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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
olhanson has commented on (2) products
What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered
by
Patrick Lane
olhanson
, July 25, 2007
Patrick Lane?s ?What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered? tells the story of the award-winning Canadian poet, a recovering alcoholic and abuser of drugs. After reading Lane?s memoir I want to meet the man whose mind and brain withstood years of abuse and could still choose such words, glorious and wrenching, touching in their lucidity. I want him to explain to me how he thinks his cells held on. What warded off guzzling 13 ounces of vodka at a time? Was it the poetry that exercised them? I want to hear his voice tell his story of the beloved garden he tends again, all the while so aware of the monster lurking, easily ready to regain its hold on his life. Lane had been gardening there for years, just as he?d been writing for years. I want to ask him how he was able to do both effectively even while he nurtured his addiction. Through the prism of words, he reveals childhood and adulthood memories, mixing them with his first sober year. Don?t we, the many and the few, have addictions that impact, influence and involve our lives? Reading Lane and then seeing and hearing him will help us live our lives. We?ll know we can do it?he did it. Almost at the end of the book, Lane writes: ?There are no accidents, there are no serendipitous moments. There are only fragile interludes of clarity and sometimes I don?t understand them fully when they happen.? I want to ask if that?s what happened when his mother last spoke to him, when she sat up in the midst of a morphine-induced dream, interrupting Lane as he read to her from her favorite book, Dickens? ?The Old Curiosity Shop.? Wasted away in her hospital bed, his mother grabbed his arm and said, ??At every turn there?s always something lovely.?? That?s what I want to believe about my life. Actually, I did get to meet Lane when he came to Lemuria Books, another great independent bookstore, in Jackson, Miss., on Oct. 19, 2005. He answered all of my questions.
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My Mothers Witness The Peggy Morgan Stor
by
Carolyn Haines
olhanson
, February 05, 2007
“My Mother’s Witness: The Peggy Morgan Story” by Carolyn Haines tells such a story of pure meanness and evil that, at times, it’s hard to allow yourself to believe it really is the truth. This biography is the story of Inez Albritton and her daughter Peggy Albritton Morgan, two women whose lives paralleled each other in a “world that was in torment and transition—a mirror image of the turmoil and violence within their family. Within their society,” Haines writes, right down to their connection to “two of the most notorious racial murders committed in Mississippi.” Peggy Albritton, sixth child of Gene and Inez Albritton, vowed to never live the life her mother had lived in Greenwood. Inez had married and remarried Gene, then was beaten by him within an inch of her life on a regular basis, often in front of little Peggy and the other children. Inez was forced to work back-breaking labor or starve even while Gene made money selling illegal moonshine, keeping the money for himself and the women he had on the side. Inez had nothing to call her own except her children and the certainty that she had to tell someone what she’d heard her husband, some relatives and friends discussing—the circumstances surrounding the death of Emmett Till in Money, Miss., that horrible night in 1955. When Gene realized what his wife knew, he beat her “until she was unconscious, and then ordered the children to put her in a tub of cold water,” Haines writes. “He had pulled her from the water, his fingers twisting in the wet material of her dress, and told her if she ever spoke the name Emmett Till again, she would pay a terrible price.” Years later, as her mind broke more and more beneath the weight of the truth, Inez said to Peggy, “’I haven’t forgotten. What they don’t want me to say. … About the colored boy … I know the truth. Tell the truth, Peggy. You have to tell the truth.’’ For Peggy Albritton, the truth was that she desperately wanted out of her life on Basket Street in Greenwood, so much so that when Lloyd Morgan—a man as handsome to her as Elvis Presley—came along and treated her as someone of value, she went against the wishes of both her parents and married him just after she turned 17—and soon relived her mother’s nightmare roller coaster ride. Before she finally divorced him in 1983, Morgan had been beaten, cheated on, lied to, threatened, and left to fend for herself and their three children alone. The final horrible strand that connected Morgan with her mother came about one July 4th weekend in the early ‘70s. Morgan found herself in the front seat of her 1964 red and white Ford, between her husband and Byron De La Beckwith, on the way to Parchman to visit her husband’s brother. As they passed a group of blacks walking alongside the road, Beckwith began a white-supremacist diatribe, ending with a confession: “’I killed that nigger, Medgar Evers,” he repeated several times. Like her mother, Morgan was not able to forget what Beckwith had said. Even though the memories nearly cost her her sanity, in the end—by telling them to district attorney Bobby DeLaughter and later at Beckwith’s third and final trial in 1994—Morgan not only made peace for herself, but she vindicated her mother—who had told her over and over that telling the truth was the only way.
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