Whatever your plans for this coming Memorial Day weekend, we hope you make time to spend with a book. Allow us to preview a quite special one NewSouth will publish in August. It’s a collection of short stories titled L’Chaim and Lamentions by Craig Darch. With stirring Jewish inflection, Darch’s work speaks about the value of family and community, exploring universal themes of companionship and loneliness, faith and perseverance. These stories detail the lives of the powerful and confident, but also the struggle of the modest and the determined, people doing the best they can to get by. Blurbs for this book by Craig Darch should whet your appetite. Read this one by Seth Greenland, author of The Hazards of Good Fortune, which we quite like: “Warm, satisfying, and evocative of lost times, Craig Darch’s stories are the literary equivalent of my grandmother’s kugel, with far fewer calories.” Happy holiday! 

If you think history doesn’t repeat itself, read again. David Martin Davies at Texas Public Radio spoke to author Brendan McNulty about the life of legendary Texas Congressman Jack Brooks, as told in a new book – The Meanest Man in Congress: Jack Brooks and the Making of an American Century – exploring how the impeachment proceedings that faced Richard Nixon during Brooks’s tenure in D.C. may bear considering again today (https://bit.ly/2YESCge). Brooks served in Congress under ten presidents in a remarkable career that spanned five decades, mentoring a younger generation of Congressmen and women including Nancy Pelosi. As Speaker Pelosi observes in her blurb for the book, “Jack had no fear of unpopular opinions or of reaching across the aisle to pursue the common good. His principled leadership and political courage, richly chronicled in this first biography of his life, are an extraordinary legacy.” Pelosi, along with the likes of Randy Weber, Brian Babin, Greg Laughlin, and many others in the halls of power, were also special guests at a D.C. launch party this week for The Meanest Man in Congress. The gala is the subject of this fantastic piece in The Hill: https://bit.ly/2HwHpc3.

Foster Dickson is many things: a writer, an English teacher, a Southerner, and a former NewSouth staffer. He’s taught at Booker T. Washington Magnet High School in Montgomery, Alabama, for many years now, but he recently embarked on a new project aimed at educating his students about environmental sustainability, especially with respect to the production of food. Foster started a gardening club a few years ago, talking to students about how one can grow a garden and helping them to see sustainability as a social justice issue. Following Booker T. Washington’s recent move to a new campus, he found himself with enough space outdoors for an official school garden. To continue his personal growth as a sustainability educator and advocate, Foster has joined forces with Loveless Academic Magnet English teacher Gina Aaij and will attend the Rob and Melani Walton National Sustainability Teachers’ Academy in Montana. “Since neither Gina nor I are science teachers, I thought we were a long shot to get in,” he said. Foster’s new book Closed Ranks: The Whitehurst Case in Post-Civil Rights Montgomery is an example of his other social justice work, as he struggled to bring the true story behind Bernard Whitehurst’s killing at the hands of a Montgomery police officer to light. About his book historian Richard Bailey says, “Foster Dickson has pulled together every possible resource to afford Bernard Whitehurst Jr. the sense of justice surrounding his death that he never received in life.”

Aileen Kilgore Henderson is much beloved in artistic and historical circles in Alabama. So we are pleased to see her work celebrated last month by the Arts Council of Tuscaloosa, which awarded her the Druid Arts Award in the Literary Arts. The award recognizes the demonstrated quality of her body of work, her contributions to the literary community, and the overall visibility she has helped bring to the arts. Pictured here with her daughter and son-in-law, Henderson is the award-winning author of several children’s books, but it’s her Eugene Allen Smith’s Alabama we are obviously most proud of. This book published by NewSouth Books is the definitive work on Alabama’s first state geologist, who spent the better part of a lifetime traversing the state with notebook and Brownie camera in hand, documenting Alabama’s abundant natural and geological resources. Smith’s work directly contributed to the commercial and industrial development of Alabama of the late nineteenth century. Lewis Dean in his foreword to the book says, “Smith was short in stature, but a giant of a man. He believed in progress. His life and work testify to the conviction that society and individuals can build a better world.” Like Smith, Ms. Henderson has done her state a service. Eugene Allen Smith’s Alabama reintroduces a preeminent Alabamian, who in his own time had a positive influence in shaping his native state and left an enduring legacy of science and service. We celebrate Ms. Henderson’s outstanding achievement in returning that story to us.