What really happened in Jerusalem on that fateful Passover? When Leon Butane climbs into the cab of his semi one late January night, he never dreams that a near fatal crash will catapult him into a world of bizarre visions, unexplained miracles and religious intrigue. He wakes from a forty-day coma with an assignment from God, delivered via the famed puppet Pinocchio: discover the names of the criminals crucified with Jesus of Nazareth, or face the consequences of your past actions. Keep your Bible handy as you accompany Leon on an adventure that twists and turns with action, humor, and love. Did the translators of the New Testament gloss over critical facts? Do these facts shed light on the crimes and betrayals lurking just below the scriptural surface? Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a shock when The DaVinci Code crashes into The Big Lebowski to produce The Butane Gospel. About the Author Michael W. Hinkle, a graduate of the University of Oklahoma Law School, practiced in the litigation arena for twenty-five years before retiring and turning his attention to writing and traveling. A resident of Edmond, Oklahoma, his Hey Hink column appears in The Edmond Sun and at www.boomer-living.com.

Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: As Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger's past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life. "Most moving is Parks’s depiction of a queer lineage, her assertion of an ancestry of outcasts, a tapestry of fellow misfits into which the marginalized will always, for better or worse, fit." —The New York Times Book Review When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks's grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. "I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man," and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks's life-changing journey to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, the small-town country singer from grandmother’s youth, all the while confronting ghosts of her own. For ten years, Parks traveled back to rural Louisiana and knocked on strangers’ doors, dug through nursing home records, and doggedly searched for Roy’s own diaries, trying to uncover what Roy was like as a person—what he felt; what he thought; and how he grappled with his sense of otherness. With an enormous heart and an unstinting sense of vulnerability, Parks writes about finding oneself through someone else’s story, and about forging connections across the gulfs that divide us.

Be A Christ Bearer by Michael Flannery __________________________________

This book presents the fullest account yet written of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Rooted in a wealth of oral histories, it tells the dramatic but underreported story of a people who confronted the unprecedented devastation of sixty-five-thousand homes when the eye wall and powerful northeast quadrant of the hurricane swept a record thirty-foot storm surge across a seventy-five-mile stretch of unprotected Mississippi towns and cities. James Patterson Smith takes us through life and death accounts of storm day, August 29, 2005, and the precarious days of food and water shortages that followed. Along the way the narrative treats us to inspiring episodes of neighborly compassion and creative responses to the greatest natural disaster in American history. The heroes of this saga are the local people and local officials. In often moving accounts, the book addresses the Mississippi Gulf Coast's long struggle to remove a record-setting volume of debris and get on with the rebuilding of homes, schools, jobs, and public infrastructure. Along the way readers are offered insights into the politics of recovery funding and the bureaucratic bungling and hubris that afflicted the storm response and complicated and delayed the work of recovery. Still, there are ample accounts of things done well, and a moving chapter gives us a feel for the psychological, spiritual, and material impact of the eight hundred thousand people from across the nation who gave of themselves as volunteers in the Mississippi recovery effort.