Purple America


Book Description

A son is tasked with an impossible decision in this poignant, astutely observed portrait of a family in crisis from the author of The Ice Storm While visiting his mother, Billie, who suffers from a degenerative neurological disease that has left her paralyzed and unable to speak, Dexter “Hex” Raitliffe learns that his stepfather, Billie’s husband and caretaker, has left her. Alone and incapable of living on her own, Billie makes an unfathomable request of Hex: to assist her in committing suicide. Perpetually indecisive, paralyzed by self-doubt, and hindered by an unshakable stutter, Hex sets out to confront his stepfather, only to find himself facing off against his own struggles—with intimacy and alcoholism—along the way. Back in the suburbs of his youth, Hex experiences the lull of nostalgia as well as the sting of painful memories like his father’s death as he tries to reconcile his mother’s fate and his own wavering identity. Author Rick Moody evokes this singular setting with stunning clarity. Profoundly tragic yet punctuated by moments of hilarity, Purple America is a searing gaze into one family’s fragile, chaotic heart. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Rick Moody including rare images from the author’s personal collection.




Red, Blue, and Purple America


Book Description

As America rushes headlong into a dramatic campaign season, it is clear that these consequential contests—and the ones that follow—will be hugely influenced by recent changes in the nation's makeup. Red, Blue, and Purple America provides a clear and nuanced understanding of the geographic and demographic changes that are transforming the United States and how that transformation is reshaping politics, for the 2008 elections and beyond. The invaluable result is a detailed picture of current trends as well as a clear-eyed assessment of how they will shape American politics and policy during the next two decades. An elite group of demographers, geographers, and political scientists analyze rapidly changing patterns of immigration, settlement, demography, family structure, and religion. Each analysis describes one major trend and assesses its likely impact on politics, for the 2008 elections but for the long term as well. The authors then lay out the most likely implications for public policy. In doing so, they show how these trends have shaped the Red and Blue divisions we are familiar with today, and how the developments might break apart those blocs in new and surprising ways.




The Color Purple


Book Description

The Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning novel is now a new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino. A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by the society around her and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life as a missionary in Africa, Celie is left behind without her best friend and confidante, married off to an older suitor, and sentenced to a life alone with a harsh and brutal husband. In an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear, Celie begins writing letters directly to God. The letters, spanning 20 years, record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment guided by the light of a few strong women. She meets Shug Avery, her husband’s mistress and a jazz singer with a zest for life, and her stepson’s wife, Sofia, who challenges her to fight for independence. And though the many letters from Celie’s sister are hidden by her husband, Nettie’s unwavering support will prove to be the most breathtaking of all. The Color Purple has sold more than five million copies, inspired an Academy Award-nominated film starring Oprah Winfrey and directed by Steven Spielberg, and been adapted into a Tony-winning Broadway musical. Lauded as a literary masterpiece, this is the groundbreaking novel that placed Walker “in the company of Faulkner” (The Nation), and remains a wrenching—yet intensely uplifting—experience for new generations of readers. This ebook features a new introduction written by the author on the 25th anniversary of publication, and an illustrated biography of Alice Walker including rare photos from the author’s personal collection. The Color Purple is the 1st book in the Color Purple Collection, which also includes The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy.




Purple Mountain Majesties


Book Description

in the summer of 1893, a young professor named Katherine Lee Bates took a train west from Massachusetts to Colorado. On her trip, she saw the beauty and the grandeur of our nation - its mountains, fertile prairies, and shining seas - and was moved to compose a poem that would later be set to music and stir generations to come. Glowing paintings and lyrical text blend together to show the magnificence of the United States of America and how it inspired Katherine Lee Bates to pen the poem that would become our nation's unofficial anthem.




In Search of The Color Purple


Book Description

Mixing cultural criticism, literary history, biography, and memoir, an exploration of Alice Walker’s critically acclaimed and controversial novel, The Color Purple Alice Walker made history in 1983 when she became the ï¬?rst black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Color Purple. Published in the Reagan era amid a severe backlash to civil rights, the Jazz Age novel tells the story of racial and gender inequality through the life of a 14-year-old girl from Georgia who is haunted by domestic and sexual violence. Prominent academic and activist Salamishah Tillet combines cultural criticism, history, and memoir to explore Walker’s epistolary novel and shows how it has influenced and been informed by the zeitgeist. The Color Purple received both praise and criticism upon publication, and the conversation it sparked around race and gender still continues today. It has been adapted for an Oscar-nominated ï¬?lm and a hit Broadway musical. Through archival research and interviews with Walker, Oprah Winfrey, and Quincy Jones (among others), Tillet studies Walker’s life and how themes of violence emerged in her earlier work. Reading The Color Purple at age 15 was a groundbreaking experience for Tillet. It continues to resonate with her—as a sexual violence survivor, as a teacher of the novel, and as an accomplished academic. Provocative and personal, In Search of The Color Purple is a bold work from an important public intellectual, and captures Alice Walker’s seminal role in rethinking sexuality, intersectional feminism, and racial and gender politics.




Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang


Book Description

Detroit's Infamous Purple Gang is a photographic history of one of the most notorious organized crime groups of the 20th century. The photographs chronologically follow the evolution of the Purples from their days as a juvenile street gang through their rise to power and eventual self-destruction. Using rare police department mug shots and group photographs, the book transports readers through the dark side of Prohibition-era Detroit history. Detroit had a gold rush atmosphere and a thriving black market during the 1920s that attracted gangsters and unsavory characters from all over the country.




Purple Mountains


Book Description

The subtle textures and colors that comprise America, sharpened by lonely miles amidst the splendor of the land as experienced by a Japanese motorcycler.




The Purple World


Book Description

You get what you pay for, right?Not when it comes to health care in America. We pay twice as much as any other developed nation for health care, yet we have the worst health of them all. If the safety record of American hospitals were transposed onto the airline industry, a fully loaded 747 would crash every other week! And while we pay the highest taxes for health care in the world, tens of thousands of Americans die each year from treatable illness merely because they can't afford medical care.How did we reach this shameful state? You'll be shocked to find out not only who's to blame, but more importantly, how easy the solution can be.In this riveting book, Dr. Joseph Jarvis, MD, examines how our nation's focus has radically shifted from the disease to the dollar--drastically harming Americans in the process. With unforgettable stories drawn from Dr. Jarvis's thirty-plus years in the medical profession, he gets you thinking about health-care reform in a big way (you'll never get over the drunk miner who spent the night dipping a dead, rabid bat into every bar patron's drink!).And through other captivating examples, from brothels to nursing homes, he shows how poorly the average American understands how to make safe health-care choices in the so-called medical marketplace and how poorly politicians serve as arbiters of what good health policy should be.Most importantly, this book can finally make a difference: instead of simply pointing fingers and wailing about the outrages, Dr. Jarvis offers a workable solution that can be quickly implemented by each state. Before you finish this book, you'll get a compelling look at how politicians can offer real solutions and how the American electorate can finally do the right thing in health-system reform: protect our families, our country, and our future.




Finding Purple America


Book Description

The new southern studies has had an uneasy relationship with both American studies and the old southern studies. In Finding Purple America, Jon Smith, one of the founders of the new movement, locates the source of that unease in the fundamentally antimodern fantasies of both older fields. The old southern studies tends to view modernity as a threat to a mystic southern essence--a dangerous outside force taking the form of everything from a "bulldozer revolution" to a "national project of forgetting." Since the rise of the New Americanists, American studies has also imagined itself to be in a permanent crisis mode, seeking to affiliate the field and the national essence with youth countercultures that sixties leftists once imagined to be "the future." Such fantasies, Smith argues, have resulted in an old southern studies that cannot understand places like Birmingham or Atlanta (or cities at all) and an American studies that cannot understand red states. Most Americans live in neither a comforting, premodern Mayberry nor an exciting, postmodern Los Angeles but rather in what postcolonialists call "alternative modernities" and "hybrid cultures" whose relationships to past and future, to stability and change, are complex and ambivalent. Looking at how "the South" has played in global metropolitan pop culture since the nineties and at how southern popular and high culture alike have, in fact, repeatedly embraced urban modernity, Smith masterfully weaves together postcolonial theory, cultural studies, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and, surprisingly, marketing theory to open up the inconveniently in-between purple spaces and places that Americanist and southernist fantasies about "who we are"have so long sought to foreclose.




Purple Solutions


Book Description

America spends more than any other developed country on healthcare, and yet does not provide better health outcomes. Why is healthcare so expensive in America, and what is the solution to this out-of-control cost curve? Republicans and Democrats can't agree, and yet rational compromise is desperately needed. Perhaps the best solution to better healthcare in America lies between all this political hyperbole. In Purple Solutions, a collection of 20 experts have come together to share their thoughts and expertise on how to reform healthcare in America. Expert contributors include the former president of the AMA, policy and think tank leaders, healthcare executives, entrepreneurs looking to disrupt the current medical industrial complex, politicians, payers, providers and legal experts. The solution is in our hands as consumers and voters, not in the hands of big government or corporate medicine. Viable bipartisan solutions to healthcare reform are presented - we just need to change our mindset, and then convince our elected officials to compromise and work towards giving us better healthcare in America.