Lane Summers lives in a small town in the hills of West Virginia. Looking for a more exciting direction in life, the young man latches onto a new clique of friends. He seeks companionship and salvation, but soon finds himself mesmerized by the glamour of parties and wild fun. Yet his new life takes him out of the darkness and into the light of self examination. Lanes story of love and bitterness as he struggles with social anxiety, depression and insomnia reaches a crescendo as he travels curvy roads in search of his true self.

This text argues that the hillbilly - in his various guises - has been viewed by mainstream Americans simultaneously as a violent degenerate who threatens the modern order and as a keeper of traditional values and thus symbolic of a nostalgic past free of the problems of contemporary life.

In Hillbilly elegy, J.D. Vance described how his family moved from poverty to an upwardly mobile clan while navigating the collective demons of the past. The book has come to define Appalachia for much of the nation. This collection of essays is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Vance's book to allow Appalachians to tell their own diverse and complex stories of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. -- adapted from back cover

The Pastor Driven Wife is a collection of strikingly honest stories that will bring laughter, light, and hope to anyone driving the bumpy road of faith. These stories-some hilarious, some poignant, some even miraculous-will especially encourage those who are "weary in well-doing" and provide valuable insights on how to go from "trying harder" to "trusting more." Come take a ride through Honky Tonk Hymns, My Drug Bust, Divine GPS, and many more chapters in the life of The Pastor Driven Wife. Note from the Author: "As a pastor's wife, teacher, counselor, mother, and grandma, I spent years pretending to be happy on the outside while crying and dying on the inside. I was fearful, struggling with perfectionism, fear of rejection, and an inexplicably vague sense of shame-yet deep down I always believed there had to be more. If you're feeling that same longing, there's good news....there IS more! So will you join me, maybe in your robe with your morning coffee? Let's ask the Father to bring us both together at His feet...free to laugh, cry, or simply receive His love."

Musical magic hit Austin, Texas, in the early 1970s. At now-legendary venues such as Threadgill's, Vulcan Gas Company, and the Armadillo World Headquarters, a host of country, rock-and-roll, blues, and folk musicians came together and created a sound and a scene that Jan Reid vividly detailed in his 1974 book, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock. The breadth of talent still astounds—Willie Nelson, Janis Joplin, Jerry Jeff Walker, Doug Sahm, Delbert McClinton, Michael Martin Murphey, Willis Alan Ramsey, Kinky Friedman, Steve Fromholz, Bobby Bridger, Billy Joe Shaver, Marcia Ball, and Townes Van Zandt. Reid's book even inspired the nationally popular and long-running PBS series Austin City Limits, which focused attention on the trends that fed the music scene—progressive country, country rock, western swing, blues, and bluegrass among them. In this new edition, Jan Reid revitalizes his classic look at the Austin music scene. He has substantially reworked the early chapters to include musicians and musical currents from other parts of Texas that significantly contributed to the delightful convergence of popular cultures in Austin. Four new chapters and an epilogue show how the creative burst of the seventies directly spawned a new generation of talents who carry on the tradition—Lyle Lovett, Stevie Ray Vaughan, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Robert Earl Keen, Steve Earle, Jimmy LaFave, Kelly Willis, Joe Ely, Bruce and Charlie Robison, and The Dixie Chicks.

Racial Situations challenges perspectives on race that rely upon oft-repeated claims that race is culturally constructed and, hence, simply false and distorting. John Hartigan asserts, instead, that we need to explain how race is experienced by people as a daily reality. His starting point is the lives of white people in Detroit. As a distinct minority, whites in this city can rarely assume they are racially unmarked and normative--privileges generally associated with whiteness. Hartigan conveys their attempts to make sense of how race matters in their lives and in Detroit generally. Rather than compiling a generic sampling of white views, Hartigan develops an ethnographic account of whites in three distinct neighborhoods--an inner city, underclass area; an adjacent, debatably gentrifying community; and a working-class neighborhood bordering one of the city's wealthy suburbs. In tracking how racial tensions develop or become defused in each of these sites, Hartigan argues that whites do not articulate their racial identity strictly in relation to a symbolic figure of black Otherness. He demonstrates, instead, that intraracial class distinctions are critical in whites' determinations of when and how race matters. In each community, the author charts a series of names--"hillbilly," "gentrifier," and "racist"--which whites use to make distinctions among themselves. He shows how these terms function in everyday discourses that reflect the racial consciousness of the communities and establish boundaries of status and privilege among whites in these areas.

Santa Claus's face has lost its glow because of all the things the author has put him through in other books, and so he takes his revenge.