When you look at the life of Ben Davis, you'll see a man with a heart of gold. He's the perfect husband, the best example of a father you'll ever find, a great friend, and a man who loves God and wants to serve him. He seems to have his life together on the outside. He's reliable, fun-loving, patient, kind, respected, accountable, an exceptional role model, and a vital part of his church and family. What Ben feels, though, and what God knows is that Ben Davis has the same struggles and challenges that everyone else has. He doubts his decisions, second-guesses his ideas, and sometimes makes mistakes. If left to do what he wanted, Ben feels that on his own, he would fail every time. With the partnership of a precious wife whom he adores, a great son who looks to him for spiritual direction, and a sweet and hilarious little girl who lights up his world and brings an abundance of joy to his life, Ben has help. But no matter how much help he gets from his family, Ben knows his best help is to rely on God for wisdom and a lot of grace and mercy. Jeremiah 17:9 says, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked who can know it?" Things usually work out, and Ben comes out looking like a good guy, and God is glorified, but most of the time, he's glad not everyone can read the heart of Ben Davis.

When you look at the life of Ben Davis, you'll see a man with a heart of gold. He's the perfect husband, the best example of a father you'll ever find, a great friend, and a man who loves God and wants to serve him. He seems to have his life together on the outside. He's reliable, fun-loving, patient, kind, respected, accountable, an exceptional role model, and a vital part of his church and family. What Ben feels, though, and what God knows is that Ben Davis has the same struggles and challenges that everyone else has. He doubts his decisions, second-guesses his ideas, and sometimes makes mistakes. If left to do what he wanted, Ben feels that on his own, he would fail every time. With the partnership of a precious wife whom he adores, a great son who looks to him for spiritual direction, and a sweet and hilarious little girl who lights up his world and brings an abundance of joy to his life, Ben has help. But no matter how much help he gets from his family, Ben knows his best help is to rely on God for wisdom and a lot of grace and mercy. Jeremiah 17:9 says, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked who can know it?" Things usually work out, and Ben comes out looking like a good guy, and God is glorified, but most of the time, he's glad not everyone can read the heart of Ben Davis.

Reading the Mind of Ben Davis is a collection of short stories in the life of a man whose family handles experiences beautifully, even when Ben’s first thoughts are not always to do what’s right. Though it is Ben’s job to provide guidance and spiritual direction for his family, he often finds direction from the people around him. Many times that direction even comes from his children. And most of the time, he’s glad that not everyone is able to read the mind of Ben Davis.

Born in 1920 in Greensboro, North Carolina, Junius Scales, whose great-uncle had been governor of the state, grew up in the privileged environment of his family’s estate. The only black people he knew were the servants. Wanting to improve the lot of workers, mainly African-American, he joined the Communist Party in 1939 while at the University of North Carolina, seeing in the Party an opportunity to right the wrongs done to blacks and poor working people. Scales rose quickly within the Party to coordinate civil rights and labor organizing activities in several Southern states. He went underground when Party leaders were trailed and harassed by federal authorities. In 1954, FBI agents arrested Scales in Memphis for violation of the Smith Act of 1940. The only American convicted solely for being a member of the Communist Party, Scales would serve 15 months in prison before his 6-year sentence was commuted by President Kennedy in 1962. Cause at Heart follows Scales from his privileged southern upbringing through the awakening of his social conscience, his civil- and labor-rights work for the Party across the South, his arrest and trials, his disillusionment with the Party, and his time in prison. In a new afterword, Barbara Scales, who was 10 years old when her father went to prison, recounts what it was like to be Junius Scales’ daughter. “It is the calm, even voice of Junius Scales we hear in Cause at Heart... this moving and memorable document... It is the voice of a decent, idealistic man who spent 18 years of his life in the Communist Party... And we don’t hear a false note: he is telling us the truth, as he reveals his illusions and delusions, his weaknesses and his strengths, his passionate belief in his party and the Soviet Union, and all the nagging doubts as well. He spares us nothing... Cause at Heart is an intelligent, rock honest... memoir, an interesting document that helps to explain in no small measure the tragic attraction the strange and hydra-headed American Communist Party held for the many decent human beings who passed through its revolving doors.” — William Herrick, The New York Times “Scales’s political life... is beautifully described in this well written book. His scenes of prison life alone — where he won respect from his fellow inmates and jailers alike — make remarkable reading.” — Monthly Review “Compelling reading, especially the discussions of Scales’s arrest, trials, and prison experience, interwoven, as they are, with his reevaluation of the Party.” — Journal of American History “An important and often moving account of the Communist Party’s role in labor organizing and civil rights activities in the South during the 1940s... [Scales’] memoir succeeds in capturing the hope and enthusiastic dedication that motivated him and many of his compatriots... the story of one individual’s unending quest on behalf of human decency and justice.” — Patricia Sullivan, Southern Changes “An engrossing saga.” — Michal R. Belknap, The Georgia Historical Quarterly “A book of unique perception and value. It is must reading for anyone interested in the era of Joseph McCarthy.” — Choice

A profoundly funny—and comically profound—story collection from one of the most original voices in contemporary American fiction When his dying psychiatrist gives him the tapes to thirty years’ worth of therapy sessions, what else can Michael Goldberg do but listen? It is the story of his life, after all—never mind the fact that it’s narrated by a younger version of himself who has no idea what’s going to happen next. Besides, as a man of letters best known for “My Mother Is Not Living,” the story that earned him a reputation as “the Jewish writer who hated his mother more than any other Jewish writer,” Michael has never been especially concerned with the niceties of literary convention. What he really wants, what he’s been looking for from New York to Hollywood and back again—from doomed high school romances to a late marriage begun in sin and overshadowed by tragedy, from boyhood days playing stickball in the streets of Queens to middle-aged afternoons behind a desk at the activist organization Jewish Punchers, sorting masses of data into one of two files: “Good for the Jews” or “Bad for the Jews”—are answers. To life’s great mysteries, sure, but mainly to the one question that always seems to be waiting for him, wherever he goes: How did I end up here? What Michael discovers in his therapist’s tapes, and what David Evanier so masterfully portrays in this hilarious and heartbreaking collection, is a life that is no less inevitable for being unplanned, and no less extraordinary for being average.

The career of any black writer in nineteenth-century American was fraught with difficulties, and William Andrews undertakes to explain how and why Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) became the first Negro novelist of importance: “Steering a difficult course between becoming co-opted by his white literary supporters and becoming alienated from then and their access to the publishing medium, Chesnutt became the first Afro-American writer to use the white-controlled mass media in the service of serious fiction on behalf of the black community.” Awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1928 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Chesnutt admitted without apologies that because of his own experiences, most of his writings concentrated on issue about racial identity. Only one-eighth Negro and able to pass for Caucasian, Chesnutt dramatized the dilemma of others like him. The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt’s most autobiographical novel, evokes the world of “bright mulatto” caste in post-Civil War North Carolina and pictures the punitive consequences of being of mixed heritage. Chesnutt not only made a crucial break with many literary conventions regarding Afro-American life, crafting his authentic material with artistic distinction, he also broached the moral issue of the racial caste system and dared to suggest that a gradual blending of the races would alleviate a pernicious blight on the nation’s moral progress. Andrews argues that “along with Cable in The Grandissimes and Mark Twain in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chesnutt anticipated Faulkner in focusing on miscegenation, even more than slavery, as the repressed myth of the American past and a powerful metaphor of southern post-Civil War history.” Although Chesnutt’s career suffered setback and though he was faced with compromises he consistently saw America’s race problem as intrinsically moral rather than social or political. In his fiction he pictures the strengths of Afro-Americans and affirms their human dignity and heroic will. William L. Andrews provides an account of essentially all that Chesnutt wrote, covering the unpublished manuscripts as well as the more successful efforts and viewing these materials in he context of the author’s times and of his total career. Though the scope of this book extends beyond textual criticism, the thoughtful discussions of Chesnutt’s works afford us a vivid and gratifying acquaintance with the fiction and also account for an important episode in American letters and history.