The Chronicles of a Sophisticated Redneck
The Chronicles of a Sophisticated Redneck

Author: Phillip Garrett

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2017-07-25

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 9781546418481

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

College taught me about wine, women, and song. Not necessarily in that order. The music sounds a little better with a fiddle. Life is about how you handle adversity. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and move on. If you haven't faced adversity in life, you're going to. These are just a few of Phillip E. Garrett's trademark "Phillipisms." He learned these lessons during his wild adolescence, heady college days, and challenging adulthood in southern Virginia. His new memoir documents Garrett's various adventures, from buying his first car to navigating life as a single dad. His work is an ode to an Appalachian adolescence, complete with his first beer, coveted Farrah Fawcett poster, and beloved dog. He also includes the Redneck Oscars, a playlist of his favorite songs (which would be at home on Outlaw Country), and a history of his community-also known as the Moonshine Capital of the World. While many of Garrett's recollections are laugh-out-loud funny, he delves into deeper topics, discussing the tragedies in his life and how he managed to move forward. Whether you're a redneck, a sophisticate, or a sophisticated redneck, you'll find something to laugh about and something to love in Garrett's work.

Hillbilly Elegy
Hillbilly Elegy

Author: J. D. Vance

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2016-06-28

Total Pages: 166

ISBN-13: 0062300563

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A riveting book."—The Wall Street Journal "Essential reading."—David Brooks, New York Times From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, a powerful account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America’s white working class Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck. The Vance family story begins hopefully in postwar America. J. D.’s grandparents were “dirt poor and in love,” and moved north from Kentucky’s Appalachia region to Ohio in the hopes of escaping the dreadful poverty around them. They raised a middle-class family, and eventually their grandchild (the author) would graduate from Yale Law School, a conventional marker of their success in achieving generational upward mobility. But as the family saga of Hillbilly Elegy plays out, we learn that this is only the short, superficial version. Vance’s grandparents, aunt, uncle, sister, and, most of all, his mother, struggled profoundly with the demands of their new middle-class life, and were never able to fully escape the legacy of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and trauma so characteristic of their part of America. Vance piercingly shows how he himself still carries around the demons of their chaotic family history. A deeply moving memoir with its share of humor and vividly colorful figures, Hillbilly Elegy is the story of how upward mobility really feels. And it is an urgent and troubling meditation on the loss of the American dream for a large segment of this country.

A Turn in the South
A Turn in the South

Author: V. S. Naipaul

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2011-03-30

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 0307789284

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Nobel Prize-winning author delivers a revealing and disturbing book about the American South—from Atlanta to Charleston, Tallahassee to Tuskegee, Nashville to Chapel Hill. • “His comprehension is astute and penetrating.... The book he has written brings new understanding [of] the subject.” —The New York Times Book Review In the tradition of political and cultural revelation V.S. Naipaul so brilliantly made his own in Among The Believers, A Turn In The South is his first book about the United States. “Naipaul’s chapters honor the diversity that marks the South.... Conservatives and liberals, whites and blacks, men and women speak for themselves, and reveal the dark side of the story in their own ways … fascinating and revealing.” —The New Republic “Mr. Naipaul travels with the artist’s eye and ear and his observations are sharply discerning.” —Evelyn Waugh “A master of English prose.” —Nobel Prize Winner J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books "His writing is clean and beautiful, and he has a great eye for nuance.... No American writer could achieve [his] kind of evenhandedness, and it gives Naipaul's perceptions an almost built-in originality." —Atlantic Monthly

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner)
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (National Book Award Winner)

Author: Sherman Alexie

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Published: 2012-01-10

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0316219304

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A New York Times bestseller—over one million copies sold! A National Book Award winner A Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winner Bestselling author Sherman Alexie tells the story of Junior, a budding cartoonist growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Determined to take his future into his own hands, Junior leaves his troubled school on the rez to attend an all-white farm town high school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. Heartbreaking, funny, and beautifully written, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, which is based on the author's own experiences, coupled with poignant drawings by Ellen Forney that reflect the character's art, chronicles the contemporary adolescence of one Native American boy as he attempts to break away from the life he was destined to live. With a forward by Markus Zusak, interviews with Sherman Alexie and Ellen Forney, and black-and-white interior art throughout, this edition is perfect for fans and collectors alike.

Pop. 1280
Pop. 1280

Author: Jim Thompson

Publisher: Mulholland Books

Published: 2011-12-25

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0316195871

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Nick Corey is a terrible sheriff on purpose. He doesn't solve problems, enforce rules or arrest criminals. He knows that nobody in tiny Potts County actually wants to follow the law and he is perfectly content lazing about, eating five meals a day, and sleeping with all the eligible women. Still, Nick has some very complex problems to deal with. Two local pimps have been sassing him, ruining his already tattered reputation. His girlfriend Rose is being terrorized by her husband. And then, there's his wife and her brother Lenny who won't stop troubling Nick's already stressed mind. Are they a little too close for a brother and a sister? With an election coming up, Nick needs to fix his problems and fast. Because the one thing Nick does know is that he will do anything to stay sheriff. Because, as it turns out, Sheriff Nick Corey is not nearly as dumb as he seems. In Pop. 1280, widely regarded as a classic of mid-20th century crime, Thompson offers up one of his best, in a tale of lust, murder, and betrayal in the Deep South that was the basis for the critically acclaimed French film Coup de Torchon.

The Expendable Man
The Expendable Man

Author: Dorothy B. Hughes

Publisher: New York Review of Books

Published: 2012-07-03

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1590175093

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“It was surprising what old experiences remembered could do to a presumably educated, civilized man.” And Hugh Denismore, a young doctor driving his mother’s Cadillac from Los Angeles to Phoenix, is eminently educated and civilized. He is privileged, would seem to have the world at his feet, even. Then why does the sight of a few redneck teenagers disconcert him? Why is he reluctant to pick up a disheveled girl hitchhiking along the desert highway? And why is he the first person the police suspect when she is found dead in Arizona a few days later? Dorothy B. Hughes ranks with Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith as a master of mid-century noir. In books like In a Lonely Place and Ride the Pink Horse she exposed a seething discontent underneath the veneer of twentieth-century prosperity. With The Expendable Man, first published in 1963, Hughes upends the conventions of the wrong-man narrative to deliver a story that engages readers even as it implicates them in the greatest of all American crimes.

Edge of the City
Edge of the City

Author: S. A. Bailey

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2017-05-31

Total Pages: 756

ISBN-13: 9781545129968

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

For years, south Dallas has been ruled by a corrupt caste of politicians who espouse populist rhetoric. Growing fat and rich while their constituents wallow in crime and poverty. Jebediah Shaw never wanted to make the city his home. It had never been more than a place to rest between wars. And now, working in that dark area between government and private business, he's given an impossible task. To keep a man alive that everyone, including himself, has a reason to want dead while choosing sides in a Civil War no one even knows is happening. At the beginning of the end of the American empire, at the edge of what was and what will be, he knows in the end all a man has, all he has any control over, is his word and his work. He will do whatever it takes to complete his mission. Dallas, may never be the same.