A Norman Rockwell painting it wasn’t. But we wanted it to be. No one called it autism, much less Asperger’s back in the sixties when we were growing up. They called it weird, odd, different.  We were a tight knit family in our little town, where my parents were teachers at the local school. At times it seemed a childhood filled with conflict about my older brother John. He was quiet and sweet. Yet, at times he would also make strange noises, shake his hands and fingers, while being completely consumed in his own thoughts. My confusion grew in trying to make sense of his differences, the over protectiveness of my parents, the teasing and bullying of him at school. Loved him, sometimes hated him, and really didn’t want to be like him. Felt guilty about all of it.  The years following school rolled on, until both family and personal crisis brought me back home. I quickly became aware that there was a significant distance between John and me. This is where our real journey began. Step by step, as I tried working my way back into his life, my perception of him began to change. Yet, I couldn’t have imagined that he would one day become my hero and a teacher I could only hope to emulate.

Precisely John: A Journey of Autism, Love, Laughter, and Faith

Biographies & Memoirs

Miller, Catherine

Community & Culture

Phenix Books

<p>Like his tenant father before him, Ezra Burke, had struggled to make a go of farming the poor rocky soil deep in his beloved Blue Ridge Mountains. With crops destroyed by a storm and hopelessly in debt, he is forced off the farm and into the employ of the wicked and cunning Mr. Tanner. When further tragedy ensues, Ezra still a young man, hears of work in the mill town of Corinth (South Carolina?)-the cotton mills there are hiring. With his wife, Judith, half Cherokee and who alone bears the burden of a dark and terrible secret, and two small children Ezra seek a new life in a Corinth mill village. As the dream of ever returning to the mountains slowly but inevitability fades, he becomes enmeshed in the daily grind of work, family, and mill politics until that fateful summer day when union organizers and the owners collide. Set against the backdrop of a recovering South still showing many of the scars of Reconstruction, now stifled by the Great Depression, simmering but still unspoken racial tensions, and unscrupulous mill owners, None but the Living explores the migration of rural people to the cities, the politics of greed and social power, and the prevailing myth of the happy and contented Southern textile worker in the period between the World Wars. It is the saga of the Burke family.</p>

None Buth The Living

Literature & Fiction

Smith, Kenneth P

Genre Fiction

<p>Mill Town is ostensibly the story of the Pruitt family, but more accurately it is a story of a changing South and its ramifications for the people who experience the inexorable passing of a way of life. Tom, the eldest son, returns from the war in the Pacific to Whittier, a small Southern mill town. Disillusioned and cynical from his war experiences, he wonders aimlessly around the town where nothing ever seems to change. When his younger brother is mysteriously killed in New Orleans, Tom travels there to bring the body home only to encounter a trouble he did not anticipate, but could not avoid. With a terrible dark secret which he thinks is behind him, he quickly returns to Whittier and takes parttime work performing errands for the town's prominent lawyer, Theo Hatcher who becomes a mentor and a friend. The Pruitt family is then virtually destroyed when the mill is sold to a faceless Northern corporation. In a fleeting happiness, Tom finally finds solace in the love of a local girl, Maggie, who has struggles and dreams of her own. Seemingly close to coming to grips with his past demons, Tom is caught up in a horrific incident when a local black man is falsely accused of murdering a white taxi drive and is subsequently arrested, sealing Tom's fate. Mill Town is, in the end, a story of hope. Hope set against the backdrop of disillusionment, hatred, violence, and, alas, love.</p>

Mill Town

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