Kirjahaku

Ezra Burke, like his tenant-farmer father before him, struggles to eke out a livingfrom a rented plot of depleted, rocky soil in his beloved Blue Ridge Mountains.With crops destroyed by a freakish summer storm and hopelessly in debt, he isforced into the employ of the wicked and cunning landowner. When further tragedystrikes, Ezra, still a young, but now a desperate man, hears of work down inCorinth-the cotton mills are hiring.With his wife Judith-half Cherokee and who alone bears the burden of a dark andterrible secret-and two small children, Ezra leaves the mountains for a new lifein Corinth where he has found work at the mammoth Galway Mill. An honest andindependent man, he is ill-prepared for the intrigues, politics, and greed of mill lifein the industrial city.As the dream of someday returning to the mountains slowly, but inevitability fades, the hardships and injustices imposed on the workers by the wealthy mill ownersbecome untenable. When union organizers from the North arrive in Corinth, thesituation intensifies and finally reaches a boiling point. Threatened, manipulated, and ostracized, Ezra is faced with a choice-one that could cost him everything.Set against the backdrop of a recovering South still showing scars of Reconstruction, now stifled by the Great Depression, simmering but unspoken racial tensions, andunscrupulous mill owners, None but the Living explores the struggles and pathos ofdisplaced people trying to maintain their identity and values in a world new andstrange to them-a world of subterfuge, of haves and have-nots, of conformity, ofinjustice. Such is the saga of the Burke family.

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 ostensibly the story of the Pruitt family, but more poignantly, it is a story of a changing South and its ramifications for the people who experience the inexorable passing of a way of life. It is, in the end, a story of hope. Hope set against the backdrop of disillusionment, hatred, violence, and, alas, love.

A collection of poems and other musings by Kenneth P. Smith. The anthology is poems about the South Carolina low-country life, its history, and the sea. Movement in the Shadows is a collection of poems about life, love, and death as seen through the author's emotional experience which is, in fact, the way he defines poetry.