The Horn family, from the Foggy Bottom community on the banks of the Neches River in Deep East Texas, are a proud family. They are descendants of some of the earliest settlers in this very remote area. Foggy Bottom folks are known to be clannish and the Horns are viewed as a backwoods clan by the residents of the nearby town, Pine Hill. Anthony Hall, the bankers son, from Pine Hill is in love with Beth Horn, the daughter of the most prominent family in Foggy Bottom. Beth is a brilliant and vivacious young lady who is a premed student at the University of Texas, but the residents of Pine Hill still see her as that little Fog Head kid who sold peas from the Horn pea patch.. The prejudice on both sides of the river creates serious problems especially between the Pine Hills mayors son, Bobby Dodd and Thomas Horn. A story of trials, faith, integrity and perseverance unfolds as each of the Horn family tries to merge with their prejudiced laden environment.

Ellis O. Briggs (1899-1976) entered the Foreign Service of the United States in 1925. During the next 37 years, he was ambassador to seven countries. He also served in Cuba, Chile, Liberia, and China. This is a collected volume of his memoirs.

Recorded in 1949, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" changed the face of American music. Earl Scruggs's instrumental essentially transformed the folk culture that came before it while helping to energize bluegrass's entry into the mainstream in the 1960s. The song has become a gateway to bluegrass for musicians and fans alike as well as a happily inescapable track in film and television. Thomas Goldsmith explores the origins and influence of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" against the backdrop of Scruggs's legendary career. Interviews with Scruggs, his wife Louise, disciple Bela Fleck, and sidemen like Curly Seckler, Mac Wiseman, and Jerry Douglas shed light on topics like Scruggs's musical evolution and his working relationship with Bill Monroe. As Goldsmith shows, the captivating sound of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" helped bring back the banjo from obscurity and distinguished the low-key Scruggs as a principal figure in American acoustic music.Passionate and long overdue, Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown takes readers on an ear-opening journey into two minutes and forty-three seconds of heaven.

“I hope I shall have ambition until the day I die,” Clare Boothe Luce told her biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris. Price of Fame, the concluding volume of the life of an exceptionally brilliant polymath, chronicles Luce’s progress from her arrival on Capitol Hill through her career as a diplomat, prolific journalist, and magnetic public speaker, as well as a playwright, screenwriter, pioneer scuba diver, early experimenter in psychedelic drugs, and grande dame of the GOP in the Reagan era. Tempestuously married to Henry Luce, the powerful publisher of Time Inc., she endured his infidelities while pursuing her own, and remained a practiced vamp well into her crowded later years, during which she strengthened her friendships with Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham, John F. Kennedy, Evelyn Waugh, Lyndon Johnson, Salvador Dalí, Richard Nixon, William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, and countless other celebrities. Sylvia Jukes Morris is the only writer to have had complete access to Mrs. Luce’s prodigious collection of public and private papers. In addition, she had unique access to her subject, whose death at eighty-four ended a life that for variety of accomplishment qualifies Clare Boothe Luce for the title of “Woman of the Century.” Praise for Price of Fame “The twentieth-century history of this country, seen through the eyes and actions of a remarkable woman . . . one of the most fabulous, intimate biographies I have ever read.”—Liz Smith, Chicago Tribune “The epic Price of Fame is a thrilling account of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing and ambitious society figures.”—Amanda Foreman, bestselling author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire “Delicious . . . In Price of Fame . . . Sylvia Jukes Morris takes up the story she began in Rage for Fame. . . . Both books are models of the biographer’s art—meticulously researched, sophisticated, fair-minded and compulsively readable.”—Edward Kosner, The Wall Street Journal “Clare Boothe Luce [was] one of the twentieth century’s most ambitious, unstoppable and undeniably ingenious characters. . . . This full, warts-and-all biography hauls her back into the limelight and does her full justice.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Poignant and profound . . . nothing short of a triumph.”—Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, The Washington Times “Compelling . . . [a] brilliant biography.”—Peter Tonguette, The Christian Science Monitor