Pillar of Fire

Author: Taylor Branch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416558705
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 868

Book Description
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, the second part of his epic trilogy on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Civil Rights Movement. In the second volume of his three-part history, a monumental trilogy that began with Parting the Waters, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Taylor Branch portrays the Civil Rights Movement at its zenith, recounting the climactic struggles as they commanded the national stage. Beginning with the Nation of Islam and conflict over racial separatism, Pillar of Fire takes the reader to Mississippi and Alabama: Birmingham, the murder of Medgar Evers, the "March on Washington," the Civil Rights Act, and voter registration drives. In 1964, King is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Branch's magnificent trilogy makes clear why the Civil Rights Movement, and indeed King's leadership, are among the nation's enduring achievements. In bringing these decades alive, preserving the integrity of those who marched and died, Branch gives us a crucial part of our history and heritage.

Parting the Waters

Author: Taylor Branch
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780333497005
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 1064

Book Description
This book chronicles the Civil Rights struggle, from the twilight of the Eisenhower years through King's fiery political baptism, the ascension of John F.Kennedy and ultimately the dawning of the New South.

At Canaan's Edge

Author: Taylor Branch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416558713
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1915

Book Description
At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 is the final volume in Taylor Branch's magnificent history of America in the years of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War, recognized universally as the definitive account and ultimate recognition of Martin Luther King's heroic place in the nation's history. The final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental, much honored, and definitive history of the Civil Rights Movement (America in the King Years), At Canaan's Edge covers the final years of King's struggle to hold his non-violent movement together in the face of factionalism within the Movement, hostility and harassment of the Johnson Administration, the country torn apart by Vietnam, and his own attempt (and failure) to take the Freedom Movement north. At Canaan's Edge traces a seminal era in our defining national story, freedom. The narrative resumes in Selma, crucible of the voting rights struggle for black people across the South. The time is early 1965, when the modern Civil Rights Movement enters its second decade since the Supreme Court's Brown decision declared segregation by race a violation of the Constitution. From Selma, King's non-violent Movement is under threat from competing forces inside and outside. Branch chronicles the dramatic voting rights drives in Mississippi and Alabama, Meredith's murder, the challenge to King from the Johnson Administration and the FBI and other enemies. When King tries to bring his Movement north (to Chicago), he falters. Finally we reach Memphis, the garbage strike, King's assassination. Branch's magnificent trilogy makes clear why the Civil Rights Movement, and indeed King's leadership, are among the nation's enduring achievements.

Parting the Waters

Author: Jeanne Damoff
Publisher: Winepress Publishing
ISBN: 9781579219505
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
When a tragic drowning accident leaves fifteen-year-old Jacob in a coma, the faith of his family and community is shaken to its foundation. Medical experts used phrases such as persistent vegetative state and said, Jacob will never wake up, but Jacob's parents knew God would have the final say. Without sugar-coating the realities of pain and suffering, Parting the Waters presents the heart-warming, true story of what can happen when a community rallies around one wounded family. While Jacob's parents struggle to preserve their faith and family, the prayers and innovative efforts of community members result in Jacob's gradual awakening. Each dramatic milestone in Jacob's recovery creates a new ripple, touching and changing many lives forever. Told from a mother's perspective, Parting the Waters is a poignant tale of unexpected beauty found in brokenness.

The King Years

Author: Taylor Branch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451662475
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 4

Book Description
The essential moments of the Civil Rights Movement are set in historical context by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the magisterial America in the King Years trilogy—Parting the Waters; Pillar of Fire; and At Canaan’s Edge. Taylor Branch, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning America in the King Years trilogy, presents selections from his monumental work that recount the essential moments of the Civil Rights Movement. A masterpiece of storytelling on race and democracy, violence and nonviolence, The King Years delivers riveting tales of everyday heroes whose stories inspire us still. Here is the full sweep of an era that transformed America and continues to offer crucial lessons for today’s world. This vital primer amply fulfills Branch’s dedication: “For students of freedom and teachers of history.”

A Long Walk to Water

Author: Linda Sue Park
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547251270
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
The New York Times bestseller A Long Walk to Water begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about two eleven-year-olds in Sudan, a girl in 2008 and a boy in 1985. The girl, Nya, is fetching water from a pond that is two hours' walk from her home: she makes two trips to the pond every day. The boy, Salva, becomes one of the "lost boys" of Sudan, refugees who cover the African continent on foot as they search for their families and for a safe place to stay. Enduring every hardship from loneliness to attack by armed rebels to contact with killer lions and crocodiles, Salva is a survivor, and his story goes on to intersect with Nya's in an astonishing and moving way.

The Dreamt Land

Author: Mark Arax
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1101875216
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Book Description
A vivid, searching journey into California's capture of water and soil—the epic story of a people's defiance of nature and the wonders, and ruin, it has wrought Mark Arax is from a family of Central Valley farmers, a writer with deep ties to the land who has watched the battles over water intensify even as California lurches from drought to flood and back again. In The Dreamt Land, he travels the state to explore the one-of-a-kind distribution system, built in the 1940s, '50s and '60s, that is straining to keep up with California's relentless growth. The Dreamt Land weaves reportage, history and memoir to confront the "Golden State" myth in riveting fashion. No other chronicler of the West has so deeply delved into the empires of agriculture that drink so much of the water. The nation's biggest farmers—the nut king, grape king and citrus queen—tell their story here for the first time. Arax, the native son, is persistent and tough as he treks from desert to delta, mountain to valley. What he finds is hard earned, awe-inspiring, tragic and revelatory. In the end, his compassion for the land becomes an elegy to the dream that created California and now threatens to undo it.

The Clinton Tapes

Author: Taylor Branch
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416594345
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 763

Book Description
Taylor Branch’s groundbreaking book about the modern presidency, The Clinton Tapes, invites readers into private dialogue with a gifted, tormented, resilient president. Here is what President Clinton thought and felt but could not say in public. This book rests upon a secret project, initiated by Clinton, to preserve for future historians an unfiltered record of presidential experience. During his eight years in office, between 1993 and 2001, Clinton answered questions and told stories in the White House, usually late at night. His friend Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch recorded seventy-nine of these dialogues to compile a trove of raw information about a presidency as it happened. Clinton drew upon the diary transcripts for his memoir in 2004. Branch recorded his own detailed recollections immediately after each session, covering not only the subjects discussed but also the look and feel of each evening with the president. The text engages Clinton from many angles. Readers hear candid stories, feel buffeting pressures, and weigh vivid descriptions of the White House settings. Branch's firsthand narrative is confessional, unsparing, and personal. The author admits straying at times from his primary role -- to collect raw material for future historians -- because his discussions with Clinton were unpredictable and intense. What should an objective prompter say when the President of the United States seeks advice, argues facts, or lodges complaints against the press? The dynamic relationship that emerges from these interviews is both affectionate and charged, with flashes of anger and humor. President Clinton drives the history, but this story is also about friends. The Clinton Tapes highlights major events of Clinton's two terms, including wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the failure of health care reform, peace initiatives on three continents, the anti-deficit crusade, and titanic political struggles from Whitewater to American history's second presidential impeachment trial. Along the way, Clinton delivers colorful portraits of countless political figures and world leaders from Nelson Mandela to Pope John Paul II. These unprecedented White House dialogues will become a staple of presidential scholarship. Branch's masterly account opens a new window on a controversial era and Bill Clinton's eventual place among our chief executives.

The Waters Between

Author: Joseph Bruchac
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781584650157
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
The time is ten thousand years ago and the place is the shores of Lake Champlain, a land inhabited by Abenaki communities who hunt, gather, and follow the cycles of their unspoiled natural world in relative harmony. Joseph Bruchac, a nationally renowned storyteller and writer of Native American tales, uses this setting not just to spin a compelling adventure yarn but also to re-create with grace, fullness, and clarity the cultural, social, and spiritual systems of these pre-contact Native Americans. In this third novel of his trilogy about the "people of the dawnland," the lake they call Petonbowk -- "the waters between" Vermont's Green Mountains and New York's Adirondacks -- holds both sustenance and danger, and Young Hunter, the "young, broad-shouldered man whose heart was good for all the people," is called upon to confront a dual menace. A "deepseer" or shaman, he must use his full powers first to comprehend the threats and then to defeat them. The lake, it seems, holds a huge water-snake monster that makes it impossible to reap the waters' bountiful harvest of fish and game. And, worse, a tortured outcast, Watches Darkness, has turned against his tribe and is using his deepseer's knowledge to perpetrate horrible acts of senseless evil: he destroys whole villages out of sheer malevolence; he literally eats his victims' hearts to absorb their powers; he kills his own grandmother without remorse. As the tension between hunter and hunted mounts, Bruchac seamlessly weaves stories within the story, the lore that connects the people to each other and to their heritage, so that the novel becomes not just an archetypal battle of good versus evil but a vivid depiction of traditional New England Indian culture in pre-Columbian times. Richly atmospheric, resonant with Native American spirituality, melodious with the rhythms of the Abenaki language, The Waters Between paints both an epic quest and a colorful portrait of "the lives of people living as human beings were told to live by the Talker. Never perfect, often failing, but always growing, always part of something larger than themselves, their varied heartbeats meshing together to make the one great, healthy heartbeat which was the Only People."

Where the Waters Divide

Author: Karen Berger
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780881504033
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
An account of the authors' walk across the Great Divide from Mexico to the Canadian border describes the people, the pertinent political and environmental issues, the history of the areas, and other important topics