It s the 1940 s and the WW11 is raging. There are six girls and three boys living with Mam in a log cabin with no electricity or running water. Pap comes home only when feels the notion life s not easy. The struggles become even more real when thirteen year old Retha Pogue sees her eighteen year old brother, Wilburn, drafter and going off to war. Surprising twists await in this gripping story of what life was really like for so many families.
During their idyllic childhood there was no hint of the chaos and violence they would face as adults. Dex was the best athlete in school; Marie was the neighborhood tomboy. They were best friends and next door neighbors until her family moved away when they were teenagers. Seven years would pass before they saw each other again. Now he was preparing to sign a multi-million dollar NFL contract, and she was a successful entrepreneur. Their unexpected reunion prompted an instant romantic attraction, but they could have never guessed that the transformation from friends to lovers would be the catalyst for a series of violent, tragic events that would soon dominate their peaceful Appalachian town. Hatred lurks volatile and undetected beneath the majestic mountains until these two old friends unintentionally ignite a reign of terror. The mayhem begins with a kidnapping and murder, but the horror is far from over. No one will be safe until the perpetrator is found. The cops believe a single individual is responsible for all the depraved attacks, but the evidence isn't leading anywhere and the investigation has reached a stalemate. Dex is shaken to the core, but he vows to personally find the killer.
A Christy Award winner from the best-selling author of War Room! In the small town of Dogwood, West Virginia, Karin has buried her shattered dreams by settling for a faithful husband whose emotional distance from her deep passions and conflicts leaves her isolated. Loaded with guilt, she tries to raise three small children and “do life” the best she can. Will returns to Dogwood intent on pursuing the only woman he has ever loved—only to find there is far more standing in his way than lost years in prison. The secrets of Will and Karin’s past begin to emerge through Danny Boyd, a young boy who wishes he hadn’t survived the tragedy that knit those two together as well as tore them apart. The trigger that will lay their pain bare and force them to face it rather than flee is the unlikely figure of Ruthie Bowles, a withered, wiry old woman who leads Karin so deep into her anger against God that it forces unexpected consequences.
In the course of researching dogwood trees, beloved poet and essayist Christopher Merrill realized that a number of formative moments in his life had some connection to the tree named—according to one writer—because its fruit was not fit for a dog. As he approached his sixtieth birthday, Merrill began to compose a self-portrait alongside this tree whose lifespan is comparable to a human’s and that, from an early age, he’s regarded as a talisman. Dogwoods have never been far from Merrill’s view at significant moments throughout his life, helping to shape his understanding of place in the great chain of being; entwined in his experience is the conviction that our relationship to the natural world is central to our walk in the sun. The feeling of a connection to nature has become more acute as his life has taken him to distant corners of the earth, often to war zones where he has witnessed not only humankind’s propensity for violence and evil but also the enduring power of connections that can be forged across languages, borders, and politics. Dogwoods teach us persistence humility and wonder. Self-Portrait with Dogwood is no ordinary memoir, but rather the work of a traveler who has crisscrossed the country and the globe in search of ways to make sense of his time here. Merrill provides new ways of thinking about personal history, the environment, politics, faith, and the power of the written word. In his descriptions of places far and near, many outside of the average American’s purview—a besieged city in Bosnia, a hidden path in a Taiwanese park, Tolstoy’s country house in Russia, a castle in Slovakia, a blossoming dogwood at daybreak in Seattle—the reader’s understanding of the world will flourish as well.
The method and plan of this dictionary of Jamaican English are basically the same as those of the Oxford English Dictionary, but oral sources have been extensively tapped in addition to detailed coverage of literature published in or about Jamaica since 1655. It contains information about the Caribbean and its dialects, and about Creole languages and general linguistic processes. Entries give the pronounciation, part-of-speach and usage of labels, spelling variants, etymologies and dated citations, as well as definitions. Systematic indexing indicates the extent to which the lexis is shared with other Caribbean countries.
