Behind And Beyond The Pine Curtain

Jacqueline Keys was ostracized from her small hometown of Pine Springs, Texas when she was seventeen, sent away because she was gay. Her family was the largest employer in the county, owning Pine Springs Lumber, and her father was mayor of this small town. Her mother could not accept the fact that her only child was gay, could not tolerate the gossip about her family. So, with a hundred dollars in her pocket and a one-way bus ticket out of town, Jacqueline was told not to come back until she had come to her senses. And that included being prepared to marry the son of a business associate of the family. Fifteen years later—long after she'd hitch-hiked to Los Angeles, long after she'd worked nights to put herself through college, and long after she'd written her first best seller, No Place For Family—Jacqueline is persuaded to go back to the tiny town of Pine Springs after her father's death. The quick trip she'd envisioned for the funeral turns into weeks as she learns her father's business is suddenly hers to manage. And she is also again face-to-face with the woman who, as a teen, had been Jackie's first crush. She and Kay had been inseparable as kids, and later as teens. They find themselves falling back into their old habits, and Jackie is soon fighting the same feelings she'd had when she was seventeen. But living behind the pine curtain, Kay is afraid of her love for Jackie, afraid of what her family will say, afraid of how the town will react. Jackie refuses to hide, refuses to crawl back into the closet, so once again, she leaves Pine Springs...alone.

Buoyed by his remarkable extended family, Thomas B. Hargrave, Jr., came of age during the turbulent decades of the Great Depression and World War II. He attended nine segregated public schools, served in a segregated Air Force, and ultimately graduated from college in 1951. He confronted the barriers of racism, intolerance, and injustice, earning his membership in the vanguard of the Civil Rights movement. In his memoirs, he shares honest recollections of the segregated society of his youth and how his early experiences shaped his outlook on life. Behind the Magnolia Curtain serves as his legacy to a new generation who will continue the quest for justice.

When the gun smoke cleared, four men were found dead at the hardware store in a rural East Texas town. But this December 1934 shootout was no anomaly. San Augustine County had seen at least three others in the previous three years, and these murders in broad daylight were only the latest development in the decade-long rule of the criminal McClanahan-Burleson gang. Armed with handguns, Jim Crow regulations, and corrupt special Ranger commissions from infamous governors “Ma” and “Pa” Ferguson, the gang racketeered and bootlegged its way into power in San Augustine County, where it took up robbing and extorting local black sharecroppers as its main activity. After the hardware store shootings, white community leaders, formerly silenced by fear of the gang’s retribution, finally sought state intervention. In 1935, fresh-faced, newly elected governor James V. Allred made good on his promise to reform state law enforcement agencies by sending a team of qualified Texas Rangers to San Augustine County to investigate reports of organized crime. In East Texas Troubles, historian Jody Edward Ginn tells of their year-and-a-half-long cleanup of the county, the inaugural effort in Governor Allred’s transformation of the Texas Rangers into a professional law enforcement agency. Besides foreshadowing the wholesale reform of state law enforcement, the Allred Rangers’ investigative work in San Augustine marked a rare close collaboration between white law enforcement officers and black residents. Drawing on firsthand accounts and the sworn testimony of black and white residents in the resulting trials, Ginn examines the consequences of such cooperation in a region historically entrenched in racial segregation. In this story of a rural Texas community’s resurrection, Ginn reveals a multifaceted history of the reform of the Texas Rangers and of an unexpected alliance between the legendary frontier lawmen and black residents of the Jim Crow South.

Early this century Enrico, a young intellectual, leaves the city of Gorizia with its abundant population and culture, to spend several years living on the Patagonian pampas, alone with his ancient Greek texts, his flocks and, every now and then, a woman. He has been taught by his closest friend, Carlo, a philosopher/poet who commits suicide in his early twenties, to search for an authentic life, free of social falsehoods. But in his search for this unattainable goal, Enrico destroys every chance he has of a normal existence. This is portrait of a world in ferment, a decaying empire shaken by war and revolution, and a life-long search for meaning.

The Tree of Gernika: a Field Study of Modern War was published in 1938. It is G. L. Steer's masterpiece. Martha Gellhorn famously wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt: 'You must read a book by a man names Steer: it is called The Tree of Gernika. It is about the fight of the Basques - he's the London Times man - and no better book has come out of the war and he says well all the things I have tried to say to you the times I saw you, after Spain. It is beautifully written and true, and few books are like that, and fewer still deal with war. Pleas get it.' As Paul Preston says in his We Saw Spain Die, 'Martha Gellhorn's judgement has more than stood the test of time.' In his introduction, Nick Rankin writes.' The Tree of Gernika tells how Euzkadi, the democratic republic that the Basques created in their green homeland by the Bay of Biscay, fought for freedom and decency in an atrocious civil war. After a year of struggle, blockaded by sea, bombed from the air, fighting against overwhelming odds in their own hill, the Basques in the end lost to Franco's forces - but they lost honourably, without resorting to murder, torture and treachery.' It was Steer who alerted the world to the destruction of Gernika (Basque spelling), Guernica (Spanish spelling). It was the most important dispatch of his life, run by both The Times and The New York Times. Nick Rankin rightly describes The Tree of Gernika as 'a masterpiece of narrative history and eyewitness reporting by someone close to the key events . . .'

“They tried siege ladders last night, but we were warned and shot naphtha flares into the city. The archers kneel behind the upper rampart and, as the Lady Im’Annas, our Seer, walks past, they rise up and shoot over her head. The Parthians are too superstitious to even try to shoot at her...” The prophetess, Serah, daughter of Asher, arrives at the temple in AD 70, so does the Roman general, Pompey, but unlike him, she does not leave.

Beyond the Pampas is an exploration of the lives of the descendents of nineteenth century Welsh settlers in Argentina. Herrad discovers a fascinating melding of Welsh and Spanish language cultures through which she explores the nature of heritage and identity. Her expectations are further challenged by the plight of Patagonia's indigenous peoples - the Tehuelche and Mapuche - with the land-related cultures and oppression by European settlers. This is an additional prism through which to view history, as is the difference Herrad discovers between metropolitan Buenos Aires and the rural hinterland. And the whole is underpinned by Herrad's personal journey of self-discovery, from an abusive childhood in Germany to acceptance in the communities of Wales and Patagonia. Herrad's openness to new experience and her wonder at the natural world result in a rich and evocative depiction of the exotic places in which she finds herself, from camping under the stars in the Andes to whale-watching on the Atlantic coast, and from the Welsh-speaking tea rooms of Chubut to the museums of lost Indian peoples.