(FRESHWATER ROAD) The Essential Civil-Rights Reading List
"Tensions both physical and psychic inform Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas, which may well be the finest novel about the civil-rights era. With all due respect to Ernest J. Gaines, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman takes an episodic, biopic approach to black history, embodying it in a single woman who conveniently lives for a century. Nicholas, instead, telescopes her story into the three months of 1964’s “Freedom Summer” and the flyspeck hamlet of Pineyville, Mississippi. Into it comes Celeste Tyree, a child of the black middle class from Detroit and the University of Michigan. Celeste is fully aware of her mixed motives—selfless idealism on the one hand, a selfish desire to build her racial credentials on the other—and she is shocked by both the white violence all around and the frightened timidity of many of Pineyville’s blacks. Perhaps Nicholas’s experience as an actress (Room 222, In The Heat of the Night) is what endowed her writing with its deep understanding of plot and character. Whatever the source of her talents, in my reading experience, few books have so artfully entwined a coming-of-age saga with the awakening of moral conscience." read more......
(HIDDEN VALOR) Nancy Wake, Australia's greatest World War II heroine and a prominent figure in the French Resistance known as the "The White Mouse" for her ability to evade the Germans, has died in London. read more......
(COVERT)The paperback edition of COVERT was launched in a special ceremony in late June at the NBA Hall of Fame. Scott/Burns & Appledown Films were principals in attendance.
(COVERT) This NBA ref, who knows the combination to the hurt locker, helps Iraq veterans cope with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
(COVERT) Bob Delaney and the Hall of Fame. read more......
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