Product Code: H909
ISBN: 9780881465457
Product Format: Book
Price: $35.00
Houston Hartsfield Holloway (1844–1917) was born enslaved in upcountry Georgia, taught himself to read and write, learned the blacksmith trade, was emancipated by Union victory in 1865, and served as an ordained traveling preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1870 to 1883. He devoted the remainder of his life to his family, his blacksmith trade, and his local church. Holloway’s 24,000-word autobiography offers a rare working-class perspective on life during some of the most transformative years of US history.
Footnotes provide supplementary biographical information for nearly two hundred relatives, neighbors, friends, and coworkers named in Holloway’s narrative. An appendix includes nineteen extended biographical sketches. The book is illustrated with photographs and three detailed maps of Holloway’s home neighborhoods and preaching assignments.
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Product Code: P457
ISBN: 9780881463934
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $20.00
Restless Fires provides a detailed rendering of John Muir’s thousand-mile walk to the Gulf based on both manuscript and published accounts. Hunt particularly examines the development of Muir’s environmental thought as a young adult.
This is one of the first books on John Muir’s thousand-mile walk that places his journey in the context of the Civil War and Reconstruction, to which Muir gave only passing witness.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H968
ISBN: 9780881466928
Price: $40.00
AN EDGEFIELD PLANTER AND HIS WORLD opens a window on the life of an elite family and its circle in a now iconic place, during a crystalizing decade of the Antebellum era. By the time he began a new diary volume in 1840, Brooks (1790-1851) was among the richest men in a South Carolina district known for its cotton-and-slave-generated wealth. His journal reveals Brooks’s attentiveness to his plantation and farms, self-image as a paternal master, religious sensibility, genteel but honor-bound bearing, personal and family connections, perspective on politics, and the effects of debilitating headaches.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H996
ISBN: 9780881467659
Price: $25.00
Cecilia Lawton's life was changed forever when the bloodiest war in American history began in 1861. The daughter of a wealthy Georgia plantation owner, she was married at the age of sixteen and went to live at her husband's plantation in South Carolina, but a few months later, she found herself fleeing from the army of General William T. Sherman as it ravaged the state. She observed the aftermath of this brutal campaign in Georgia and South Carolina, writing of what she saw in vivid, horrific detail. Told in her own words, this is the true story of Cecilia Lawton, a young woman who faced incredible challenges with determination and courage.
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Product Code: P502
ISBN: 9780881465211
Price: $24.00
A unique blend of memoir, literary appreciation, and travel narrative, Reading Life is a series of interrelated essays tracking the relationship between books and experience, dramatizing and reflecting on how stories lead us into the world, and how we transform that engagement with the world back into personal narrative.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P558
ISBN: 9780881466485
Price: $20.00
Founded in fieldwork and reflection, LOST PLACES follows the author from small towns and rural landscapes, through a transitional city neighborhood, to the challenging construction of an urban renewal loft, as she struggles to renovate living spaces and transform relationships after an early divorce. In a voice droll and lyrical by turns, Hankla charts a path through enigmatic encounters with snakes and contemplations of Thomas Jefferson's problematic biography homes, underground and ancient cities, Star Trek, the contradictory nature of Appalachia, desire, our families, spiritual callings, and definitions of home.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H783
ISBN: 9780881461497
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $60.00
Emily Chubbick Judson (1817–1854) was a nationally known writer (her pseudonym was Fanny Forrester) with pieces appearing alongside those by Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, and she walked in literary company second to none. Volume 2 consists of the early letters Emily Chubbick Judson from the years 1836 through 1845.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P436
ISBN: 9780881462623
Product Format: Paperback
Price: $20.00
Father Mercer tells the story of the life and labors of Jesse Mercer, a leader in Georgia Baptist life during the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet, rather than telling the story of a larger-than-life pastor with whom few “ordinary” pastors can identify, the books reveals how one who is faithful in small things can, over time, bear much fruit for the Lord.
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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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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: H839
ISBN: 9780881462760
Product Format: Hardback
Price: $30.00
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.
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Edited by: Susan Cushman Foreword by: Anne Lamott
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P542
ISBN: 9780881466126
Price: $18.00
A SECOND BLOOMING is a collection of essays by twenty-one authors who are emerging from the chrysalis they built for their younger selves and transforming into the women they are meant to be. They are not all elders, but all have embraced the second half of their lives with a generative spirit.
These women of all ages have made it over a wall to find their true selves. As Agatha Christie says of the second blooming, “…a whole new life has opened before you…. It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you.”
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