Mary Brown – författare

Goldwork Embroidery by Mary Brown is the most comprehensive book on this ancient form of embroidery. The history of goldwork in Britain and Europe is illuminated with images in glorious full-colour of gold embroidered costumes and textiles held in museums and private collections, many never previously published or seen by the public. This book includes fifteen original projects that either reference historical examples or exhibit contemporary techniques for this form of embroidery.A beautiful book that covers every aspect of gold embroidery.

These beautifully crafted stories depict the changing relationships between black and white southerners, the impact of the civil rights movement, and the emergence of the New South. Mary Ward Brown is a storyteller in the tradition of such powerful 20th-century writers as William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, and Eudora Welty-writers who have explored and dramatized the tension between the inherited social structure of the South and its contemporary dissolution. With Tongues of Flame, her first collection of short stories, Brown bares the awkward, sometimes hopeful, and often tragic suffering of people caught in changing times within a timeless setting. Here we meet such memorable characters as a dying black woman who seeks the advice of a now-alcoholic white doctor whom she knew in better years; a young woman, jilted at the altar, driven crazy by an illuminated cross erected by the church opposite her house; and a 95-year-old woman buying a tombstone for her long-deceased husband only to discover that he had been adulterous throughout their marriage. Brown constructs her characters in a disarmingly plain style while breathing life into them with compassion and honesty as they confront the large moments of their lives. First published by E. P. Dutton in 1986 to immediate critical acclaim, Tongues of Flame won the 1987 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. The judges commended Brown for ""seeing life whole, without prejudice, without sentimentality, without histrionics. Her voice may be quiet-sometimes she speaks in a whisper-but her words are, nevertheless, always forceful, clear, and ultimately lasting."" With this new publication of Tongues of Flame and its inclusion in the University of Alabama Press's Deep South Books series, a whole new generation of readers may once more discover Mary Ward Brown's profound stories of pain, loss, and hope.

With the 11 stories in this popular collection, Mary Ward Brown offers her devoted fans a palette of true literary pleasures. The hallmarks of her style - the fully realized characters, her deep sensitivity, a defining sense of place and time - are amply employed to involve and delight the reader. All but one of the stories are set in Alabama. They deal with small but dramatic turning points in the lives of characters who happen to be southerners, many of them caught between Old South sensibility and New South modernity. Through their diverse voices, Brown proves herself a graceful and gifted storyteller who writes with an authoritative pen, inventing and inhabiting the worlds of her characters with insight, compassion, and wit. First published in cloth in 2002, the collection was greeted with national applause. Southern Living glowed, "Mary Ward Brown...creates stories with Southern charm and brilliance in this her second book. [She] mixes the tensions of family, economics, romance, and social standing to create stories faithful to the Black Belt and the complexities of the 'simple' life. She captures the decisive moment of a thought, a life, a relationship."The Birmingham News noted, "Ms. Brown's stories are small-town stories - gentle in the telling, colorful in description. Life is simple, slow, ritualistic - and regularly spiced with gossip. She takes us to the funeral of a town matriarch. We visit diners, a storefront church, parlors. We share precious memories of a way of life that is long gone." Steve Yates, writing for the Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger, understood, "Without fail, plainly told living truths from [the mouths of] printer's devils, insurance salesmen, widows, newspaper editors, waitresses, dirt farmers, and farm hands drive every story...We know we've met her people. Near story's end, we don't want to leave them behind. And long after we've set the book aside, we grow lonesome for them yet again."

Social Work and Social Welfare: A Practical Guide for Future Practitioners helps students become familiar with the field of social work and assess their genuine interest in becoming a social work professional.Students gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a social worker through readings exploring the field. The workbook exercises take learning a step further by giving students a feel for what social workers do on the job and helping them judge what practice area they might want to work in.The book includes theoretical perspectives for social workers, an assessment of at-risk populations, and a historical perspective on social welfare policy. Students also explore social work specialties such as family and children's services, mental health and health care, substance abuse services, and social work in the criminal justice system. Chapters include interest-building questions and target social work language.Well-suited to introductory social work courses, Social Work and Social Welfare gives students the opportunity to complete hands-on social work exercises that help them rehearse and practice the core skills needed to succeed in the social work profession.

Confessions of a Prison Chaplain explains the 'lifeline' provided by the work of the prison chaplaincy. Written by a Quaker chaplain (but equally compelling for all faith groups), it shows how important to prisoners contact can be  -  how chaplains fit into the ever-pressing world of prison regimes. Among the diverse topics covered are Christmas in prison, death in prison (or of a loved one on the outside) and learning in prison  -  as well as restorative justice (which is in line with the teachings of various faiths: as old as religion itself). As the author writes, prisoners are 'Children of God' no matter what their crime, how petty, serious or heinous. How to deal with those whose crimes are so distressing as to challenge this idea is also a feature of the book. It contains a chapter on life-sentence prisoners, those with only a distant and in some cases forlorn hope of release as well as telling the stories of individual prisoners, their time in prison and the 'calming' role of the chaplain when contrasted with the security pre-occupations and rule dominated routines of governors and prison officers.With a Foreword by Juliet Lyon, Director of the Prison Reform Trust, General Secretary of Prison Reform International and one of the UK's leading commentators on penal matters.