Kirjahaku

Duane McGuane, ex-journalist and owner of the Portia, an art house in Uptown New Orleans, has a vision while standing on the Mississippi River levee near the French Quarter that it is time to move on and produce his own film: The Southern Guide to Self-Improvement. The production of the film is accelerated by the arrival of Hurricane Katrina a few days later. Duane’s efforts to survive Katrina and its aftermath bring him into alliance with his girlfriend Maybelle, his theater projectionist Moon-Ra, his Welsh lawyer Rhys, the hustler kid Boy Jack, a voudou preacher’s son Paulus, and their extended families and friends throughout the city. After a terrifying night seeking shelter in the Convention Center, helped along by Scheherazade-like tales to ward off fear and intruders, the group now called the Portia Family­ decides to head to Texas, where Duane has been gifted a mysterious ranch in the Big Bend by his old friend Carlos, whom he hasn’t seen since Duane’s insurgent gun-smuggling days in Mexico. Duane tells the Portia family they can start a new life and help make his movie. They head out in a stolen church van, joining the thousands of evacuees from Katrina who can no longer stay in New Orleans as it struggles to recover. Their flight takes them from the city to nearby bayou towns, through Cajun country, into the racist fringes of western Louisiana and East Texas, and a pause in San Antonio to regroup. When they travel to the Rio Grande Valley, another surprise that will affect all their destinies awaits. Increasingly torn by their decisions and consequences, they press on to the mountains and deserts of the Trans-Pecos to find Duane’s new land. There, they encounter more surprises—spiritual, deadly, and transformative. Some who started the expedition never return to New Orleans. Others are pulled home by the city, as is its way, to pursue their own journeys through life in the time of hurricanes.

This hardbound edition of the popular paperback with the same title is designed for libraries, schools, and other organizations that lend books. It does not contain the interactive games in the back of the paperback. Its target audience is ages 7-12, but older students and adults have praised it as well. The feedback from teachers who have tested this book in their classrooms has been phenomenal. Some students formed their own contests, completing the workbook games and sharing the bizarre facts they learned about animals. OUT ON A LIMERICK will suck you in before you hit page 1. Check out the "Rules for Reading Limericks" with safety measures to avoid limerick reading related injuries. It is a completely unique book of "Laughable Limericks and Fun Facts About Animals".

The stock market has changed more in last two decades than it had over the prior two centuries. Investing today is driven by technology, which can be both a blessing and curse. It is as if faster computing speeds compel people to trade faster. But that is a mistake. The market has always favored long-term investors over speedy speculators, and it has never favored those who have not bothered to learn the basics. What is the stock market? What does it mean to own shares of stock? How does the economy affect investments? What types of accounts can you set up? How do you use leverage when investing? What are your rights as an investor? There are many books that teach trading strategies, but few that encourage you to lay a foundation before you put money into building on it. This is a rule book about investing. Rule books are not quick reads, but they are necessary. You have a better chance at winning if you know the rules of the game. Not knowing the rules can have expensive consequences. This book will teach you What You Need to Know Before You Invest.

Voudou (an older spelling of voodoo)-a pantheistic belief system developed in West Africa and transported to the Americas during the diaspora of the slave trade-is the generic term for a number of similar African religions which mutated in the Americas, including santeria, candomble, macumbe, obeah, Shango Baptist, etc. Since its violent introduction in the Caribbean islands, it has been the least understood and most feared religion of the New World-suppressed, outlawed or ridiculed from Haiti to Hattiesburg. Yet with the exception of Zora Neale Hurston's accounts more than a half-century ago and a smattering of lurid, often racist paperbacks, studies of this potent West African theology have focused almost exclusively on Haiti, Cuba and the Caribbean basin. American Voudou turns our gaze back to American shores, principally towards the South, the most important and enduring stronghold of the voudou faith in America and site of its historic yet rarely recounted war with Christianity. This chronicle of Davis' determined search for the true legacy of voudou in America reveals a spirit-world from New Orleans to Miami which will shatter long-held stereotypes about the religion and its role in our culture. The real-life dramas of the practitioners, true believers and skeptics of the voudou world also offer a radically different entree into a half-hidden, half-mythical South, and by extension into an alternate soul of America. Readers interested in the dynamic relationships between religion and society, and in the choices made by people caught in the flux of conflict, will be heartened by this unique story of survival and even renaissance of what may have been the most persecuted religion in American history. Traveling on a criss-cross route from New Orleans across the slave-belt states of Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, dipping down to Miami where the voudou of Cuba and the Caribbean is endemic, and up to New York where priests and practitioners increase each year, Rod Davis determined to find out what happened to voudou in the United States. A fascinating and insightful account of a little known and often misunderstood aspect of African-American culture, American Voudou details the author's own personal experiences within this system of belief and ritual, along with descriptions and experiences of other people, ranging from those who reject it entirely to ardent practitioners and leaders. Davis also places voudou in a broad context of American cultural history, from slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, and from Elvis to New Age. Current interest in voudou is related, in part, to the arrival of large numbers of people into the United States from the Caribbean, especially Cuba. Blacks in that country were able to maintain the African religion in a syncretic form, known as santeria. The tensions that have arisen between Cubans and African Americans over both the leadership and the belief system of the religion is discussed. Davis raises questions and offers insight into the nature of religion, American culture, and race relations. The book contains an extensive bibliography for further reading and a glossary of voudou terms for readers unfamiliar with the subject. ROD DAVIS is an award-winning journalist and magazine editor who has taught writing at the University of Texas at Austin and Southern Methodist University in Dallas. A fifth-generation Texan, he has lived most of his life in Texas and the South.

The latest from prose stylist and accomplished novelist Rod Davis exposes the dark underbelly and underground economies of God's country. A desperate call from heiress Elle Meridian shakes ex-Dallas TV anchor Jack Prine from his comfortable life in the Big Easy as he begins his long search for Meridian’s missing teenage daughter. Instead of the girl, Jack discovers the savaged bodies of drug dealers and embarks on a journey of relentless violence and lethal betrayal across the South. As an intricate web of deception, extortion, and murder unwinds, Prine finds himself at odds with neo-Nazis, the cartel, and the Dixie Mafia. Even if Prine can save Meridian’s child, can he justify the blood on his hands? Rod Davis expands the thrilling world of South, America in this Southern noir, rife with chaos, unexpected turns, and fascinating characters.

In 1970, Second Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Hobbes, fresh out of college and ROTC, finds himself sent to South Korea instead of the expected Vietnam. His arrival at Kimpo Air Base turns his destiny from a war zone to another face of warfare, the destructive interactions between soldiers and camp followers, aka men and women, that are a part of conquest and occupation throughout history and around the world. Utterly unprepared, he follows trails and carves his own, his soul and sense of humanity falling to levels of hell that even Dante would find daunting. A beautiful young Korean working girl, known only as Miss Kim, becomes Hobbes's partner and his guide into deception and danger. Pushing through his 13-month tour, he becomes a part of the thoughtless, predatory subculture that binds him to the love of his life, but at an impossible price.