Simon & Schuster – serie

From the smoke-filled coffeehouse of the 1950s folk scene, where she first performed, to the racially tense South of the early sixties, bringing support to terrorized African-Americans with Martin Luther King, Jr. Joan has been involved with some of the most important political movements including the 2008 Presidential elections. Joan always took her social and political beliefs on-stage with her. The Woodstock performance where she sang to thousands in the middle of the night while six months pregnant became one of the stand-out and iconic performances of that period. In France, Italy, and Spain, her concerts made headlines for the political confrontations they sparked and in a church in Poland she sang to the brave workers of Solidarity. Whether she is recounting her stormy love affair with a young, undiscovered, and very ambitious Bob Dylan and how, years later, they fought bitterly over her affair with a woman. Or her marriage to David Harris and the pain of their break up, Joan displays both the openness and vulnerability that have touched us in her music and the passion and integrity that have marked her politics.

Explores the current debate about what constitutes a classic and the revolutionary power great works of literature contain.

In his fortieth year, Chris Offutt returns to his alma mater, Morehead State University, the only four-year school in the Kentucky hills. He envisions leading the modest life of a teacher and father. Yet present-day reality collides painfully with memory, leaving Offutt in the midst of an adventure he never imagined: the search for a home that no longer exists. Interwoven with this bittersweet homecoming tale are the wartime stories of Offutt's parents-in-law, Arthur and Irene. An unlikely friendship develops between the eighty-year-old Polish Jew and the forty-year-old Kentucky hillbilly as Arthur and Offutt share comfort in exile, reliving the past at a distance. With masterful prose, Offutt combines these disparate accounts to create No Heroes, a profound meditation on family, home, the Holocaust, and history.

Here in trade paperback, Rappleye's fresh and panoramic view of the American founding fathers' era, told through the lives of John and Moses Brown of Providence, one a slaver, the other an abolitionist. In 1774, as the New World simmered with tensions that would lead to the violent birth of a new nation, two Rhode Island brothers were heading toward their own war over the issue that haunts America to this day: slavery. Set against a racial backdrop teeming with radicals and reactionaries, visionaries, spies, and salty sea captains, Sons of Providence is the biography of John and Moses Brown, two classic American archetypes bound by blood yet divided by the specter of more than half a millions Africans enslaved throughout the colonies. John is a profit-driven robber-baron running slave galleys from his wharf on the Providence waterfront; his younger brother Moses is an idealist, a conscientious Quaker hungry for social reform who--with blood on his own hands--strikes out against the hypocrisy of slavery in a land of liberty.Their story spans a century, from John's birth in 1736, through the revolution, to Moses' death in 1836. The brothers were partners in business and politics and in founding the university that bears their name, but for the Browns as for the nation, the institution of slavery was the one question that admitted no middle ground. The brothers' dispute takes the reader from the sweltering decks of the slave ships to the taverns and town halls of the colonies and shows just how close America came to ending slavery eighty years before the conflagration of civil war. This dual biography is drawn from voluminous family papers and other primary sources and is a dramatic story of an epic struggle for primacy between two very different brothers. The story of their collaboration and their conflict has a startlingly contemporary feel. And like any good yarn, the story of the Browns tells us something about ourselves.About the AuthorCharles Rappleye grew up in New England, attended school in Wisconsin, and lives in Los Angeles. He spent most of the past decade as news editor at LA Weekly, where he won awards as a columnist and for investigative journalism. This is his second book.

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