Search results for ""Mercer University Press""

John Wesley O'Toole, the disbarred attorney-turned art dealer and protagonist of The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes, returns to face another challenge when he is approached by a wealthy cryptocurrency trader wanting to invest heavily in quality works of art. A proposition that seems almost too good to be true turns deadly when the trader's body is discovered, and the digital code keys needed to retrieve his millions are missing. The situation becomes even more complicated when investigators find the trader's name was an alias, his background a mystery, and much of the missing fortune appears to belong to domestic terrorist groups. On the possibility that O'Toole had access to the codes before the trader's murder, he finds himself caught between the FBI, Savannah homicide investigators, and a seductive divorcée, each of whom appear to have their own agenda and none of whom can be trusted to reveal the truth. Set in the beautiful city of Savannah, Georgia, the tale twists and turns toward a shocking and unexpected conclusion as secrets are revealed and O'Toole discovers he can trust no one.

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This third collection of Kevin Cantwell's poetry is characterized less by formalism than by the lyric poem as an exploration of the process of making art. The title poem recounts an anecdote about the mid-century painter Robert Motherwell and the nature of the real, and the opening poem returns to the familiar landscape of the Florida Panhandle where the speaker crosses unmarked rivers at night while getting disoriented, then stymied, by waters that cannot be crossed. Intimate poems from family life give pointed texture to the more meditative encounters within the paragraphing of longer stanzas. An exchange between brothers who cannot afford to bury their mother is overheard while they toy with a gull by throwing bits of shell in the air as if it were bread. A longer poem in five sections experiments with the space a poem establishes on the page and which pressures the kind of poem each of its sections make; ""You can turn your life around,"" that poem asserts, ""but not the ship of night."" As the poet has inscribed elsewhere, the lives of other poets move through the imagery, forming an allegiance to the life of the mind. The elegy is, therefore, characteristic, in one instance for the late Seaborn Jones, and in another example, a poem built upon couplets after a claim, via the late James Merrill, that one should not wish to know what lies ahead in life.

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At the age of seventy-one, the recluse Amelia finally leaves her home in the North Carolina mountains to find the world grown strange and almost deserted. In her quest to unravel the mysteries of this apocalyptic landscape, she encounters a neighbor turned into an apple tree, children trapped in mica, and her doppelgänger. Between these events, she reflects on the recent death of her immigrant father and the disastrous love affair with a woman that sent her into seclusion for half a century. Eventually, Amelia meets up with the time-stranded and dying Sir Walter Scott, who becomes an unwilling companion. Together they navigate the dystopic local town and the living, breathing shadow of a mountain, searching for answers. At the novel's end, Amelia grows to understand the origin of these mysteries when she meets a famous mother, who is nothing like the Gospels imagined her. The Gospel of Rot is a creative intervention into the Appalachian imaginary, steeped in the Southern gothic. It explores lesser-known, idiosyncratic, and historically taboo subjects: Biblical apocrypha, heterodoxy, mysticism, queerness, Cherokee lore, and the weird and the fantastic. It strives to upend and complicate any static conception of the Appalachian experience.

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For centuries the Jewish community in Europe possessed a copy of Matthew in the Hebrew language. The Jews' use of this document during the Middle Ages is imperfectly known. Occasionally excerpts from it appeared in polemical writings against Christianity. By the end of the fourteenth century, however, the entire Hebrew Gospel appeared in the polemical treatise Even Bonham, by the Spanish writer Shem-Tob ben -Isaac ben- Shaprut. An important thrust to this volume is to establish that the Hebrew Matthew of the Even Bohan predates the fourteenth century. It shares many readings with ancient Christian writings, some of which were lost in antiquity only to reappear in modern times. These included Codex Sinaiticus, the Old Syriac version, the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, and a host of others. It also analyzes the language, artistic touches, and theology of the Hebrew Gospel.

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When the Lane cake, named after Emma Rylander Lane (1856-1904), appeared in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird (1960), the boozy Southern dessert was at peak popularity. Yet the culinary artist behind the cake had fallen into obscurity. From Biscuits to Lane Cake recovers Lane's biography, as well as the recipes she published in Some Good Things to Eat (1898) and the Columbus Enquirer-Sun. Born in Americus, Georgia, and left fatherless in the American Civil War, Lane spent most of her life living, studying, and managing a household in Southwest Georgia. While in Clayton, Alabama, and Columbus, Georgia, she drew on the diverse culinary heritage of the South as she won cooking demonstration competitions, published a cookbook, and taught cooking classes. The family's move from the U.S. South to Mexico, alongside a tragedy there, cut short her fame. By recovering the life story of Emma Rylander Lane, From Biscuits to Lane Cake reveals the Georgia backstory of Alabama's official state dessert. Lane's recipes-from biscuits, wafers, and loaf cakes to salads, cordials, and holiday favorites-show that her expertise went far beyond the bourbon-infused dessert that bears her married name.

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Brigadier General Samuel Elbert's story spans most of Georgia's history in the eighteenth century. He is best remembered for his role as a commander of Georgia troops during the American Revolution. Before the war, he was a prominent Savannah merchant and a member of the General Assembly when James Wright was Georgia's governor. In 1775, Elbert was instrumental in bringing the Revolution to Georgia and he soon commanded Continental forces in the conflict. He emerged as a significant leader in the age of Revolution in Georgia and participated in almost every major battle in the state prior to his capture at Brier Creek on March 3, 1779. Elbert was present at the Battle of the Rice Boats in 1776, a participant in two of Georgia's three campaigns into Florida, commanded American troops during the action on the Frederica River in 1778, and was in Savannah when it fell to the British on December 29, 1778. After his exchange, he went to Yorktown, Virginia, and joined George Washington's forces, where he witnessed the surrender of Lord Cornwallis's British army in 1781. In 1785, Elbert became Georgia's governor, but his one-year term was plagued by border conflicts, particularly with the Creek Indians over the Oconee Lands. Among his most enduring legacies are the creation of independent masonry in Georgia, the chartering of Franklin College which later became the University of Georgia, and a county in the northeast section of the state that bears his name.

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Acclaimed novelist and memoirist David Armand's first full-length collection of poetry, The Evengelist, contains poems that are at once deceptively simple, clear, and colloquial, yet dense with meaning and universal significance. Drawing upon everyday incidents, Armand fashions poems of great lyrical beauty and potent symbolism that remind his readers of the importance of memory and of a shared language. But these poems are also a series of emotional meditations on fatherhood, growing up poor, and the legacies we leave behind for our families. Deftly using his own experiences, then casting them out into the world so that they become a part of the universal exploration of life and all its intricacies, Armand paints an honest and devastating portrait of what it means to be a father, a husband, and a son. The collection concludes with a series of poetic responses to some of the folk art and traditions of his native South, where he reimagines the remarkable photography of Birney Imes, as well as providing lamentations on the humble beginnings and tragic life of Elvis Presley, a poet and an evangelist in his own right.

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The dominant public philosophy of the United States of America has long been some version of liberalism--dedicated to individual liberty, equal rights, religious freedom, government by consent, and established limits on political power. Today, however, we today find ourselves in unusual times, when the major political parties have powerful and growing wings that embrace decidedly illiberal public philosophies. On the Left, critical theory eschews Enlightenment rationalism and liberal ideas of toleration and individual liberty as structures that serve to support inequality and oppression. On the Right, conservative scholars excoriate liberalism for privileging an ideal of individual autonomy that eats away at the civilizing bonds of family, tradition, religion, and country. What seems new here is not the critiques themselves, but the power and popularity of political movements that openly and proudly reject the first principles of America's long-dominant public philosophy. Can the center hold? Can the principles of 1776 survive? Or has liberalism run its course? With these questions in the air, this book proposes to return with fresh eyes to the beginning of liberalism and the political philosophy of John Locke. Instead of looking at Lockean liberalism as a simple and timeworn ideological program, the essays reexamine Locke's project by remaining alive to the complexity and nuance with which he addressed his subject. The Locke that emerges is indeed an ambitious and radical thinker, but one not as imprudent or unmindful of custom as his conservative critics would have it, nor as tolerant of oppression as his progressive critics aver.Contributors include Nasser Behnegar, Steven Forde, Peter Josephson, Rita Koganzon, J. Judd Owen, Gabrielle Stanton Ray, and Scott Yenor.

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Until now, a daily account (1,630 days) of Georgia's social, political, economic, and military events during the Civil War did not exist. During the 160 years since the conflict's termination, many fine accounts of wartime Georgia have rolled off various presses. Each daily entry derives from a quill scrolling the parchment or a press imprinting type on the day the activity occurred. For the author, constraint proved a continuing challenge, while the unearthing of a few dramatic quotes, without a date associated, negated their use in this resource. Many former reference books were too much North or too much South, but with this effort, Michael K. Shaffer strikes a balance between the combatants while remembering the struggles of enslaved persons, folks on the home front, and merchants and clergy attempting to maintain some sense of normalcy. Historians and students will benefit from using this book in future research endeavors. As such, this work will become the standard reference book for those studying the Civil War in Georgia. Maps, footnotes, a detailed index, and bibliographical references will aid those wanting more.

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Frank Lambert tackles the central claims of the Religious Right “historians” who insist that America was conceived as a “Christian State,” that modern-day “liberals” and “secularists” have distorted and/or ignored the place of religion in American history, and that the phrase “the separation of church and state” does not appear in any of the founding documents and is, therefore, a myth created by the Left. He discusses what separates “bad” history from “good” history, and concludes that the self-styled “historians” of the Religious Right create a “useful past” that enlists the nation’s founders on behalf of present-day conservative religious and political causes. Lambert believes that the most effective means of critiquing such misuse of history is sound historical investigation that considers all the evidence, not just that which support’s an author’s biases, and draws reasonable conclusions grounded in historical context.

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Here is a brief, balanced, and up-to-date history of Georgia from the early Native Americans into the twenty-first century. Based on the most recent research, this second edition surveys the people and events that shaped our state's history in a style that reads easily and flows effortlessly. Beginning with the earliest Native American settlements, the story tells of first contacts between area natives and Spanish from Florida, British from Carolina, and James Oglethorpe leading the effort to found a colony called Georgia. That colony passed out of the British Empire during the American Revolution, a conflict that was as much a civil war as a war for independence. In the following decades, the Creek and Cherokee were driven out as Georgia was transformed into a cotton kingdom dominated by a minority of slaveholders, who finally sought to make slavery perpetual in a war that often pitted Georgians against each other. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the state struggled with the consequences of the conflict, political, social, and economic. The postwar years were highlighted by economic stagnation, questions over the meaning of freedom, and one-party politics. Race relations pervaded the state's history after the Civil War and those struggles are traced from Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Era and twenty-first century voter suppression. In the latter half of the twentieth century, and carrying into the twenty-first, Georgia drifted away from the provincialism that characterized its history and moved toward modernity.

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The Atlanta Woman’s Club has steered the development and identity of Atlanta since 1895. Headquartered in the elegant and historic Wimbish House on Peachtree Street, the club symbolises both a vibrant past and continuing hope for this unique Southern city. Through their affiliation with the Georgia and General Federation of Women’s Clubs, members have helped improve the quality of life in Atlanta, the South, and the world in the fields of politics, human rights, poverty, the arts, education, health, conservation and the understanding of international affairs. As educational advocates, they worked to set the foundation of the Atlanta Public Kindergarten system and Georgia’s public library system. Along with other Georgia Federation of Women’s Club members, the Atlanta Woman’s Club is a vested owner of Tallulah Falls School, one of the most esteemed college preparatory private schools in the country. They helped establish the first farmers’ market in metro Atlanta and were instrumental in promoting the acquisition of a landing field and the building of what is now Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Few are aware of the club’s enormous effect on its community and state, or its ties to the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs (GaFWC) and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), both of which have been a major force in the history of Georgia and the nation. A Light on Peachtree: A History of the Atlanta Woman’s Club is the story of the remarkable efforts and accomplishments of the Atlanta Woman’s Club from 1895 to present time.

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Civil War historians have remained baffled over the Cassville controversies for the past 150 plus years. There are two versions of events: Confederate commanding General Joseph E. Johnston's story, and Lieutenant General John Bell Hood's story. But Federal General William T. Sherman had other plans, and it was Confederates who would be ""surprised"" instead. The Cassville Affairs, there were two of them, because there were two critical decisions that the Confederate leadership faced at Cassville: first, whether to attack a portion of the Federal army in the morning; and second, once the morning attack was no longer feasible, whether to stay and fight the next day. Both decisions were the responsibility of Johnston, and both decisions involved the advice and assistance by Hood. Johnston issued a General Order to all soldiers that morning proclaiming that the army had fallen back enough and would now turn and face the enemy. After a series of unforeseen circumstances, however, the Southern commander withdrew without a fight. Before the war even concluded, Johnston and Hood began finger-pointing as they wrote their own versions of what happened that day. Since then, historians have been scratching their heads as to who was telling the truth, or if either one was honest. The Cassville Affairs promises to change our understanding of the events surrounding the Cassville controversies and close the gap in its history. Replete with both period and modern-day color maps, The Cassville Affairs will be a vital book in the annals of the Atlanta Campaign.

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All manner of ghosts haunt the poems in Jack Bedell's new collection, Ghost Forest. From memories of lost loved ones, to the ghosts of heroes, to the remnants of an eroding coastline, these spectres fill Bedell's lines with beauty and wisdom to help us all move into the future. Sometimes through memory, sometimes through visitation, sometimes through pure fantasy, Bedell's poems invoke spirits to help us see the world as it needs to be seen, or put back whole our broken pasts to make moving forward possible. No matter if it's Sonny Liston in need of a moment's peace, a ghost forest glowing as harbinger of what's headed our way, or old habits left to us by family we've lost come back around on the breeze to make their souls present in this world, Ghost Forest takes time, page by page, to pay its due respects.

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Through the redemptive power of words, Old Gods confronts personal battles of addiction, autism, heartbreak, otherness, anxiety, and escapism through journey poems. Bolstered by faith, family, friends, and vocation, the poet's telling is ordered and meticulous. Here, readers will find that seeping wounds can be healed only by facing life head-on, not getting in its way. Offering no subterfuge or cryptic turns, Brooks has found quiet after writing this book's last line, a quiet that previous writings never managed.

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Stella Bankwell has suddenly found herself in a ""heap of trouble"" in the words of her mountain people. Ten years ago, the charming redhead was a sports marketing executive when she married unforeseen trouble, Asher Bankwell, who is descended from old Atlanta money and prestige. After public humiliation in front of Atlanta's snootiest at a black-tie gala, Stella is banished from high society. Running away to her childhood mountain home and her Mama's consoling, she soon heads for St. Simons Island where the sea and her best friend, Marlo, offer peace and calm. But there on her beloved island, Stella finds herself embroiled in a mystery that includes murder and money laundering. Simply trying to escape her scandalous embarrassment and an unhappy marriage, she's now facing real trouble: Possible federal indictments leading to a murder and serious danger for Stella. With the help of her best friend, Chatty (Chatham Balsam Colquitt IV, the only good that came from her marriage to Asher), who has followed her to his second home on adjoining Sea Island; former Governor McCager Burnett (Chatty's Sea Island neighbor); and U.S. Marshal Jackson (Pepper) Culpepper, they set out to solve a mystery that, most surely, will send a deep rattling through the columned, brick mansions of Atlanta's exclusive Buckhead.

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During an eight-month period in 1977 and 1978, the city of Columbus, Georgia, was terrorized by a mysterious serial killer who raped and ritualistically strangled seven elderly women in one of the community's finer neighborhoods. Despite intensive efforts on the part of police the Stocking Strangler, as he came to be known, managed to elude capture. After the last murder in April 1978, the case went cold. In the spring of 1984, a series of fortuitous events connected to an unrelated murder and a stolen pistol led to the capture of Carlton Gary, who had recently escaped from a South Carolina prison. Following a dramatic trial in August 1986, Gary was convicted of three of the seven Columbus murders and sentenced to death, a penalty that would not be carried out until March 2018. This convoluted tale of crime and punishment is punctuated by dramatic and unexpected twists and turns including issues of race, alleged conspiracy and misconduct on the part of the police and the judiciary, a second serial killer active in Columbus during the time of the Strangler murders, the Ku Klux Klan, errors in DNA analysis, and a vigorous and prolonged struggle by attorneys and death penalty opponents who believed in Gary's innocence.

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Weaving together input from six experts in the fields of Bible, Church History, and Theology, Christianity introduces learners to the practices, traditions, beliefs, and scriptures of the Christian faith. This expanded and updated edition tells Christianity's growth from humble origins to becoming the world's largest religion. New material appears on a variety of topics, such as church architecture, vestments, church offices, apocalyptic literature, the Gospels, Roman citizenship, and the life of Paul. This edition distills the most current research in an accessible style and user-friendly format, and improves on the previous edition by highlighting and defining key terms, adding breakout boxes, and rewriting all major sections with a focus on clarity and up-to-date information. Complete with a new introduction and conclusion, Christianity offers a fresh, crisp, and concise survey of a faith held dear by more than two billion people across the globe.

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A career-spanning volume drawn from forty years of work and a selection of new poems.Stephen Corey’s work is intelligent, moving and engaging. Poem after poem is beautiful, effortless, and thought-provoking. The range of style and subject matter, the depth of thought and emotion, the elegance and resonance and simplicity of language, the affectionate voice and tone—all work to make this a truly important and memorable book.“Here is a life, and a life, and / a life,” Stephen Corey writes in the opening poem’s instructions to on how find the faded leaf—also a metaphor for the end of life—that one must imagine still colored after he is “gone.” The poem is echoed near the end of this stunningly rich and encompassing book in a poem addressed to his four daughters about what he has missed during his life. In between we encounter a world we thought we knew but have not seen in this way before: things as varied as Monarch butterflies, telephones, calligraphy, and bread, as well as other writers and texts that become lenses to show us “How we are growing undoes what we are” and see.Like the glassblower’s art in one of these major poems, “Breath makes another world.” And like his Michelangelo in a sequence that masterfully covers centuries, we see “the way a life we love can be steered, / beyond our control, beyond us.” And so, thanks to this important and needed book we too can live beyond ourselves; that, indeed, is the highest praise for any art.”—Richard Jackson, author of Broken Horizons and Where the Wind Comes From“Stephen Corey’s, As My Age Then Was, So I Understood Them, is sometimes bookish, in the best ways, and in addition to welcoming many of the stars in our pantheon (Shakespeare, O’Keeffe, Keats, Ginsberg, Woolf, and Whitman for example) there’s also the dual elegy for the poet’s father and Dickinson (the latter also has her own baseball poem), Emerson ‘at the moment of his first masturbation,” and a sequence in which Li Po and Tu Fu hop on a jet and tour America. What this means is that when Corey forays into “the real world” —keeping a hospital death watch, exploring and exalting carnal love, or delighting in his young daughter “playing Beethoven on my chest” — the poems are informed by both of his masters… by the “shelves of books” that are “the bones of my brain.””—Albert GoldbarthStephen Corey worked at the Georgia Review for thirty-six years in various positions including thirteen year as Editor before retiring in 2019. His first two poetry collections, The Last Magician (Water Mark Press, 1981) and Synchronized Swimming (Swallow’s Tale Press, 1984), were winners of national competitions. All These Lands You Call One Country (University of Missouri Press, 1992) and There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003) followed, and a half-dozen poetry chapbooks were interspersed along the way. His first prose collection was Startled at the Big Sound: Essays Personal, Literary, and Cultural (Mercer University Press, 2017), and a second is in process.

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