Long before he became a celebrity by being depicted as John Keating in the Dead Poets Society, Sam Pickering lived an ordinary childhood in the South. This memoir, extraordinarily told, is Pickering’s crowning moment to his long, literary career. Told with honesty, warmth, and integrity, he tells his story through his eighth grade year, focusing on family, growing up, and centers on finding his self. For Pickering, family is everything.

Lamar Plunkett’s is a story that yearns to be told. Even so, it is clear that the course of Lamar Plunkett’s labors and the wide-ranging focus of his devotion can never be captured in a word or even a volume of words. His life is larger than language. Lamar Plunkett’s story is filled with imagination and spontaneity, unfettered joy and difficult pain. It is the story of family and friends, of governors and presidents, of governing and gently guiding, of building businesses and strengthening institutions. It is the story of a person who has reached beyond the limits and conditions that we meet every day to create new expectations and to set people’s sight on new possibilities.

Born in 1861, eldest in a while, middle-class Southern family that lost everything in the Civil War, Richard Russell grew up consumed with ambition to make a name for himself. His dream was to found an outstanding family and to hold the three highest offices in Georgia: chief justice of the Supreme Court, governor, and United States senator. In striving for these ambitions, he married twice and ran for public office seventeen times.

This is the story of Glenn Hinson’s life—A Miracle of Grace— “for I stand with mouth agape as I look back from where I am at age eighty toward where my story began.” With degrees from some of the world’s most noted schools (Washington University in St Louis, Southern Seminary, Oxford University), Hinson has taught in some of America’s most distinguished educational institutions (Southern Seminary, Wake Forest University, Catholic University of America, Notre Dame, Emory University), and has played a modest role in some of the most momentous ecumenical developments in Christian history since the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Who could have foreseen much less predicted any of those happenings from a glance at his early years growing up in dire poverty in the Missouri Ozarks during the Great Depression?

Referred to by the late Jerry Wexler as one of the men most responsible for the Southern Rock sound that came out of Macon, Georgia, in the ’70s, Johnny Sandlin’s music career began in the early ’60s playing with many legendary musicians, including fellow HourGlass band members, Paul Hornsby, Pete Carr and Gregg and Duane Allman. A Capricorn studio rhythm section player, he later became a recording engineer, producer and vice-president of Capricorn Records and head of A&R. Sandlin also produced, mixed, and mastered albums for the Allman Brothers Band, Gregg Allman, Gregg and Cher, Richard Betts, Johnny Jenkins, Elvin Bishop, Wet Willie, Bonnie Bramlett, Alex Taylor, Cowboy, Delbert McClinton, Widespread Panic and many others.

This book traces the life of Isidor and Ida Straus, both German Jewish immigrants who arrived as children in America in the early 1850s. Isidor’s father, Lazarus, was an itinerate peddler in Georgia, but within one generation the family became the wealthy owners of Macy’s Department Store in New York. A Titanic Love Story follows the Strauses’ life from Talbotton, Georgia, where an anti-Semitic incident caused them to move to nearby Columbus. The devastation of Columbus at the end of the Civil War brought the family to New York, where Isidor met and eventually married the young Ida Blun. The Strauses were wealthy Jews within their New York community, and as people committed to the welfare of their family, their city, their country, and those less fortunate than themselves, they dealt with their own grief, illness, and occasional brushes with anti-Semitism. Ironically, their final happy days in the south of France lead to their unexpected sailing on the Titanic.

Back to the Garden: The Goal of the Journey is the sixth book in the Journey series by beloved Southern author Jackie K. Cooper. The stories in this new book, as well as those in the past books, are based on Cooper’s memories of his life in the South. Each story emphasizes an event in Cooper’s journey through life and builds an overall picture of a man who is trying to live a life that will get him “back to the garden” where he will be eternally happy as well as at peace. The stories vary in their portrayal of this everyman’s ability to deal with the humorous and the dramatic events we all encounter on our journeys.

Cancer and Healing: Memoirs of Gratitude and Hope provides first-person glimpses into the cancer experiences of eighteen Baptists. In fact, every person connected with this book, including the publishing director, editor, and writers, has had and/or currently has cancer. Their very lives comprise the primary resources of this work. They share passionately about their own survival experiences and compassionately for those who do not survive and for those for whom the announcement of cancer may picture into their tomorrows. These writers, male and female, white and black, live in ten states. They have suffered various cancers: carcinoma, leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, melanoma, and others, which have affected many parts of their bodies and emotions. They have not written to make money. All royalties from sales of this book will be donated to the American Cancer Society.

A biography of Georgia congressman Carl Vinson, one of the most important and influential individuals in US naval affairs. He not only mastered the traditions, processes, and rules of the House of Representatives where he served for a half century, but also acquired a vast and detailed knowledge of naval matters (and later the armed services in general).

Ceremony of Innocence addresses what society owes its youngest generation, especially with respect to a humanities education, i.e. an education for freedom. Roger Sharpe expresses a genuine and well-informed concern for the influence of political and religious extremists’ attacks on public education, its consequences for children of poor and working class families, and long-term implications for democratic government.