Born In The Briar Patch

The strange phenomenon of 'Striking Back' is explained to a bewildered Emily Bottomsley when her newly born son is obviously not Caucasian, although both parents are.

The Born in the Briar Patch saga continues in this revised version of Beneath the Flowering Flamboyants, now called Briar Patch 2. Strange things are happening in the Bottomsley and Bertrand households. A face from the past re-enters the picture throwing everything in total disarray and also bringing death, deceit and destruction.

Relates how the wily Brer Rabbit outwits Brer Fox who has set out to trap him.

This book is the story of the authors quest to understand her family history. She tries to untangle the briars of the past by tracing lines of cause and effect back to the early 1800s. As slaveholders, her South Carolina ancestors lived inside a psychological briar patch of American history. Through family documents and cultural studies, the author explores the likely results of slaveholding upon the family character as it passes from parents to children. History participates in shaping the moral psychology of a Southern family through five generations. Deep within the briar patch lies the will to survive. Belief in ones own goodness is necessary to survival. The author considers evidence of her familys self-professed virtuesphysical bravery, nurturing, and purityand locates their roots partly in slaveholding. Her family may have needed to intensify certain qualities as if they were extreme virtues, in order to reassure themselves of their own goodness while they were participating in slavery and Jim Crow. These unspoken depths of the briar patch may also have produced stories about blacks and whites that turn and twist so as to reassure whites that they were themselves good. Into the Briar Patch interrogates the roots of racism and the interplay of culture and soul. The psychological entanglements of slavery seem to have brought about both good and bad in family history, both fruit and thorns. The family tree becomes the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Each branch bends differently, and each family story sounds its own wistful, amusing, tragic, zealous, or ironic tone. Kirkus Discoveries praises the book as an expansive, accomplished memoir with succinct, rich language that rings in ones ear like a wind chime gently stirred by a slow breeze. Madelon Sprengnether, memoirist and Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, writes that Into the Briar Patch is a profound meditation on the mixture of good and evil and praises the authors compelling . . . labor to achieve not only clear-eyed understanding of the past, but also compassion for all of the (living and dead) players involved. Further information about Into the Briar Patch is at http://www.mariannregan.com.

“America's best storyteller.” —The New York Times Book Review From Edgar Award-winning author Ross Thomas comes Briarpatch, a thrilling mystery of one man’s personal mission to find justice for his family. Now the basis for the USA Network television series executive produced by Sam Esmail, creator of Mr. Robot. A long-distance call from his small Texas hometown on his birthday gives Benjamin Dill the news that his sister Felicity—born on the same day exactly ten years apart—has died in a car bomb explosion. She was a homicide detective who had perhaps made one enemy too many over the course of her career. Unwilling to let local law enforcement handle the investigation, Dill arrives in town that night to begin his dogged search for his sister’s killer. What he finds is no surprise to him as he begins to unravel town secrets, because Benjamin Dill is never surprised at what awful things people will do. Featuring an Introduction by New York Times bestselling author Lawrence Block Edgar Award Winner for Best Novel

Stories from the classic Afro-American tales about Br'er Rabbit and his friends and enemies. Tar Baby is a collection of the some of the finest of these often surreal and grotesque stories, in the orginal African American dialect.

DIVFocuses on the socially relevant aspects of Hip Hop music: its treatment of the identity of the black subject in a white society, new definitions of blackness and its commercialization./div