Good Old Boy


Book Description

The author's boyhood escapades in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi.







Never Too Late


Book Description

In June 12, 1963, Mississippi's fast-rising NAACP leader Medgar Evers was gunned down by a white supremacist named Byron De La Beckwith. Beckwith escaped conviction twice at the hands of all-white Southern juries, and his crime went unpunished for more than three decades. Now, from Bobby DeLaughter, one of the most celebrated prosecutors in modern American law, comes the blistering account of his remarkable crusade in 1994 finally to bring the assassin of Medgar Evers to justice. This is the fascinating, real-life story of the assistant district attorney -- played by Alec Baldwin in Rob Reiner's Ghosts of Mississippi -- who brought closure to one of the darkest chapters of the civil rights movement. When the district attorney's office in Jackson, Mississippi, decided to reopen the case, the obstacles in its way were overwhelming: missing court records; transcripts that were more than thirty years old; original evidence that had been lost; new testimony that had to be taken regarding long-ago events; and the perception throughout the state that a reprosecution was a futile endeavor. But step by painstaking step, DeLaughter and his team overcame the obstacles and built their case. With taut prose that reads like a great detective thriller, Never Too Late is a page-turner of the very highest order. It charts the course of a country lawyer who, concerned about the collective soul of his community and the nature of American justice in general, dared to revisit a thirty-one-year-old case -- one so incendiary that everyone warned him not to touch it -- and win a long-overdue conviction. DeLaughter's success in this trial stands today as a landmark in the annals of criminal prosecution, and this bracing first-person account brings the saga to life as never before.




Taps


Book Description

The final work by one of America's most beloved authors, "Taps" returns to the stretch of southern delta that Willie Morris made famous with his award-winning classic "North Toward Home" and the enormously popular tales of his inimitable dog Skip.




My Mississippi


Book Description

A father and son present an eloquent portrait and personal evocations of modern Mississippi in this book which contemplates the realities of the present day, assesses the most vital concerns of the citizens, gauges how the state has changed, and beholds what the state is like as it enters the 21st century. 105 full-color photos.




Marmee & Louisa


Book Description

Originally published: New York: Free Press, 2012.




My Dog Skip


Book Description

This classic story of a boy, a dog, and small-town America is "a rich experience all around.... Skip turns out to be a dog worth writing about.... I'd take him home in a shot" (The New York Times Book Review). In 1943 in a sleepy town on the banks of the Yazoo River, a boy fell in love with a puppy with a lively gait and an intelligent way of listening. The two grew up together having the most wonderful adventures. My Dog Skip belongs on the same shelf as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Russell Baker's Growing Up. It will enchant readers of all ages for years to come. A major motion picture form Warner Brothers, starring Kevin Bacon, Diane Lane, Luke Wilson, Frankie Muniz, and "Eddie" from the TV show Frasier (as Skip), and produced by Mark Johnson (Rain Man).




The Courting of Marcus Dupree


Book Description

At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris found a living emblem of that baroque strain in the American character called "southern." Beginning on the summer practice fields, Morris follows Marcus Dupree through each game of his senior varsity year. He talks with the Dupree family, the college recruiters, the coach and the school principal, some of the teachers and townspeople, and, of course, with the young man himself. As the season progresses and the seventeen-year-old Dupree attracts a degree of national attention to Philadelphia neither known nor endured since "the Troubles" of the early sixties, these conversations take on a wider significance. Willie Morris has created more than a spectator's journal. He writes here of his repatriation to a land and a people who have recovered something that fear and misdirected loyalties had once eclipsed. The result is a fascinating, unusual, and even topical work that tells a story richer than its apparent subject, for it brings the whole of the eighties South, with all its distinctive resonances, to life.




Willie Morris


Book Description

William Weaks Morris was a writer defined in large measure by his Southern roots. A seventh generation Mississippian, he grew up in Yazoo City frequently reminded of his heritage. Spending his college years at the University of Texas and at Oxford University in England gave Morris a taste of the world and, at the very least, something to write home about. This volume is a comprehensive reference work dealing with Willie Morris' life and works. It is also a literary biography based on hundreds of primary sources such as letters, newspaper articles and interviews. The principal focus is on Morris' literary legacy, which includes works such as North Toward Home, New York Days and My Dog Skip.




The Kudzu That Ate Yazoo City


Book Description

Junior Jenkins, influenced by a large family, poverty, faith, and the ever-present kudzu vine, mingles fact, fiction and homegrown wisdom to remember those cotton picking days in Yazoo City, Mississippi.