1935. In the middle of the Great Depression, after months of unemployment, Ken Morris found a job at the Briggs Manufacturing Company, the toughest auto company in Detroit. He would eventually play a pioneering role in building one of the cleanest, most socially progressive labor unions the world has known-the United Automobile Workers. Bob Morris, Ken's son, tells not only his father's story, but also the UAW's story: the battles with companies, the struggles within the union, and then the vicious attacks on Detroit labor leaders in the late 1940s. He also provides portraits of early auto industrialists, their companies, their henchmen and the gangsters they hired to destroy the labor movement.
Bridging the River of Hatred portrays the career of George Clifton Edwards, Jr., Detroit's visionary police commissioner whose efforts to bring racial equality, minority recruiting, and community policing to Detroit's police department in the early 1960s were met with much controversy within the city's administration. At a crucial time when the Civil Rights movement was gaining momentum and hostility between urban police forces and African Americans was close to eruption, Edwards chose solving racial and urban problems as his mission. Deeply committed to social justice, Edwards was a historical figure with vast political and legal experience, having served as head of the Detroit Housing Commission, a member of Detroit's common council, a juvenile court judge, a Michigan Supreme Court justice, and judge on the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Incorporating material from a manuscript that Edwards wrote before his death, supplemented by historical research, Mary M. Stolberg provides a rare case study of problems in policing, the impoverishment of American cities, and the evolution of race relations during the turbulent 1960s.
Explores everything that made Detroit great--from the auto industry visionaries to influential labor leaders to the hit-makers of Motown--while demonstrating how there were hints of the citys tragic collapse decades before the riot, years of civic corruption, and neglect took their toll.
In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion. This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.
Masterful in its simplicity, Chronicle in Stone is a touching coming-of-age story and a testament to the perseverance of the human spirit. Surrounded by the magic of beautiful women and literature, a boy must endure the deprivations of war as he suffers the hardships of growing up. His sleepy country has just thrown off centuries of tyranny, but new waves of domination inundate his city. Through the boy’s eyes, we see the terrors of World War II as he witnesses fascist invasions, allied bombings, partisan infighting, and the many faces of human cruelty—as well as the simple pleasures of life. Evacuating to the countryside, he expects to find an ideal world full of extraordinary things, but discovers instead an archaic backwater where a severed arm becomes a talisman and deflowered girls mysteriously vanish. Woven between the chapters of the boy’s story are tantalizing fragments of the city’s history. As the devastation mounts, the fragments lose coherence, and we perceive firsthand how the violence of war destroys more than just buildings and bridges.
Ismail Kadare has experienced a life of controversy. In his own country and internationally he has been both acclaimed as a writer and condemned as a lackey of the Albanian socialist dictatorship. Coming of age after occupation and war, Kadare (b. 1936) belonged to the first generation of new Albanians. In a land where writers were routinely imprisoned, Kadare produced the most brilliant and subversive works to emerge from socialist Eastern Europe. His work brings to an end the century whose literary beginnings were marked by the terror to which Kafka gave his name. The inaugural award of the International Man-Booker Prize for Literature in 2005 marked an important milestone in the global recognition of Kadare. Ironic, multi-layered and imaginative, Kadare's writing is profoundly opposed to ideology. Through critical analysis of a representative selection of Kadare's works, Peter Morgan explains for a wide audience how Kadare survived and wrote in the repressive Albanian Stalinist environment. Peter Morgan is Professor of European Studies at the University of Western Australia.
Set sail with this collection of stories of boating the Northeast's waterways from New Jersey to Canada. Inland Passage takes readers on a tour of the natural history of the Northeast, revealing how the waterways and waterfronts that make up these popular cruising grounds were formed. The stories also delve deeply into the history of how human ingenuity shaped the waters, and the way of life along the coast and inland waters in times long forgotten. Additionally, the book focuses on rare boats, their owners, and the many people from boatyards to museums who work to preserve them. Ride the waves with Shaw as he sails the major waterways from Cape May to Lake Ontario and the Thousand Islands on the Saint Lawrence River, the mountain lakes of the Adirondacks, the Erie Canal, the Hudson River, and Lake Champlain. Shaw takes readers on tours on- and off-shore, above and below water. Without ever leaving your seat, you'll shove off for the coasts many fascinating lighthouses, museums, bridges, harbors, inlets, beaches, and artificial reefs. You'll learn about New Jersey's disappearing (and reappearing!) island and how New York Harbor was built. Hear tales from the marine police, find out what a sand sucker is, and voyage through the most dangerous inlet on the Jersey Shore. Shaw will take you boat racing, whale-watching, and treasure hunting in the many shipwrecks along the Northeast. Readers will even get a history lesson on how the unique geography of the Northeast coast effected the Revolutionary, Civil, and Cold wars. Inland Passage brings alive the cruising experience, and the people and places that make the Northeast waters so special.
"All we ever did was try to help the Angel world and humanity, like we were raised to do. But some of you Paras plot to destroy us for no reason other than how powerful we will become. And now, the days of playing nice with the Paras are over..." The Noru series in order: Book 1: Blue Rose Book 2: Last Akon Book 3: Fall Of The Chosen Book 4: When Angels Break Book 5: Ways of the Wicked Book 6: Rise of the Alago
