Who is always perfectly put together and never at a loss for words? Who is professional, courteous, and harder working than anyone else? Whose Christmas cards arrive the day after Thanksgiving, year after year? Y'all know she's got to be a Southern Belle. A Southern Belle takes care of herself and makes sure people treat her right. She always gets her way, even if her man thinks it was his idea. (That's a win for you both.) But you don't have to be raised in the South to be the same fun-loving package of looks, charm, and determination that makes a Belle a Belle. That's what this little book is for! Take it from Phaedra Parks, the smart, confident, and always poised star of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Life as a Belle is simply better--for you and for the people around you.--From publisher description.
At the end of the Civil War, spirited Ella Swain--daughter of the University of North Carolina president--shocked citizens of Chapel Hill and the entire state when she fell in love and married the Union general whose troops occupied the town. Author Suzy Barile separates fact from lore, drawing on Ella Swain's never-before-published letters that reveal a love that transcended outrage and scandal.
This is a new edition of the autobiography of Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair (1883-1961). She started life innocently and happily on her father's Mississippi Delta plantation but went on to know deprivation and danger when she married Upton Sinclair, the crusading social activist. As she joined him in his struggles to rescue the disinherited of the earth, collaborating with him in writing a shelf of books, she gave up the moonlight and magnolias but not her grace. After her death, Sinclair recalled her as the loveliest woman I have ever known. She moved North with him and began an exhilarating new life. He was a Socialist and the celebrated muckraker whose novel The Jungle (1906) was an exposé of the meatpacking industry. Later, in 1943, he would win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Dragon's Teeth. Through him she became involved in social causes and came to know many of America's intellectuals including such eminent figures in the literary and political worlds as Walter Lippman, Sinclair Lewis, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, and Art Young. With her husband she traveled throughout the United States and Europe. Her story is filled with many great names--including Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, Charlie Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks--whom she and Sinclair counted among their friends. As a child she once sat on Jefferson Davis's knee. In her girlhood she was instructed in the southern graces. Later she would be immersed in the world of demonstrations, distress, and political pamphleteering for the liberal causes she and her husband espoused. Their marriage of forty-eight years was extraordinary and happy. Sinclair recalled her as the helpmeet of a man who set out to help in the ending of poverty and war in the world. . . . It required many crusades in which he bankrupted himself and her as well. It required a year-long entanglement in a bitter political campaign [for the California governorship]. She helped him to write and publish three million books and pamphlets. Of her book he said, This is the story of a southern belle, told by a real one.
"Gardner's reading of a wide range of published and unpublished texts recovers a multifaceted vision of the South. For example, during the war, while its outcome was not yet a foregone conclusion, women's writings sometimes reflected loyalty and optimism; at other times, they revealed doubts and a wavering resolve. According to Gardner, it was only in the aftermath of defeat that a more unified vision of the southern cause emerged. By the beginning of the twentieth century, however, white women - who remained deeply loyal to their southern roots - were raising fundamental questions about the meaning of southern womanhood in the modern era."--BOOK JACKET.
Christmas Day of 2005 was the last time four generations of author Nora Burchs family would gather at the same table for a Holiday dinner. By the same time the following year, there were two empty seats. In this memoir, Burch describes the loss of first her mother and then her husband and narrates how she came to terms with her grief. In Go North, Young Lady Burch tells how she returned to teaching and then made one of the most drastic decisions of her life. She left her home state of Louisiana, where she had lived all of her life, and relocated to Massachusetts in 2010. From information gathered in a journal, Burch shares a years worth of recollections as she adapted to her new home 1,000 miles away. From red beans and rice, jambalaya, and Who Dat to quahogs, cawfee milk, and Go Pats, Go North, Young Lady recounts culture shock, first impressions, and travels experienced by a Southern girl after relocating to the North.
Maxine had been called a lot of things in her lifetime, but never a Southern Belle! The title simply did not fit with her lifestyle or the history of her people in America. As she sat in a hotel bar in Hong Kong, China surrounded by colleagues from around the world, Maxine was surprised to hear herself described in such a way. She didnt know whether to be insulted that the history of her people was so poorly known that a black woman from the south was referred to as a Belle, or to be amused. She chose to be amused. Maxine sipped her Chardonnay. The wine relaxed her frontal lobe and she laughed out loud. She couldnt help thinking, I am my mothers daughter and she aint no Southern Belle. Back in the states, Maxine settled into the routine of work, family and friends with a new perspective. The China experience had been wonderfully positive and enlightening in ways that gave fresh eyes, ears and meaning to her life. "Southern Belle" details Maxine's quest for meaning in the concept of a 21st Century black southern belle. What she learned would strengthen her faith and bring her closer to the women whose lives had shaped her past, and helped to define who she was today.
Dan Knight returned to the civilian world after a stint in the Navy following high school. With a one dollar car and hope that he can catch up with his contemporaries, his world revolves around college and a job. But overnight, the world explodes and the Cold war goes flaming hot. Knight receives orders; returns to the service, immediately. The move is both salvation and sacrifice. Yeoman Knight finds himself contending with a green crew, spies, submarines and orphans while dodging bunkmates with seasickness. Knight is faced with the ultimate choice follow his heart or uphold his oath.
Jaime Primak Sullivan, outspoken star of Bravo TV’s Jersey Belle, offers no-nonsense Southern-spun advice for navigating life and love with her signature charismatic Jersey charm in this winning fish-out-of-water tale. Jamie Primak Sullivan, a Jersey-bred, tough-as-nails PR maven—and unlikely transplant in an upscale suburb of Birmingham, Alabama—has spent her entire life crossing the line: whether she’s pushing the boundaries of what proper Southern ladies consider to be “polite behavior” or literally traversing the Mason-Dixon line in the name of love. She isn’t afraid to say what everyone is thinking when it comes to love, sex, friendship, and many other topics that are all-too-often sugar-coated in polite Southern company. But when a meet-cute scenario right out of a Nora Ephron movie upends her life, Jaime finds herself a reluctant “knish out of water,” smack-dab in the Deep South starting a life with her new husband, the perfect Southern gentleman. In The Southern Education of a Jersey Girl, Jaime shares hard-learned lessons on Southern etiquette, deep-fried foods, college football, and matters of the heart while living in the heart of Dixie, with her quintessential ball-busting, bullsh*t free, and side-splitting Jersey twist.
Expelled from thirteen boarding schools in the past five years, seventeen-year-old Jane Fontaine Ventouras is returning to her Southern roots, and the small town of Bienville, Alabama, where ladies always wear pearls, nothing says hospitality like sweet tea and pimento cheese sandwiches, and competing in the annual Magnolia Maid Pageant is every girl's dream. But Jane is what you might call an anti-belle--more fishnets and tattoos than sugar and spice. The last thing on her mind is joining the Magnolia Maid brigade and parading around town in a dress so big she can't even fi t through doors. So when she finds herself up to her ears in ruffl es and etiquette lessons, she's got one mission: Escape. What's a hipster to do? Will Jane survive Bienville boot camp intact or will they--gasp!--make a Southern belle out of her yet?
