This Civil War biography sheds light on the Confederate General’s first year serving the newly formed Southern Republic. Early in the Civil War, General Robert E. Lee was given command of the Department of South Carolina, Georgia and East Florida. Making him, in effect, the first line of defense for for Confederacy and two of its key cities: Charleston and Savannah. In Lee in the Lowcountry, Charleston historian Danny Crooks examines this period in Lee’s career, in which he faced with confusion and convoluted loyalty among the ranks. Using Lee’s own words and those of his contemporaries, Crooks helps the reader to understand why Lee, and only Lee, could bring order to the early chaos of the war. He also reveals how Lee acquired the two most famous trademarks of his wartime career while in the Lowcountry. Long hours in the saddle prompted Lee to grow his signature beard and, while at Pocotaligo, he acquired his beloved equine companion, Traveller.

This cleverly designed paperback book with an expanding cover accompanies Daniel Crook's fascinating video works exhibition "everywhere instantly". Crooks' works seem to carry us through space and time in multiple directions at once. At a moment when much has been said about the possibilities of video and new media art, Crooks simultaneously takes us back to cinema's origins in the time-and-motion experiments of Marey and the Lumire brothers, and propels video art forward into exciting new territory. Exhibition: 18 July - 9 November 2008

From the days of "bucket brigades" and private volunteer companies--such as the Phoenix, the Axemen and the Eagle--Charleston has seen more than its fair share of conflagrations. A carelessly overturned candle could ignite a blaze that would consume hundreds of Charleston's closely built wooden structures within just a few hours, leaving large swaths of the city in ruins. Join Charleston native and local historian Danny Crooks as he relates the story of Charleston's many historic fires and firefighting efforts, starting as early as 1698 and continuing through the horrors of the Great Fire of 1861 and the establishment of the Charleston Fire Department in the 1880s.

Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

A game-changing book on the origins of life, called the most important scientific discovery 'since the Copernican revolution' in The Observer.

"Ask anyone outside of Austin what they know about the city and chances are the first thing they'll mention is the music. While the Armadillo Era has been well-chronicled, there is no book about Austin music in the 90s. Greg Beets and Richard Whymark were part of the scene at that time, making zines, playing in bands, and DJ-ing at the college radio station, and have put together an oral history of the decade. Beets and Whymark are not trying to cover all of the music made in Austin during the 1990s; they're most interested in the underground/punk community in which they participated. While a few of those bands got big (e.g., Spoon), the music remained mostly local, DIY. It was driven by live shows, though local media (radio, TV, print), record stores, and a few labels were also important to the story. Beets and Whymark devote chapters to those elements, but almost half of the chapters are based around a particular club. Organizing the book around physical spaces is not only appropriate for telling the story of the music, it is nice framing for the larger story of Austin. As the authors note, the city was still a relatively sleepy place in the early 1990s, with vacant blocks downtown and loads of small clubs that opened and closed simply because music-minded people wanted a place to play. By 1999, longtime venues like the Electric Lounge and Liberty Lunch were bulldozed to make way for development and tech companies"--

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • SOON TO BE AN FX LIMITED SERIES STREAMING ON HULU • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions. One of The New York Times’s 20 Best Books of the 21st Century "Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book—as finely paced as a novel—Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga." —New York Times Book Review "Reads like a novel ... Keefe is ... a master of narrative nonfiction. . .An incredible story."—Rolling Stone A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, and more! Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes. Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.