This book highlights my journey of rising from the cotton fields of Alabama to the city of Chicago where I thought would be a palace. Chicago was certainly not a palace but it was a place of adventure and excitement where I found God, Education, and purpose.
As a thirteen year old boy on an East Texas farm, Fred M. Allen read a book about explorer/missionary David Livingstone and was mesmerized. Many years later, he stood at the edge of the mighty Victoria Falls and gazed upon a statue of Livingstone. By then, Allen had spent a lifetime in service for the Lord. From Cotton Fields to Mission Fields reveals the experiences that led Allen to make it his mission to spread God’s Word, beginning with his boyhood in Texas and extending to his decades of work as a missionary in Zambia. Allen began writing his stories for family and friends but realized how much his words could inspire others, after being given a column in a weekly newspaper. Then his brother, Duane Allen of the musical group “The Oak Ridge Boys,” offered to share his stories on social media. Over and over, people asked, “Are these stories in a book?” In this inspiring Christian memoir, Allen looks back on his life, collecting those stories in one place. His experiences highlight the importance of faith, hard work, and walking the path that God intended.
At the age of forty-four, my mother set out to accomplish what no other American woman of color had achieved at her ageto graduate and receive a doctorate of medicine and surgery from the Universite Lobre de Bruxelles, Belgium. She walked two and a half miles daily from the cotton fields to a one-room school that housed grades one through seven taught by one teacher. But it was her thirst of knowledge that would sustain her and carry her to a great adventure across the Atlantic. We hope that the content of these pages will inspire many other young persons to strive and become whatever they wish to become, overcoming any obstacles and defying all odds.
The Civil War alters life for a Louisiana plantation mistress and a poor seamstress in this novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of Jubilee Trail. Corrie May Upjohn stands on the levee, watching men unload the riverboats and wishing she could travel far away. A poor preacher’s daughter, she is only fourteen and her life is already laid out for her: marriage in a year or two, and then decades of drudgery. At nearby Ardeith Plantation, Ann Sheramy Larne lives in luxury, but feels just as imprisoned as Corrie May. Their lives could not be more different, but when the horrors of war and Reconstruction come to Louisiana and the Old South begins to fall, these two women will band together to survive. From the bestselling author of Calico Palace, this is the second novel in the poignant Plantation Trilogy, which also includes Deep Summer and This Side of Glory.
A saga of Louisiana by an author who “belongs among those Southern novelists who are trying to interpret the South and its past in critical terms” (The New York Times). Published in the late 1930s by New York Times–bestselling author Gwen Bristow, the Plantation Trilogy is an epic series of novels that bring to life the history of Louisiana—from its settlement in the late eighteenth century to the realities of slavery and poverty to the post–World War I era—via the intertwined lives of the members of three families: the Sheramys, the Larnes, and the Upjohns. Deep Summer is the story of Puritan pioneer Judith Sheramy and adventurer Philip Larne, who marry and strive to build an empire in the Louisiana wilderness during the American Revolution. The Handsome Road tells the story of plantation mistress Ann Sheramy Larne and poor seamstress Corrie May Upjohn, who forge an unlikely bond of friendship as they struggle to survive the cataclysms of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This Side of Glory presents the story of Eleanor Upjohn, a modern young woman in the early twentieth century who marries charming Kester Larne and struggles to save the debt-ridden plantation that her husband’s ancestors founded more than one hundred years ago.
This expanded second edition of Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ambitious and unprecedented overview of many of the key directors working in European theatre over the past 30 years. This book is a vivid account of the vast range of work undertaken in European theatre during the last three decades, situated lucidly in its artistic, cultural, and political context. Each chapter discusses a particular director, showing the influences on their work, how it has developed over time, its reception, and the complex relation it has with its social and cultural context. The volume includes directors living and working in Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, Russia, Romania, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, offering a broad and international picture of the directing landscape. Now revised and updated, Contemporary European Theatre Directors is an ideal text for both undergraduate and postgraduate directing students, as well as those researching contemporary theatre practices, providing a detailed guide to the generation of directors whose careers were forged and tempered in the changing Europe following the end of the Cold War.