Yankee Doctor in the Bible Belt


Book Description

Welcome to Dry Lick ... Welcome to Dry Lick, Kentucky!- In a simple, rural region of Kentucky, a little town surrounded by a patchwork of small farms, horses, and tobacco, a woman medical doctor arrives. A population of a few thousand awaits her. A stranger in a strange land, she must quickly learn the odd dialect and humorous ways of the locals, master outdated equipment, and do her best to mend, treat, and heal the men, women, and children who quickly find their way to the doorway of the Medical Clinic. The town Dr. Janet Tamaren practiced in consisted of a main street with a courthouse. Her medical practice shared a building with a video rental store. Town amenities included two restaurants and a hardware store. Plus, the corner cemetery. Kentucky has an intuitive mistrust of outsiders-like people from New York City, a location which was described in the local paper as the devil's playground. Yankee Doctor in the Bible Belt is Dr. Tamaren's humorous memoir based on her real life experiences working as a physician in rural Kentucky. Her story in a witty and heartwarming collection, bringing a new lens to small town rural America ... often amusing; sometimes terrifying; and sometimes heartbreaking. Her patients taught her valuable lessons about the nature of life, death, and the role of a doctor in mediating between the two. Quickly learning to translate the local dialect, she gets to know the families in town and learns a lot from her patients. Within its pages, discover the ties that bind us to each other in this thing called humanity. Dry Lick became the fictional name for the town and boasted generations of families, many living next door to each other. It even had its own dialect-English is spoken with an accent and with idioms unlike anywhere else in the country. It was a culture unto itself. These stories will transport you to a small town in the South where everyone knows everyone, for good or for ill. Plus, they offer a window into the intricacies of medical diagnosis and the adventure of solving medical puzzles. Janet Tamaren, MD found herself at 38, entering medical school, answering the siren call to the mysteries of medicine. For 25 years, she worked as a family doctor-20 of them a small rural community in Kentucky where she ran her own health clinic.




The Book of Genesis


Book Description

"The Book of Genesis: Exploring Deep Roots" provides an illustrated study guide for use in Hebrew school curriculum for 6th to 8th graders. The study guide focuses on exploring 18 stories in Genesis from a Jewish perspective and includes colorful illustrations and exercises to keep students engaged. "The Book of Genesis: Exploring Deep Roots" is suitable for Reform and Reconstructionist congregations. The study guide includes Hebrew with vowels to improve students' Hebrew learning.




Below the Belt


Book Description

Alternative lifestyles are anathema to the inhabitants of rural areas of the Bible Belt. Even gays and lesbians themselves resist the notions of community and self-identification espoused by city queers. As Wilson demonstrates, it is the combination of internalized self-hatred, the influence of the right-wing Republicans and religious fervor, together with the hatred, fear, and suspicion aroused by the intervention of gay and lesbian activists from urban areas, that determine the tenor of gay life in the American rural South. A series of shocking interviews with local religious leaders and medical experts whose opinions shape local discourse in sexuality, abortion, feminiosm, and AIDS are the foundation for this revelatory study.




A Prayer for Owen Meany


Book Description

Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen does not believe in accidents and believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying.




Albion's Seed


Book Description

This fascinating book is the first volume in a projected cultural history of the United States, from the earliest English settlements to our own time. It is a history of American folkways as they have changed through time, and it argues a thesis about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. While most people in the United States today have no British ancestors, they have assimilated regional cultures which were created by British colonists, even while preserving ethnic identities at the same time. In this sense, nearly all Americans are "Albion's Seed," no matter what their ethnicity may be. The concluding section of this remarkable book explores the ways that regional cultures have continued to dominate national politics from 1789 to 1988, and still help to shape attitudes toward education, government, gender, and violence, on which differences between American regions are greater than between European nations.




Walking to Gatlinburg


Book Description

"A Civil War odyssey in the tradition of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain and Robert Olmstead’s Coal Black Horse, Mosher’s latest, about a Vermont teenager’s harrowing journey south to find his missing-in-action brother, is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word....The story of Morgan’s rite-of-passage through an American arcadia despoiled by war and slavery is an engrossing tale with mass appeal." –Publisher's Weekly Morgan Kinneson is both hunter and hunted. The sharp-shooting 17-year-old from Kingdom County, Vermont, is determined to track down his brother Pilgrim, a doctor who has gone missing from the Union Army. But first Morgan must elude a group of murderous escaped convicts in pursuit of a mysterious stone that has fallen into his possession. It’s 1864, and the country is in the grip of the bloodiest war in American history. Meanwhile, the Kinneson family has been quietly conducting passengers on the Underground Railroad from Vermont to the Canadian border. One snowy afternoon Morgan leaves an elderly fugitive named Jesse Moses in a mountainside cabin for a few hours so that he can track a moose to feed his family. In his absence, Jesse is murdered, and thus begins Morgan’s unforgettable trek south through an apocalyptic landscape of war and mayhem. Along the way, Morgan encounters a fantastical array of characters, including a weeping elephant, a pacifist gunsmith, a woman who lives in a tree, a blind cobbler, and a beautiful and intriguing slave girl named Slidell who is the key to unlocking the mystery of the secret stone. At the same time, he wrestles with the choices that will ultimately define him – how to reconcile the laws of nature with religious faith, how to temper justice with mercy. Magical and wonderfully strange, Walking to Gatlinburg is both a thriller of the highest order and a heartbreaking odyssey into the heart of American darkness.




The New Yorker


Book Description




Shaking the Sugar Tree


Book Description

Wise-cracking Wiley Cantrell is loud and roaringly outrageous -- and he needs to be to keep his deeply religious neighbors and family in the Deep South at bay. A failed writer on food stamps, Wiley works a minimum wage job and barely manages to keep himself and his deaf son, Noah, more than a stone’s throw away from Dumpster-diving. Noah was a meth baby and has the birth defects to prove it. He sees how lonely his father is and tries to help him find a boyfriend while Wiley struggles to help Noah have a relationship with his incarcerated mother, who believes the best way to feed a child is with a slingshot. No wonder Noah becomes Wiley’s biggest supporter when Boston nurse Jackson Ledbetter walks past Wiley’s cash register and sets his sugar tree on fire. Jackson falls like a wet mule wearing concrete boots for Wiley’s sense of humor. And while Wiley represents much of the best of the South, Jackson is hiding a secret that could threaten this new family in the making. When North meets South, the cultural misunderstandings are many, but so are the laughs, and the tears, but, as they say down in Dixie, it’s all good.




Brands of Faith


Book Description

Through a series of fascinating case studies of faith brands, marketing insider Mara Einstein has produced a lively account of the book in the commercialization of religion.




Alcoholics Anonymous


Book Description

A 75th anniversary e-book version of the most important and practical self-help book ever written, Alcoholics Anonymous. Here is a special deluxe edition of a book that has changed millions of lives and launched the modern recovery movement: Alcoholics Anonymous. This edition not only reproduces the original 1939 text of Alcoholics Anonymous, but as a special bonus features the complete 1941 Saturday Evening Post article “Alcoholics Anonymous” by journalist Jack Alexander, which, at the time, did as much as the book itself to introduce millions of seekers to AA’s program. Alcoholics Anonymous has touched and transformed myriad lives, and finally appears in a volume that honors its posterity and impact.