Aradella Stark came into a world beautifully rooted in nature but limited in cultural development. How she transcends that limitation is the overarching theme of the book, set during the mid-1900s in a cotton mill village located in Northwest Georgia where her mother is a nightshift spinner at the mill and her father a house painter who makes most of his income from bootlegging moonshine whiskey. Nurtured by her angelic uncle, often referred to as "peculiar," she learns to love nature and experiences racial harmony with nearby neighbors. This story of Aradella Stark's coming of age is surrounded and supported by story chapters that enrich the sense of her emerging from a strongly imagized particular place and community and family. Her own intelligence and compassion, discerned and brought into bloom by a church pastor who links her to work and college in Atlanta, make possible her eventual doctoral education and her return to reclaim her roots. Despite the absence of cultural advantages known to city dwellers, what was not absent from her youth were the alternating tragic and comic motifs found in the best Southern fiction tradition, designed to bring to the reader deep engagement and moments of great delight.

An English language dictionary, in two volumes, that provides definitions, spellings, and pronunciations to more than 225,000 terms.

Using the historical principles of the Oxford English Dictionary, Lise Winer presents the first scholarly dictionary of this unique language. The dictionary comprises over 12,200 entries, including over 4500 for flora and fauna alone, with numerous cross-references. Entries include definitions, alternative spellings, pronunciations, etymologies, grammatical information, and illustrative citations of usage. Winer draws from a wide range of sources - newspapers, literature, scientific reports, sound recordings of songs and interviews, spoken language - to provide a wealth and depth of language, clearly situated within a historical, cultural, and social context.