This is an eclectic array of seventeen essays, all of which will evoke a direct and immediate response. Ranging from humorous to satirical, from persuasive to sarcastic, Flynn moves from preaching to the choir to preaching at the choir. Trained as both a Baptist and a Marine, he explores the concepts gleaned from a world that this training did not equip him to control, improve, or escape. Flynn admits he has tried to meld the pretty presumption of the Baptists that "all men are brothers" with the hard presumption of the Marines that "you will attack until I say you are dead." He calls the result an unholy view of the world in which he lives and survives, alternating between humor and anger.

Why are so many people drifting away from today's churches? John Killinger suggests that part of the problem is that they have personally outpaced the thinking and understanding of the church so that they no longer find it adequate as a social structure for the celebration of their faith. In their attempts to find Jesus and his teachings relevant within the new culture, they strike out on their own or adhere to para-Christian organizations that retain an allegiance to Jesus without the baggage of the traditional institution. Killinger, a former big-steeple minister and theologian, describes how he himself has been forced essentially to abandon the church in order to remain faithful to the beliefs and ideals that first drew him into it.

In 1999 Bryan Woolley of the Dallas Morning News set out to record the stories of ordinary people in North Texas, to tell about their lives, especially their past, and how they became who they became. These stories were published in a column entitled "Where I Come From," which ran in the Sunday newspaper from May 1999 to December 2000, to great reader acclaim. Now, for the first time in book form, the best of those stories is gathered herein with photos of each storyteller. Among the people featured-a refugee who traveled a long road to Texas after the fall of Saigon; a ballet teacher who as a teenager joined the French Resistance against the Nazis; a rabbi who was also a country-music disc jockey; and a man who survived Auschwitz. Each story is told in the teller's words, making this collection a valuable resource for oral historians as well as to all those who enjoy a good story. Where I Come From will also stimulate the endeavors of those seeking to record their family history.

The first major biography of the great actress draws on personal interviews with friends, family, and colleagues to offer a revealing study of Kim Stanley's extraordinary career and her acclaim as the finest stage actress of her generation, as well as her turbulent, self-destructive personal life, from her childhood and early training to her rise to stardom and the demons that destroyed her life.

"0n the Street of the Seven Angels in Paris, we find a gathering of humanity's finest and most frivolous. The Paris bookseller, Charles Edmund Dantes Durand; the liberal-minded, generous monks of a poor Dominican monastery; Madame Culuhac, the personally abstemious owner of the local whorehouse; the Mademoiselle Mailleferre, whose Religious Arts Shop is the headquarters for the newly formed Société for the Preservation of Christian Morality Against Contemporary Indecency; and a host of other finely delineated characters and caricatures. The Société stations a catty collection of spinsters and housewives to spy on their neighbors, resulting in an hilarious citizen's arrest and a revealing censorship trial that intrigues all of Paris. As Jonathan Kozol writes of this novel, "the literary magic here is in the vivid details. I felt I was back in Paris once again after so many years, and followed the delicious story of Durand (a wonderful creation!) as if I were walking with him through the city""--Jacket flap.

In an ideal universe, theirs might have been the perfect love story from two separate worlds. But in the heart of the Bible Belt South, in America of the mid-twentieth century, their young love was forbidden because of their skin color. She was white, lovely, and privileged, growing up in a Tara-like Victorian home. He was Latino, dark-skinned, and working classthe grandson of a Mexican revolutionary who had fought with Pancho Villa. And an innocent waltz at a school May Fetea waltz that they were not permitted to dance togethercame to symbolize their societys racial divide. In The Prince of South Waco, author Tony Castro narrates his sensitive rite-of-passage memoir of growing up Latino in the segregated South in an age when being different in America often brought the cruel, hard reality of the time, along with heartbreak and despair. He recounts how, as a child in an era before bilingual education and affirmative action, he overcame speech and learning disabilities and an inability to speak English to become an honor student with a penchant for literature, the classics, and writing. Throughout his youth, he remained discreetly close to the teenage ballerina who had captured his heart. All the while, he encountered ugly warnings of violence and harmagainst the two of themshould they see each other and defy the ages-old prohibition in the South against interracial relationships. A story taking place before the enactment of civil rights legislation, The Prince of South Waco provides insight into the issue of racial discrimination and hate of the times.

Robert Flynn's new novel, Echoes of Glory centers on a fictitious Texas county that embraces its legends, but not its actual history. Set in the Reagan era, the novel exposes shared myths as lies and the truth, lacking all comfort. In his inimitable style Flynn paints a portrait of the denizens of the county who tacitly embrace the legend as all too human and all too frail. Overshadowed by the accomplishments of adjacent Doss County, Mills County clings to its legends—the legendary Mills brothers. One brother had died at the Alamo, one at Goliad, three had fought at San Jacinto. The three survivors marched into the center of Texas bringing with them stories of heroism and acorns from the San Jacinto battlefield. According to tradition, they planted an oak tree for each hero who had died at the Alamo. Then there was Timpson Smith, sole survivor of Second Platoon of Marine reserves, who had prevented the North Korean army from driving U.S. and U.N. forces into the sea. To honor their memory the county erected a monument, "Second to None," topped with the heroic figure of Timpson Smith. But there is a less heroic side of Mills County. When Deputy Sheriff Larry Maddin decides to run against Sheriff and Local Hero Timpson Smith, and a drama professor at the university announces that he will write a play depicting the true story of Second Platoon, many fear the dark underside of Mills County will be exposed.