"From Roots to Branches" is a reader-friendly, historical overview of the development of one of the United States' fastest growing cities, Olive Branch, Mississippi.

Roots & Branches is rooted in a story of love and longing based on a fatal accident in a primitive upper Egyptian village over a century ago. In this rich and powerful story Meguid explores his remarkable early life based on a journal, letters and photos, which amply illustrate the book. How does a four-year-old boy uprooted from a cozy Egyptian family endure abandonment in impoverished post-war Germany? In his vivid biography of his formative years Meguid traces his childhood-alone, forsaken and often threatened with corporal punishment. Born to an Egyptian father and a German mother, his earliest memories of Cairo are idyllic, but his mother's refusal to adapt to Egyptian life resulted in upheaval. At the age of four, his parents left him in Hamburg with his German grandparents, where life became defined by the rigid rules of his Prussian grandfather. The desertion left him with a gaping hole, howling loneliness, and a longing that rippled through him. When his parents collected him five years later, they took him to England, where once again he had to adapt to being an outsider. When he eventually returned to his beloved Egypt, he had been gone so long that he no longer quite fit in there either. His father's premature death thrusted Meguid into another existential crisis of abandonment. Facing conscription and an uncertain future, Meguid learned to navigate his own path.

Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan's second major book of poetry (first published in 1964) is now reissued.

Originally formed by singer-songwriter Ian Anderson in psychedelic 1968, the band Jethro Tull has been recording its own kind of rock and roll and touring the globe for more than three decades. This is a history of the band through the present, written by an acquaintance of several of its members. The book includes a chronology of all of the band's recordings and information on all accompanying tours, with the author's critiques as well as the band's own reminiscences and opinions of each album. Also included are previously unpublished interviews with founder Ian Anderson, long-time band member David Pegg, other band members Glenn Cornick, Andy Giddings and Doane Perry, and more.

The story of the banjo's journey from Africa to the western hemisphere blends music, history, and a union of cultures. In Banjo Roots and Branches, Robert B. Winans presents cutting-edge scholarship that covers the instrument's West African origins and its adaptations and circulation in the Caribbean and United States. The contributors provide detailed ethnographic and technical research on gourd lutes and ekonting in Africa and the banza in Haiti while also investigating tuning practices and regional playing styles. Other essays place the instrument within the context of slavery, tell the stories of black banjoists, and shed light on the banjo's introduction into the African- and Anglo-American folk milieus. Wide-ranging and illustrated with twenty color images, Banjo Roots and Branches offers a wealth of new information to scholars of African American and folk musics as well as the worldwide community of banjo aficionados. Contributors: Greg C. Adams, Nick Bamber, Jim Dalton, George R. Gibson, Chuck Levy, Shlomo Pestcoe, Pete Ross, Tony Thomas, Saskia Willaert, and Robert B. Winans.

Professor Tom Shippey is best known for his books 'The Road to Middle-earth' and 'J.R.R. Tolkien. Author of the Century'. Yet they are not the only contributions of his to Tolkien studies. Over the years, he has written and lectured widely on Tolkien-related topics. Unfortunately, many of his essays, though still topical, are no longer available. The current volume unites for the first time a selection of his older essays together with some new, as yet unpublished articles.

Although widely viewed as the beginning of the legal struggle to end segregation, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision Brown v. Board of Education was in fact the culmination of decades of legal challenges led by a band of lawyers intent on dismantling segregation one statute at a time. Root and Branch is the compelling story of the fiercely committed lawyers that constructed the legal foundation for what we now call the civil rights movement. Charles Hamilton Houston laid the groundwork, reinventing the law school at Howard University (where he taught a young, brash Thurgood Marshall) and becoming special counsel to the NAACP. Later Houston and Marshall traveled through the hostile South, looking for cases with which to dismantle America's long-systematized racism, often at great personal risk. The abstemious, buttoned-down Houston and the folksy, easygoing Marshall made an unlikely pair-but their accomplishments in bringing down Jim Crow made an unforgettable impact on U.S. legal history.