Winner of the 1986 Alabama Library Author Award, Outside the Magic Circle tells the remarkable story of Virginia Foster Durr, a southern white woman born into privilige who (along with her husband Clifford Durr, a lawyer best known for defending Rosa Parks), nonetheless devoted her life to Civil Rights activism. "Outside the Magic Circle is a valuable document...engaging, warm, and shrewd. [Durr's] odyssey of political commitment belongs in the collective biography of a remarkable generation of Southern liberals and radicals." --Southern Exposure
"Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter is a double portrait of place and family, a collection of essays that interrogates the legacy of racial tension in the South and the way race, caste, and privilege are entwined in Patricia Foster's family story from the Depression era through the present day. After returning to Alabama to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Foster writes her five-year-old great-niece, "How can we teach you to love our country if we don't also explain our country's oppressive history, its duplicity and sin, its guilt and blood?" It is a fact that the South has often been a place of danger and fury, a place where civil rights activists were beaten and whipped, fire-hosed and bombed, where predominantly Black (and some white) activists and communities demanded the right to justice, equity, and respect. And yet, in Foster's white, striving, class-conscious family in small-town south Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s, calls for racial progress were mostly ignored, relegated to the nightly news where visceral images of violence and protest were surely seen but rarely discussed. As a result, she came to her knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement--so prominent in Montgomery, Selma, Anniston, and Birmingham--largely in retrospect. It is this silence that Foster seeks to interrogate. As a college student at Vanderbilt University, she grew to recognize that indifference, alongside silence, could be an ideological space; only after a shameful event occurring the night of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder would she awaken to the unearned privileges of whiteness. A few years later, working as a caseworker in western Tennessee, she discovered that her belief in good intentions and easy solutions was irrelevant, given the southern caste system that affected poor whites and all Blacks. Written in the Sky is a book of essays that contends not only with the mythologies about race and class but also with the shadow stories beneath these mythologies, the more complicated and illuminating narratives Foster must excavate. To do so, she must learn to listen, to extend herself beyond her white middle-class life. The real story of place, Foster discovers, comes from wrestling with a culture's irreconcilable ideas. Foster's exploration of this struggle is organized in three interconnected parts--"Family Lessons," "History Lessons," and "Lessons of Legacy and Loss"--bookended by "Reckonings," two essays about the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery. In the first, "Written in the Sky," Foster considers how the memorial might be seen as a secular afterlife where the dead can speak, imagining what all those men, women, and children who had been lynched would say to her. In the essays in "Family Lessons," Foster wrestles with her family mythology: its class hierarchies, parental traumas, and the lasting insecurity about caste that pervades her family's psyche. In "History Lessons," she physically moves outside of white culture into the town of Tuskegee, where, in various visits, she teaches, interviews girls, talks to librarians and townspeople, and assesses the political zeitgeist of the 2016 election in this small southern town. In other essays, she explores the traumas and successes of women in the Civil Rights Movement. Foster shifts back to her family in "Lessons of Legacy and Loss" to portray the difficult, compelling relationships that preceded the deaths of a father, a sister, and a mother: moments of love and enmeshment, resentment and restitution that reveal how an excavated story allows for closeness and, in some sense, closure. In closure, she returns to the frame of "Reckonings," the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. This time, in "Archives of the Dead," she focuses on the tableau of stories that detail specific acts of domestic terrorism in short declarative sentences. Realizing that the psychology of racism haunts both the dead and the living, Foster is alert to the understanding that what is unconnected and sacred in her must not merely read the words but write about this legacy with an unflinching gaze"--
When her cousin is slain by an unknown assassin, Ariel Behn becomes the sole heir to a family legacy: a sinister cache of manuscripts that thrusts her into the deadly center of international intrigue--and an age-old enigma that spans the centuries. Whoever assembles and interprets the cryptic clues of this ancient mystery will possess the power to control the fate of the world. What strange powers lie hidden within the manuscripts? Splashed against a lavish backdrop that sweeps from the rise of the Roman Empire to the fall of the Berlin Wall, THE MAGIC CIRCLE finds one woman standing at the center of it all: Ariel Behn. As she races across continents to reveal the dark secrets buried in her family's past, she begins to unlock the chilling truth of the coming millennium. . . .
If she keeps far enough away from humans, perhaps she won’t be forced to hurt them. Deep in the woods lives the old witch called Ugly One. All she wants is to forget—the she was once a loving mother and a healer, blessed and powerful within her magic circle, and not a witch, claimed by the devils. Then one day she hears the footsteps she dreads. Then real voices—children’s voices. The Ugly One longs to take care of sturdy, sensible Gretel and her young brother Hansel. They are such good children, such delicious, beautiful children. But demons’ voices scream in her head: “Eat them!” How can she? . . . How can she not? “A brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed novel.”—School Library Journal, starred review “A work of great strength and powerful emotion, written with immediacy and intensity, filled with beauty and terror and pervading sense of compassion that must touch young and old.”—Lloyd Alexander An ALA Best Book for Young Adults A Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
No one expressed the heart and soul of the Sixties as powerfully as the Beatles did through the words, images, and rhythms of their music. In Magic Circles Devin McKinney uncovers the secret history of a generation and a pivotal moment in twentieth-century culture. He reveals how the Beatles enacted the dream life of their time and shows how they embodied a kaleidoscope of desire and anguish for all who listened--hippies or reactionaries, teenage fans or harried parents, Bob Dylan or Charles Manson. The reader who dares to re-enter the vortex that was the Sixties will appreciate, perhaps for the first time, much of what lay beneath the social trauma of the day. Delving into concerts and interviews, films and music, outtakes and bootlegs, Devin McKinney brings to bear the insights of history, aesthetics, sociology, psychology, and mythology to account for the depth and resonance of the Beatles' impact. His book is also a uniquely multifaceted appreciation of the group's artistic achievement, exploring their music as both timeless expression and visceral response to their historical moment. Starting in the cellars of Liverpool and Hamburg, and continuing through the triumph of Beatlemania, the groundbreaking studio albums, and the last brutal, sorrowful thrust of the White Album, Magic Circles captures both the dream and the reality of four extraordinary musicians and their substance as artists. At once an entrancing narrative and an analytical montage, the book follows the drama, comedy, mystery, irony, and curious off-ramps of investigation and inquiry that contributed to one of the most amazing odysseys in pop culture.
Clifford Judkins Durr was an Alabama lawyer who played an important role in defending activists and other accused of disloyalty during the New Deal and McCarthy eras. His uncompromising commitment to civil liberties and civic decency caused him to often take unpopular positions. In 1933, Durr moved to Washington to work as a lawyer for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a creation of Roosevelt’s new Democratic administration, becoming a dedicated New Dealer in the process. He was then appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a politically sensitive position as FDR sought to counter the increasing power and concentration of broadcasters, many of whom were opponents of the New Deal. Durr resigned from the FCC in 1948 and after brief employment with the National Farmers Union in Colorado, the Durrs eventually returned to Montgomery, Alabama in the hope of returning to a more prosperous, less controversial life. Durr continued to practice in Montgomery as counsel for black citizens whose rights had been violated and ultimately, in December, 1955, when police arrested Rosa Parks for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man he stepped in and lent his extensive legal prowess to her case and the continuing quest for civil rights. Closing his firm in 1964 Durr began to lecture in the United States and abroad. He died at his grandfather's farm in 1975
Games are no longer confined to card tables and computer screens. Emmy award winning games like "The Fallen Alternate Reality Game" (based on the ABC show) or "The Lost Experience" (based on the CBS hit show)- are pervasive games in that they blur traditional boundaries of game play. This book gives game designers the tools they need to create cutting edge pervasive games.
This title provides an accessible introduction to the study of digital gaming, and is the first book to explicitly and comprehensively address how digital games are experienced and engaged with in the everyday lives, social networks and consumer patterns of gamers.
Cassie Harper is a disillusioned high school senior who is daily losing ground in a battle against her own nihilistic inclinations. When a beautiful new girl from California comes to town and attempts to befriend a reluctant Cassie, the two unlikely companions find common ground in a shared sorrow. Cassie lives with her mother and grandmother in a dilapidated house in a nameless Kansas town, where she is haunted nightly by dreams of a father who died before she was born. Amy Cole has just moved from California, where she recently lost her mother and brother in a car accident. When Amy finally breaks down the walls of Cassies self imposed solitude, the girls band together to avoid the common end of all high school students: inexorable assimilation into an increasingly empty and incomprehensible world. But as Amy and Cassie attempt to outrun fate, their pursuit will be cut short by an unexpected adversary, leading Cassie to devise a chilling and unimaginable revenge. Cassie Draws the Universe is a complex and tragic tale of friendship and betrayal, living and dying, human cruelty, and the terrible price of vengeance.
