By Randy Travis with Ken Abraham Randy Travis, singer, songwriter, and Country Music Hall of Fame member, worked for ten years to become an overnight success. The son of an abusive alcoholic father and “a saint” of a mother, Travis was a teenager headed to jail when Lib Hatcher took him under her wing in […]
By Debra Gwartney Debra Gwartney’s memoir, I Am A Stranger Here Myself, opens with her driving away from her hometown of Salmon, Idaho, at age 55, after the funeral of her last remaining grandparent. She writes, “For reasons I have yet to decipher, I can’t seem to make peace with the place I’ve loved best […]
With Scot England Jimmy Capps has been a Grand Ole Opry guitarist since the early 1960s. “When I was a little boy, I would lie in my bed and dream about being on the Grand Ole Opry,” he says on the opening page of The Man In Back: Jimmy Capps, The Autobiography. “There was no […]
With Scot England Moe Bandy has been one of my favorite entertainers since his music first hit radio airwaves in the early 1970s. A genuine Texas cowboy, he sang songs that made me want to dance. So I was excited to receive a copy of Moe Bandy, Lucky Me. I looked forward to connecting his […]
By Jesse Jarnow Wasn’t That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America is the story of a singing group that brought folk music to the pop charts in spite of having its own career derailed by the Red Scare following World War II. In his thoroughly researched book, […]
By Sam Kleiner Three years before the United States entered World War II, American pilots were already flying in a covert operation to defend China against Japan. Retired U.S. Army pilot Claire Chennault organized and led the group officially designated the American Volunteer Group (AVG)—better known as the Flying Tigers. The Flying Tigers: The Untold […]
By Talithia Williams, PhD Talithia Williams wrote Power in Numbers: The Rebel Women of Mathematics to give back. It fulfills her dream of making participation in mathematical sciences a reality for more women, by showcasing these role models and thanking mentors such as the ones who helped her. Williams was a high school student when […]
By Maura Conlon-McIvor FBI Girl: How I Learned To Crack My Father’s Code . . . With Love is the coming-of-age memoir of Maura Conlon-McIvor. Originally published in 2004, it is being reissued in softcover and as an audiobook. The story was adapted for the stage at the Pittsburgh Playhouse. The press release promised a […]
By Caroline Fraser Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder recently won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. And deservedly so. Caroline Fraser did a masterful job of researching and describing both the life and the times of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Fraser writes in the introduction that Wilder’s life was “a story that […]
By Mimi Schwartz Mimi Schwartz grew up in the Queens borough of New York City, the first American-born child of German-Jewish immigrants who escaped in 1936 from Hitler’s Germany. She is now an award-winning author and professor emerita in the writing program at Stockton University. When History Is Personal is her collection of 25 essays, […]