Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P470
ISBN: 9780881464498
Price: $20.00
Alexander Smith stated that a good essayist needed “an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things.” Arthur Benson seconded the idea, saying an essayist needed a “far-ranging curiosity.” For three decades Sam Pickering has written essays, his words rolling in a fine frenzy over ordinary life discovering the marvelous and the absurd. His curiosity ranges, but it also rumpuses and rollicks. He wanders the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, rural Connecticut, farmland in Nova Scotia, and islands in the sun. Strangers tell him their life stories—tales that are almost as odd as the fictional characters he meets. He runs half-marathons and wins prizes, but finishes so late in the day that he misses award ceremonies. His good friend David tells him, “Sam, if you weren’t so damn smart, you would have been a great success.”
Add smiles and laughter, a smidgen of melancholy, and a pinch or two of happy lies, and you have Pickering the essayist.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: HH1014
ISBN: 9780881468120
Price: $29.00
In 1994 Georgia Tech was a good regional technological university, but the outgoing president left under a cloud of problems with financial systems, federal audits, deferred maintenance, threats to accreditation, and the looming commitment to serve as the Olympic Village for the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games. As the first alumnus of Georgia Tech to serve as president, G. Wayne Clough was determined to find the means to solve these problems and save the reputation of the university. Believing Georgia Tech had enormous untapped potential, Clough set out to use his experience at four comprehensive universities to change the course of the university for the future. It would come down to a set of key decisions, gaining support for them, and executing with persistence. When it was all said and done, Georgia Tech would be ranked among the top ten public universities in the country and among the top thirty in the world.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H817
ISBN: 9780881462180
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $35.00
The Tifts of Georgia is richly illustrated with charts, maps, and original photographs. This history of an important Georgia family should be of special interest to professional and amateur historians, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, and genealogists.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P679
ISBN: 9780881469073
Price: $20.00
Jackie K. Cooper has spent the last three decades of his life gathering his memories of growing up in the South. He has studied the various seasons of his life and having reached the winter season, he offers reflections on lessons learned, the people who have influenced him, the role of God's hand in his journey, and the good fortune with which he has been blessed.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P544
ISBN: 9780881466157
Price: $18.00
Part memoir, part essay collection, part spiritual journal, THIS GLADDENING LIGHT offers a unique perspective on the interconnectedness of universal themes--doubt and devotion, childhood and parenthood, disconnection and ecological mindfulness, anguish and empathy--all told at the level of the ground.
This much-anticipated nonfiction debut from Christopher Martin is, ultimately, a work of belonging. Through narrative prose that moves between a rain-soaked Appalachian cove, Thoreau’s hut site at Walden Pond, hospital rooms in Atlanta and Cherokee County, Civil War battlefields crossed by highways, and the suburbanized, ore-red hills of Northwest Georgia, Martin paints a spirituality of the ordinary, of the creaturely world.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H876
ISBN: 9780881464610
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $30.00
Thomas Grantham (1633/34–1692) provided important leadership as an English nonconformist and General Baptist polemicist and messenger in the second half of the seventeenth century. Grantham was baptized around 1652 in the Baptist church at Boston, Lincolnshire, and became one of the most significant Baptist figures of the period, yet no major historical study of Grantham has appeared until now.
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Product Code: P283
ISBN: 9780865548589
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $30.00
Thomas R. R. Cobb (1823-1862), a Georgia jurist who, perhaps more than any other one person, influenced the form that the “second revolution” took in Georgia (1860-1861), has been described as a prototype of a Southern intellectual. A product of the “Old South,” Cobb’s influence upon national events (up to and during the Civil War, especially in Georgia) was considerable. Cobb was a “representative Southerner” whose ideas “expressed the trends then current in Southern thought.” This investigation of the life and influence of Thomas R. R. Cobb provides significant insight into the attitudes of his time.
Cobb’s multifaceted involvements--in legal, educational, and moral reform; revivalism; the “positive good defense” of slavery; secession; and the Civil War--make him a doubly interesting important figure worthy of serious investigation. The present study is just such a serious, well-researched, and well-written investigation of Cobb, and amply provides further insight into the life and times of that “Late Great Unpleasantness” (secession and Civil War) that is such an important part of the history of the United States.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H792
ISBN: 9780881461572
Product Format: Hardback
Availability: Not currently available. ( Backorder policy)
Price: $35.00
Born in 1867 just west of Hayesville, North Carolina, George W. Truett grew up to be one of the outstanding Baptist preachers of the twentieth century. Best known for his advocacy of religious liberty, Truett also helped found Baylor Hospital in Dallas. Less known about Truett was his understanding of stewardship.
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Product Code: H897
ISBN: 9780881465136
Price: $25.00
Success requires the relentless yearning and courage of countless generations for a family to reach a culminating moment of great contribution and distinction. With the birth of James T. McAfee, Jr., in 1939, such fulfillment coalesced. Over the span of the next six decades, Jim McAfee emerges as a significant leader within the healthcare industry, as well as a generous and visionary contributor to higher education. Drawing on family memoirs and a cache of personal interviews, Scott Walker recounts the career of Jim McAfee, and the impact of his life on Belmont University, Mercer University, and Union University.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H952
ISBN: 9780881466621
Price: $30.00
The core question of this book: how a great lawyer who comes to represent important causes, emerges out of the racist, paternalistic, and self-perpetuating establishment of rural Georgia in the 1950s? What about Tommy Malone led him to take on the power structure in his community and begin representing people who were injured against prominent doctors and hospitals? It wasn't money because there wasn't any money to be made at that time. The answers are as varied as human experience, but undoubtedly, Malone sensed a "guiding hand" directing him to the good. There was no teacher or mentor to illumine the path forward, just the gradual accretion of experience, knowledge, insight, and pain on a sensitive soul, kindling fierce passion and righteous anger.
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Product Code: P507
ISBN: 9780881465310
Price: $24.00
In Watershed Days, the reader embarks on a wide array of adventures shared in seasonal order over a period of two years, 2005-2007, yet spanning in memory back to the author’s youth. The twenty-four adventures are woven into a subtle, cohesive whole, providing a textured portrait of a young man, his family, and their evolving intimacy and distance with each other and the natural world, the 18-acre homestead to which they have just moved and started working, as well as the woods and rivers of Virginia’s Jefferson National Forest just down Arcadia Road.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P596
ISBN: 9780881467307
Price: $20.00
WHILE THERE WERE STILL WILD BIRDS is a personal history of Southern quail hunting as it was lived at three different South Carolina quail hunting clubs and by related dog trainers, hunting guides, and hunters. The author’s father, Richard E. Rankin, Sr., belonged to the first hunting club in Kline, South Carolina, and was a founding partner in the second hunting club, the Quail Roost Hunt Club, outside Manning, South Carolina. The third club featured was the Foreston Hunt Club, an adjoining neighbor of the Quail Roost Hunt Club. As both a family member, hunt club partner, and historian, Richard E. Rankin, Jr. tells this story as both a participant and as an objective observer.
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