Chronicles the black experience in Georgia from the early 1500s to the present, exploring the contradictions of life in a state that was home to both the KKK and the civil rights movement.

Whether you are continuing your journey with me via these Spirit Animal Tales or whether you missed my first volume, The Voice of Coyote, and are leaping unwarned into this spiritual realm, I welcome you. These are tales that ‘I’ have been blessed with, passed to me from various Spirit Animals, mainly Coyote. They are filtered through ‘my’ experiences; people, places, things, & incidences that brought me to where I am today. There is no conscious effort on my part to accurately recreate any person, place, thing, or incident. If anyone has a button or two pushed, that’s probably meant to be. That said, the path lies before & may you enjoy. Peace! This one is for my beloved companion & wife, Linda for Uncle Ike, and for the ever-wandering WhiteDog Doug Hodges

This book is a memoir of my boyhood, the 14 years between 1934 and 1948, Memory is the way we allow the past to live in the present. But the past is not experienced in a vacuum. Memories have locations in a particular time and particular places. Th is brief memoir is attempt to share my boyhood as shaped by the Great Depression of the 1930s and the World War II years of the 1940s. In the writing of these pages it became evident to me that indeed the experiences of my childhood have greatly shaped the person I am today. It is hoped that this modest memoir may at once be an enjoyable read as well as encourage the reader to recall his or her own childhood days and reflect upon how that time may have shaped their lives.

A candid and eye-opening inside look at the final decades of Sinatra's life told by his longtime manager and friend, Eliot Weisman. By the time Weisman met Sinatra in 1976, he was already the Voice, a man who held sway over popular music and pop culture for forty years, who had risen to the greatest heights of fame and plumbed the depths of failure, all the while surviving with the trademark swagger that women pined for and men wanted to emulate. Passionate and generous on his best days, sullen and unpredictable on his worst, Sinatra invited Weisman into his inner circle, an honor that the budding celebrity manager never took for granted. Even when he was caught up in a legal net designed to snare Sinatra, Weisman went to prison rather than being coerced into telling prosecutors what they wanted to hear. With Weisman's help, Sinatra orchestrated in his final decades some of the most memorable moments of his career. There was the Duets album, which was Sinatra's top seller, the massive tours, such as Together Again, which featured a short-lived reunion of the Rat Pack--until Dean Martin, having little interest in reliving the glory days, couldn't handle it anymore--and the Ultimate Event Tour, which brought Liza Minelli and Sammy Davis Jr. on board and refreshed the much-needed lining of both their pocketbooks. Weisman also worked with many other acts, including Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, and an ungrateful Don Rickles, whom Weisman helped get out from under the mob's thumb. Over their years together, Weisman became a confidant to the man who trusted few, and he came to know Sinatra's world intimately: his wife, Barbara, who socialized with princesses and presidents and tried to close Sinatra off from his rough and tough friends such as Jilly Rizzo; Nancy Jr., who was closest to her dad; Tina, who aggressively battled for her and her siblings' rights to the Sinatra legacy and was most like her father; and Frank Jr., the child with the most fraught relationship with the legendary entertainer. Ultimately Weisman, who had become the executor of Sinatra's estate, was left alone to navigate the infighting and hatred between those born to the name and the wife who acquired it, when a mystery woman showed up and threatened to throw the family's future into jeopardy. Laden with surprising, moving, and revealing stories, The Way It Was also shows a side of Sinatra few knew. As a lion in winter, he was struggling with the challenges that come with old age, as well as memory loss, depression, and antidepressents. Weisman was by his side through it all, witness to a man who had towering confidence, staggering fearlessness, and a rarely seen vulnerability that became more apparent as his final days approached.

THE WAY IT WAS draws a picture of the last half century with its craters and peaks there at your fingertips, shared and explored by caring witnesses who took sides all the way through. It was not by chance that someone called out Mazel Tov, Pal, as the news of Francos demise swept through a Paris gallery opening. Their lives touched on the vital chords of our times. The story that emerges is humane, often funny, acute and shaded with grace for they knew they were blessed. To contradict the Chinese proverb, they lived in interesting times and enjoyed every minute. The Way It Was shows the reader how.