daniels, author of Eight Mile High and other collections

"This collection is provocative yet subtle; gritty yet humorous. The characters are round and the short stories are complete, though often feel like the tip of an iceberg. I wanted more because of how drawn I was to the characters, not because the tales left me unsatisfied. These stories continue to stick with me long after closing the book, beautifully rendered reminders of what we each hold untold."
Genevieve Shifke Ali, Independent Publisher
 

Summary

Riding on Comets is the true story of an only child growing up in a working-class family during the 1950s and ‘60s. 

As the family storyteller, Cat Pleska whispers and shouts about her life growing up around savvy, strong women and hard-working, hard-drinking men. Unlike many family stories set within Appalachia, this story provides an uncommon glimpse into this region: not coal, but an aluminum plant; not hollers, but small-town America; not hillbillies, but a hard-working family with traditional values. 

From the dinner table, to the back porch, to the sprawling countryside, Cat Pleska reveals the sometimes tender, sometimes frightening education of a child who listens at the knees of these giants. She mimics and learns every nuance, every rhythm—how they laugh, smoke, cuss, fight, love, and tell stories—as she unwittingly prepares to carry their tales forward, their words and actions forever etched in her mind. And finally, she discovers a life story of her own. 

Contents

Introduction

                        IMAGES

Chapter 1        No Salt

Chapter 2        Trick or Treat

Chapter 3        A Tone

Chapter 4        Give Me My Hat

Chapter 5        Big Earl’s

Chapter 6        A Brush with the Law

Chapter 7        In Mommaw’s Kitchen

                        AWAKENING

Chapter 8        What We Called Home

Chapter 9        From a Time Before

Chapter 10      Night Light

Chapter 11      Cicada Buzz

                        AWARENESS

Chapter 12      I Spy

Chapter 13      Shelter

Chapter 14      Back Home

Chapter 15      Devil Faces

Chapter 16      Something Gathers ‘Round Me

Chapter 17      House of Leaves

Chapter 18      Plunder

REACTION

Chapter 19      Alarm Clock

Chapter 20      My Civic Duty

Chapter 21      The Nervous Hospital

Chapter 22      My Kingdom for a Horse

Chapter 23      Night on Cheat Mountain I

Chapter 24      Night on Cheat Mountain II

Chapter 25      CarniVAL

Chapter 26      War

Chapter 27      The Sailor man

                        LOSS

Chapter 28      In the Cellar

Chapter 29      Reckoning

Chapter 30      Exception to the Rule

Chapter 31      Charmed

Chapter 32      I’ve Drawed up a Mite

Chapter 33      900 Degrees Celsius

Chapter 34      Twin Haloes

Chapter 35      The Phone Rings

Chapter 36      Attention K-Mart Shoppers! Do the Dead Wear Underwear?

Chapter 37      We Shall Gather

Chapter 38      Riding on Comets

Chapter 39      Night on Cheat Mountain III

Chapter 40      Fall

                        STRENGTH

Chapter 41      Liminal

Chapter 42      Dragon’s Tale

Epilogue          
 

Author

Cat Pleska is a seventh generation West Virginian, and she is a writer, editor, educator, publisher, and storyteller. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College. She is an essayist for West Virginia Public Radio and a book reviewer for the Charleston Gazette. She coedited the anthology Fed from the Blade: Tales and Poems from the Mountains. Pleska has been published in literary magazines and newspapers throughout the Appalachian region. She lives in Scott Depot, West Virginia, with her husband, Dan, one dog, four cats, and with a daughter, Katie, in nearby St. Albans. 

Reviews

“In voice, in person, on the radio, on the page, Cat Pleska has for years been one of my favorite writers. I carry the rhythms of her honeyed voice inside me. I have felt the reassurance of her grandmother’s lap on the night-porch, listening to the thump of maternal heartbeats that made Cat feel safe then and forever, and I’ve been gripped by her father’s hands, less reliable but just as beloved, driving like crazy down Cheat Mountain. Cat herself stands fearless wherever she is among the grownups, the way only a greatly loved child can stand, alone on the front seat of the truck, curious to see roosters fighting while her grandpa goes inside at the bootlegger’s. I’ve tagged along after her mother (who made her bed tight enough to bounce a dime off) and her aunt as they circle the old family homestead, remembering their own childhoods. Never patronizing or pathologizing, always with compassion, knowing that her amazing, enduring, flawed family gave her the gift of unconditional belonging, Cat Pleska tells the story of her people with steady awareness of their hardships and foibles, their greatness of heart, and the smoking or alcohol that killed some of them, cut off in the midst of their stories while their inheritor, Cat, listens and faithfully records their voices for herself, for them, and for us. I could read this writer’s words forever, and still want more."
Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America

"The gifts of Cat Pleska’s Riding on Comets are many: it is fresh, candid, gently humorous, tautly lyrical, and deeply moving.Cat Pleska writes masterfully and movingly about herself, her West Virginia home, and her colorful kin. But the greatest pleasure in reading Riding on Comets is that Pleska’s prose refuses to stay on the page. Rather, it insists on being read aloud and filling the room with its rich rhythms, resonances, syntax, and family diction. Cat Pleska is a natural, graceful, spellbinding storyteller."
Lisa Knopp, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte

“Cat Pleska’s memoir of a childhood lived among the ‘giants’ of her West Virginia family is by turns humorous, touching, and achingly beautiful. This is a storyteller who knows how to piece together shards of story into a brilliant mosaic of a life. A joy to read.”
Janice Gary is the author of Short Leash: A Memoir of Dog Walking and Deliverance, winner of two Silver 2014 Nautilus Awards and a 2014 Eric Hoffer Prize for Memoir.

“Riding on Comets is not only a personal memoir, it is the story of a family embedded in West Virginia for many generations. . . .Cat Pleska’s restrained but graceful prose allows us to witness four generations through the eyes of the author, first as a child and then through the years that followed as her people live, age, and die. The details Pleska offers have the immediacy of truths well told, with a resolute eye and spacious heart, neither shying away from family and personal dysfunction, nor sentimentalizing the bonds of fear and love that held her family together.”
Geoffrey Cameron Fuller is an author of the true crime Pretty Little Killers and the crime thriller Full Bone Moon

“This compelling memoir illumines a challenging childhood rooted in the town and countryside of West Virginia. It is an identifiably Appalachian life insightfully revealing a broader view of the region than stereotypes portray. It is, as well, pervaded with a razor-sharp honesty that brings heartfelt empathy to both the sweet and the wicked. I could not stop cheering for this spunky little girl who becomes a spirited and resourceful woman, a woman who never gives up on herself or those she loves.”
Marc Harshman, Poet Laureate of West Virginia and children’s book author

“Cat Pleska is a natural storyteller, a storied child. Growing up in West Virginia in the ‘50s and ‘60s, her life was steeped in family stories, and she was the one entrusted to retell them. Her own memories and experiences of small-town Appalachia deepen this candid and compelling coming-of-age memoir, and she captures our hearts in the process.”
Laura Treacy Bentley, author of The Silver Tattoo and Lake Effect

“Image by image, each unquestionably whole and mysterious. . . . Those images—her grandmother offering a ‘slice of apple from the edge of her knife,’ the ‘curing tobacco leaves hanging in bunches from the ceilings wooden beams’ in a long abandoned house, or her ‘Dad leaning over [her] mother's pristine, white enamel kitchen sink and throwing up blood’—tenderly sear themselves into both Cat’s heart and the reader’s.  All these images reflect, compound, and resonate with one another until they carry us forward like a leaf swirling in the October wind.”
Chris Green, Director of the Loyal Jones Appalachian Center, Berea College 

“Cat Pleska’s memoir seamlessly moves through moments in time to discover that her story is her family’s story of struggle and forgiveness against the backdrop of her native West Virginia mountains. Like stars that become constellations if we know how to look at them, this fine and engaging book shows us how to find and read the stories of our lives.”
Rob Merritt, author of The Language of Longing

“Sometimes comedic, sometimes heart wrenching . . . Cat Pleska writes with the graceful succinctness of a poet—whether she’s describing a bike ride home ‘pedaling fast against the dark’ or just listening to the peepers ‘calling out for someone to love them.’”
Cheryl Ware, author of Flea Circus Summer, Catty-Cornered, Venola in Love, Venola the Vegetarian, and Robert Price Has Head Lice

Summary

In Beowulf and the Grendel-kin: Politics and Poetry in Eleventh-Century England, Helen Damico presents the first concentrated discussion of the initiatory two-thirds of Beowulf’s 3,182 lines in the context of the sociopolitically turbulent years that composed the first half of the eleventh century in Anglo-Danish England.

Damico offers incisive arguments that major historical events and personages pertaining to the reign of Cnut and those of his sons recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, and major continental and Scandinavian historical texts, hold striking parallels with events and personages found in at least eight vexing narrative units, as recorded by Scribe A in BL, Cotton Vitellius A.xv, that make up the poem’s quasi sixth-century narrative concerning the fall of the legendary Scyldings. 

Given the poet’s compositional skill—widely relational and eclectic at its core—and his affinity with the practicing skalds, these strings of parallelisms could scarcely have been coincidental. Rather, Damico argues that examined within the context of other eleventh-century texts that either bemoaned or darkly satirized or obversely celebrated the rise of the Anglo-Danish realm, the Beowulfian units may bring forth a deeper understanding of the complexity of the poet’s compositional process.

Damico illustrates the poet’s use of the tools of his trade—compression, substitution, skillful encoding of character—to reinterpret and transform grave sociopolitical “facts” of history, to produce what may be characterized as a type of historical allegory, whereby two parallel narratives, one literal and another veiled are simultaneously operative. 

Beowulf and the Grendel-kin lays out the story of Beowulf, not as a monster narrative nor a folklorish nor solely a legendary tale, but rather as a poem of its time, a historical allegory coping with and reconfiguring sociopolitical events of the first half of eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon England.

Contents

Coming Soon.

Author

Helen Damico is Professor Emerita of English Medieval Language and Literature at the University of New Mexico, where she was twice selected as Outstanding Teacher and honored as UNM Presidential Teaching Fellow. She is a founder of its Institute for Medieval Studies, a recipient of the New Mexico Humanities Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Humanities, and a member of The Medieval Academy of America and recipient of its CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies. She is also an Honorary Member of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists. She edited the three volumes of Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Essays in the Formation of a Discipline and is the author of Beowulf’s Wealhtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition.

Reviews

"Debate about the dating of Beowulf has raged among scholars for many years, and it shows no sign of abating. The suggestion advanced here, with control, commitment, and clarity, is that the poem incorporates passages that can be read as allegories or reflexes of the period beginning with the Viking raids on England in the late tenth century, leading to the Danish conquest in 1016, and, following Cnut’s death in 1035, to the emergence of Queen Emma in a role that animates the joint and separate reigns of Harald Harefoot and Harthacnut. To say any more would be to spoil the ride. . ."
Simon Keynes, Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, University of Cambridge

“Damico makes an elegant and thought-provoking case for Beowulf as a political allegory of late Anglo-Saxon England. She weaves a subtle argument for her provocative thesis, and in doing so she illuminates not only the poem but the eleventh-century world of Cnut, Emma, and their offspring, the original audience for Beowulf and perhaps its hidden subject.”
R. M. Liuzza, University of Toronto

“Although paleographers have always included the early eleventh century in dating the script of the Beowulf manuscript, historians and literary scholars have studiously neglected this period in their otherwise wide-ranging theories on the composition of Beowulf.  Now Helen Damico has bravely ventured forth with the first book-length study of how the historical context of the manuscript might have influenced the making of the epic poem.  Thoroughly researched and cogently argued, Damico's revolutionary thesis and supporting documents demand the attention of all serious students of Beowulf.”
Kevin Kiernan, author of Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript, The Thorkelin Transcripts of Beowulf, Electronic Beowulf and Professor Emeritus, University of Kentucky

“Damico demonstrates that historical allegory need not be a passively reflexive or coyly cryptic mode of poetic invention, but can also serve as an imaginative technique of active political thought and critical analysis.”
Craig R. Davis,Professor of English Language & Literature and Comparative Literature, Smith College

Summary

This fourth Rural Sociological Society decennial volume provides advanced policy scholarship on rural North America during the 2010’s, closely reflecting upon the increasingly global nature of social, cultural, and economic forces and the impact of neoliberal ideology upon policy, politics, and power in rural areas.

The chapters in this volume represent the expertise of an influential group of scholars in rural sociology and related social sciences. Its five sections address the changing structure of North American agriculture, natural resources and the environment, demographics, diversity, and quality of life in rural communities.

Contents

Preface

Rural America in a Globalizing World:  Introduction and Overview

Conner Bailey, Leif Jensen & Elizabeth Ransom

Part I Changing Structure of Agriculture

Agriculture and Food in the 2010s, Alessandro Bonanno

1. Economic Concentration in the Agrifood System: Impacts on Rural Communities and Emerging Responses

Douglas H. Constance, Mary Hendrickson, Philip H. Howard, William D. Heffernan

2. The Declining Middle of American Agriculture: A Spatial Phenomenon

Amy Guptill and Rick Welsh

3. Land Ownership in American Agriculture

Douglas Jackson-Smith and Peggy Petrzelka

4. Mexican-born Farmworkers in U.S. Agriculture

Eric B. Jensen

5. Agricultural Technologies and the Structure of the North American Agrifood System

Leland L. Glenna and Christopher R. Henke

6. Food Safety and Governance of the Agrifood System

Michelle R. Worosz and Diana Stewart

7. Changing Animal Agriculture and the Issue of Farm Animal Welfare

Jeff Sharp and Dani Deemer

8. Agrifood Movements: Diversity, Aims, and Limits

Clare Hinrichs and John Eshleman

Part II Natural Resources and the Environment

Connections: The Next Decade of Rural Sociological Research on Natural Resources and the Environment, Louise Fortmann, Merrill Baker-Médard and Alice Kelly

9. Impacts of Climate Change on People and Communities of Rural America

Lois Wright Morton and Tom Rudel

10. Contemporary Water Issues in Rural North America

Courtney G. Flint and Naomi Krogman

11. Resource Dependency in Rural America: Continuities and Change

Richard S. Krannich, Brian Gentry, A.E. Luloff, and Peter G. Robinson

12. The Gulf: America’s Third Coast

Robert Gramling and Shirley Laska

13. Biofuels and Rural Communities: Promises, Pitfalls and Uneven Social and Environmental Impacts

Theresa Selfa and Carmen Bain

14. New Natural Gas Development and Rural Communities: Key Issues and Research Priorities

Abby Kinchy, Simona Perry, Danielle Rhubart, Richard Stedman, Kathryn Brasier, and Jeffrey Jacquet

15. Got Coal? The High Cost of Coal on Mining-Dependent Communities in Appalachia and the West

Suzanne E. Tallichet

Part III Population Change in Rural North America

Rural Population Change in Social Context, David L. Brown

16. Demographic Trends in Nonmetropolitan America: 2000 to 2010

Kenneth M. Johnson

17. Population Shifts Across U.S. Nonmetropolitan Regions

John Cromartie and Timothy S. Parker

18. Rural Families and Households and the Decline of Traditional Structure

Jessica A. Carson and Marybeth J. Mattingly

19. Children and Youth in Rural America

Diane K. McLaughlin and Carla Shoff

20. Concentrations of the Elderly in Rural America: Patterns, Processes and Outcomes in a Neoliberal World

Peter B. Nelson

21. New Rural Immigrant Destinations: Research for the 2010s

Martha Crowley and Kim Ebert

Part IV Diversity in Rural America

Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Sexuality in Rural America, Carolyn Sachs

22. The Status of African Americans in the Rural United States

John J. Green

23. Hispanic Immigration, Global Competition, and the Dairy Industry in Rural Communities

J.D. Wulfhorst, Priscilla Salant, Leigh A. Bernacchi, Stephanie L. Kane, Philip Watson, and Erinn Cruz

24. Native Nations in a Changing Global Economy

Sarah Dewees

25. The Past is the Present: Gender and the Status of Rural Women

Cynthia B. Struthers

26. Rolling in the Hay: The Rural as Sexual Space

Julie C. Keller and Michael M. Bell

27. Rural Poverty: The Great Recession, Rising Unemployment, and the Underutilized Safety Net

Jennifer Sherman

Part V Rural Economies, Community, and Quality of Life

Economic Change, Structural Forces and Rural America: Shifting Fortunes across Communities, Linda Lobao

28. Education and Schooling in Rural America

Kai A. Schafft and Catharine Biddle

29. Work in Rural America in the Era of Globalization

Tim Slack

30. Rural Entrepreneurship

Lori A. Dickes and Kenneth L. Robinson

31. Community Organization and Mobilization in Rural America

Cornelia Butler Flora and Jan L. Flora

32. Community as Moral Proximity: Theorizing Community in a Global Economy

Todd L. Goodsell, Jeremy Flaherty, and Ralph B. Brown

33. Food Insecurity and Obesity in Rural America: Paradoxes of the Modern Agrifood System

Keiko Tanaka, Patrick H. Mooney and Brett Wolff

34. Thinking About Rural Health

E. Helen Berry

35. Housing in Rural America

Katherine MacTavish, Ann Ziebarth, and Lance George

Author

Conner Bailey is Professor of Rural Sociology at Auburn University. He is a past President of the Rural Sociological Society. His primary research interests are in natural resources and the environment as well as questions of poverty and power in the southeastern United States.

Leif Jensen is Distinguished Professor of Rural Sociology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University. His primary interests are in rural sociology, social stratification, demography, and international development.

Elizabeth Ransom is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Richmond. Her primary research interests are in international development, global agriculture and food systems with an emphasis on Southern Africa, and science and technology studies especially in relation to agriculture and food. 

Reviews

Summary

On April 5, 2010, an explosion ripped through Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch Mine, killing twenty-nine coal miners. This tragedy was the deadliest mine disaster in the United States in forty years—a disaster that never should have happened. These deaths were rooted in the cynical corporate culture of Massey and its notorious former CEO Don Blankenship, and were part of an endless cycle of poverty, exploitation, and environmental abuse that has dominated the Appalachian coalfields since coal was first discovered there. And the cycle continues unabated as coal companies bury the most insidious dangers deep underground, all in search of higher profits, and hide the true costs from regulators, unions, and investors alike.

But the disaster at Upper Big Branch goes beyond the coalfields of West Virginia. It casts a global shadow, calling into bitter question why coal miners in the United States are sacrificed to erect cities on the other side of the world, why the coal wars have been allowed to rage, polarizing the country, and how the world’s voracious appetite for energy is satisfied at such horrendous cost.

With Thunder on the Mountain, Peter A. Galuszka pieces together the true story of greed and negligence behind the tragedy at the Upper Big Branch Mine, and in doing so he has created a devastating portrait of an entire industry that exposes the coal-black motivations that led to the death of twenty-nine miners and fuel the ongoing war for the world’s energy future.

This new paper edition contains a foreword by Denise Giardina that provides an update on Massey Energy and Donald Blankenship, Chairman and CEO of Massey Energy Company during the UBB disaster, and recounts her own experiences with Massey Energy and the United Mine Workers Association in the 1980s. This edition also includes a notes section and a bibliography.

Contents

Coming Soon.

Author

Peter A. Galuszka is a veteran journalist who has covered worldwide energy issues, especially coal, for several decades. A former West Virginia resident, he logged thousands of miles on the windy mountain roads of Central Appalachia and traveled to Mongolia, China, and Japan to track down the Massey story. The former Moscow bureau chief for BusinessWeek, he now lives in Chesterfield, Virginia.

Denise Giardina grew up in a coal camp in McDowell County, West Virginia. She is a writer, ordained Episcopal Church deacon, and community activist. Her novels include Storming Heaven and The Unquiet Earth, both of which are set in the Appalachian coalfields.

Reviews

Summary

At the turn of the 20^th century, the California dream was a suburban ideal where life on the farm was exceptional. Agrarian virtue existed alongside good roads, social clubs, cultural institutions, and business commerce. The California suburban dream was the ultimate symbol of progress and modernity.

California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory, and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State analyzes the growth, promotion, and agricultural colonization that fed this dream during the early 1900s. Through this analysis, Paul J. P. Sandul introduces a newly identified rural-suburban type: the agriburb, a rural suburb deliberately planned, developed, and promoted for profit. Sandul reconceptualizes California’s growth during this time period, establishing the agriburb as a suburban phenomenon that occurred long before the booms of the 1920s and 1950s.

Sandul’s analysis contributes to a new suburban history that includes diverse constituencies and geographies and focuses on the production and construction of place and memory. Boosters purposefully “harvested” suburbs with an eye toward direct profit and metropolitan growth. State boosters boasted of unsurpassable idyllic communities while local boosters bragged of communities that represented the best of the best, both using narratives of place, class, race, lifestyle, and profit to avow images of the rural and suburban ideal.

This suburban dream attracted people who desired a family home, nature, health, culture, refinement, and rural virtue. In the agriburb, a family could live on a small home grove while enjoying the perks of a progressive city. A home located within the landscape of natural California with access to urban amenities provided a good place to live and a way to gain revenue through farming.

To uncover and dissect the agriburb, Sandul focuses on local histories from California’s Central Valley and the Inland Empire of Southern California, including Ontario near Los Angeles and Orangevale and Fair Oaks outside Sacramento. His analysis closely operates between the intersections of history, anthropology, geography, sociology, and the rural and urban, while examining a metanarrative that exposes much about the nature and lasting influence of cultural memory and public history upon agriburban communities. 

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Bourgeois Horticulturists in an Agricultural Wonderland

Part One: The Suburban Ideal and the California Dream

The Market Revolution and Romanticism

Chapter One: The Suburban Ideal

Boosterism

Chapter Two: The California Dream

Part Two: Harvesting Suburbs

Suburban Definitions, Archetypes, and Limitations

Chapter Three: The Model Colony of Ontario as the Model Agriburb

Chapter Four: The Agriburbs of Sacramento

Welcome to the Growth Machine

Chapter Five: The Boosters

Part Three: Cultivating Memory

Coming to Terms with Memory

Chapter Six: The Ongoing Legacies of Boosterism

Chapter Seven: Collected Memory and the Continued Legacies of Boosterism

Conclusion: Harvesting Suburbs, Cultivating Memory

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Author

Paul J. P. Sandul is an Assistant Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University where he co-directs the public history program. Sandul is heavily involved in public history projects and local heritage organizations and oral history, which often provide opportunities for students, and serves on advisory committees and boards for both professional and local historical societies and journals.

Reviews

Summary

The Psalms of Israel Jones is the story of a father and son’s journey towards spiritual redemption. This novel tells the tale of a famous father trapped inside the suffocating world of rock and roll, and his son who is stranded within the bounds of conventional religion.

When Reverend Thomas Johnson receives an anonymous phone call, he learns his Dylanesque rock star father is acting deranged on stage, where he’s being worshipped by a cult of young people who slash their faces during performances. In his declining years, Israel Jones has begun to incite his fans to violence. They no longer want to watch the show—they want to be the show.

Eager to escape troubles with his congregation as well as gain an apology from his dad for abandoning his family, Reverend Thom leaves town and joins Israel Jones’s Eternal Tour. This decision propels him to the center of a rock and roll hell, giving him one last chance to reconnect with his father, wife, congregation—and maybe even God.

The Psalms of Israel Jones is the 2010 Hackney Literary Award winner for the novel.

Contents

Coming Soon.

Author

Ed Davis taught writing and humanities courses at Sinclair Community College in Dayton, Ohio for thirty-five years before retiring in 2011. He has also taught both fiction and poetry at the Antioch Writers’ Workshop and is the author of the novels I Was So Much Older Then and The Measure of Everything, four poetry chapbooks, and many published stories and poems in anthologies and journals. He is also the author of Time of the Light, a poetry collection. 

Learn more about Ed Davis on his website.

Reviews