This is all about growing up in the south during the 1930s and 1940s and going into the Army in 1953. Childhood adventures, my first real job at the telephone company and hunting stories. This was the south before ¿progress¿ came into our lives.

This all took place back in my high school years where my writing would go into my dresser draw. Later in my college years to be inspired by others who read some of my work. Also being inspired by the great Langston Hughes reading his poetry gave me the inspiration to write more with thoughts about life and endless images. Throughout my vision of writing ideas exploded into words and then formed into a poem or story. Writing was always my way of expressing my feelings and thoughts. Furthermore I experienced similar episodes of my own which gave me fruit for thought in my own travels.

Telling It like It Is It is a deliverance of the mind to think freely. It is breaking the chains that have enslaved the mind, body, and soul for several generations. It is telling like it has never been told before. It will enlighten the human intellect in a world filled with madness and in a society that has lied repeatedly that all men are created equally. There is corruption in our society that intertwines and connects to every individual in America. The root cause of this corruption is fueled by the act of greed to gain power, money, and sex.

'Telling It Like It Is' is a collection of quotations that either give good advice or are useful truths. Of course there will be quotations that you disagree with or don't identify with, but with about 700 pages how could it be otherwise! Taken as a whole though, the book tries to present a coherent view of life that has honesty and integrity and is true. Ultimately, however, you must decide for yourself whether each quote strikes a chord with you and whether all the quotes taken together present a picture of human affairs and behavior that you recognize and agree with. Whatever your final opinion, you will find this collection of quotations both fascinating and provocative.

The autobiography of one of the foremost jazz clarinetists who is well known for his recordings with Edward 'Kid' Ory and the Louis Armstrong All Stars. Darensbourg was born in Baton Rouge, LA, in 1906 and heard many early New Orleans jazz bands as a young boy. For most of his life he lived on the West Coast and the book is a first-rate reference source for students of jazz and popular music in the urban centres of Seattle and Los Angeles.

... encounter the realities of life

Inventing counterfactual histories is a common pastime of modern day historians, both amateur and professional. We speculate about an America ruled by Jefferson Davis, a Europe that never threw off Hitler, or a second term for JFK. These narratives are often written off as politically inspired fantasy or as pop culture fodder, but in Telling It Like It Wasn’t, Catherine Gallagher takes the history of counterfactual history seriously, pinning it down as an object of dispassionate study. She doesn’t take a moral or normative stand on the practice, but focuses her attention on how it works and to what ends—a quest that takes readers on a fascinating tour of literary and historical criticism. Gallagher locates the origins of contemporary counterfactual history in eighteenth-century Europe, where the idea of other possible historical worlds first took hold in philosophical disputes about Providence before being repurposed by military theorists as a tool for improving the art of war. In the next century, counterfactualism became a legal device for deciding liability, and lengthy alternate-history fictions appeared, illustrating struggles for historical justice. These early motivations—for philosophical understanding, military improvement, and historical justice—are still evident today in our fondness for counterfactual tales. Alternate histories of the Civil War and WWII abound, but here, Gallagher shows how the counterfactual habit of replaying the recent past often shapes our understanding of the actual events themselves. The counterfactual mode lets us continue to envision our future by reconsidering the range of previous alternatives. Throughout this engaging and eye-opening book, Gallagher encourages readers to ask important questions about our obsession with counterfactual history and the roots of our tendency to ask “What if...?”

Can you imagine a young, vibrant, spontaneous and intelligent child having the potential to develop into a successful, high-achieving adult? Well, Alice experienced the opposite. Being raped at a tender age, she blocked out the event; could not tell her parents, and chose to pretend that life is dandy, living a faade and creating the illusion that all is well. Thus, with many unresolved emotions and thoughts which became debilitating beliefs, spilling over into devastating behaviours, Alice carried these into adulthood which caused much pain and suffering. Many stumbling blocks were encountered, conflict and challenges she had to face and found herself at continuous cross roads and did not know which way to go. Was a breakdown imminent? Three pertinent questions are raised which baffles people because they have not considered it before. When are you the abused? When are you the abuser? When are you self-abusive? After deep and honest introspect she courageously had to deal with her representational and belief systems, conditionings, habits and patterns. How it leads to consequences and the impact it has on the self, family, friends, work and society at large. There is clarity!

America's favorite writing coach and bestselling author returns with an "indispensable" guide (Diana K. Sugg, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter) to writing clearly and honestly in a world full of lies, propaganda, and misinformation. The darker and more dystopian the future appears, the more influential public writers become. But with so much content vying for our attention, and so much misinformation and propaganda polluting public discourse, how can writers break through the noise to inform an increasingly busy, stressed, and overwhelmed audience? In Tell It Like It Is, bestselling author, writing coach, and teacher Roy Peter Clark offers a succinct and practical guide to writing with clarity, honesty, and conviction. By analyzing stellar writing samples from a diverse collection of public writers, Clark highlights and explains the tools journalists, scientists, economists, fact-checkers, even storytellers use to engage, inform, and hook readers, and how best to deploy them in a variety of contexts. In doing so, he provides answers to some of the most pressing questions facing writers today: How do I make hard facts—about pandemics, wars, natural disasters, social justice—easy reading? How do I get readers to pay attention to what they need to know? How do I help contribute to a culture of writing that combats misinformation and propaganda? How do I instill hope into the hearts and minds of readers? With Clark's trademark wit, insight, and compassion, Tell It Like It Is offers a uniquely practical and engaging guide to public writing in unprecedented times—and an urgently needed remedy for a dangerously confused world.