Cotton Pickin Southern Belle

You are a rich Southern Belle who has never had to work and everything is great, or is it? What was your life like before the riches? What did your ancestors have to do to achieve such wealth? What sacrifices were made on your behalf?

Interviews with the author of My Dog Skip and North Toward Home

You are invited to take a journey, along with the author, to her hometown in the American South, a unique culture of relative safety within a sheltered small town in the mid-twentieth century. You will discover a time when sorority girls were virgins, baton twirlers mattered, and Elvis Presley's hips were the wildest thing on the block. Against the backdrop of groundbreaking musical environments from Memphis, Tennessee to the Mississippi Delta, you will share stories that follow Elvis and his rise to fame through the eyes of his Graceland neighbors in the small suburb of Whitehaven. The author's mother, a young girl who was as much a celebrity in this small town as Elvis, reveals never-before-shared photographs and stories that chronicle a town, an extraordinary man, and a time forever lost to history, each on the brink of explosion and change.

For over 125 years, the Daily Tar Heel has chronicled life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at times pushed and prodded the university community on issues of local, state, and national significance. Thousands of students have served on its staff, many of whom have gone on to prominent careers in journalism and other influential fields. Print News and Raise Hell engagingly narrates the story of the newspaper's development and the contributions of many of the people associated with it. Kenneth Joel Zogry shows how the paper has wrestled over the years with challenges to academic freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, while confronting issues such as the evolution of race, gender, and sexual equality on campus and long-standing concerns about the role of major athletics at an institution of higher learning. The story of the paper, the social media platform of its day, uncovers many dramatic but perhaps forgotten events at UNC since the late nineteenth century, and along with many photographs and cartoons not published for decades, opens a fascinating window into Tar Heel history. Examining how the campus and the paper have dealt with many challenging issues for more than a century, Zogry reveals the ways in which the history of the Daily Tar Heel is deeply intertwined with the past and present of the nation's oldest public university.

Sarah Bird’s gutsy, sharp, and touching new novel opens at full speed. Bernadette "Bernie" Root, military brat, speaks. She has never really noticed what a peculiar bunch of nomads her eight-member Air Force family is (with the exception of her Post Princess sister, Kit), until the summer after her first year of college when she joins them at their new assignment: Kadena Air Base, Okinawa. Just as Okinawa turns out to be a sorry version of the Japanese paradise Bernie knew in her childhood at Yokota Air Base, her family, especially her once-beautiful mother, Moe, and her former spy-pilot father, Mace, seems to have been in decline since those glory days of the American Raj. Days when her mother was happy and their best friend, Fumiko, now lost to them, was the family’s maid. The worst part of Okinawa for Bernie, though, is realizing how perfectly she fits with her oddball family and how badly she needs to get out. So when a dance contest first prize, a trip to Japan,offers a chance to escape, she takes it, playing second banana to a third-rate comedian on a tour of Japan’s military bases. At their grand finale at the Yokota Officers’ Club, Fumiko finally reappears, and Bernie discovers the terrible price that is paid when the secrets nations hide end up buried within families. A brilliantly appealing novel whose energy, wit, and feeling have won for it (see back of the jacket) extraordinary advance praise.

After the Republicans win the presidency in November, 2000, a series of events precludes their taking over the White House. In the wake of two nuclear attacks on the United State, the country is vaulted into chaos. President Dick Atherton continues in office and leads the nation to a new Constitution and the birth of the United Socialist States of America. The USSA's first twenty years are tumultuous and greatly change the lives of all Americans.