By author: Roland McElroy Foreword by: Sam Nunn
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: h940
ISBN: 9780881466287
Price: $30.00
When Georgia’s US Senator Richard B. Russell died January 21, 1971, the scramble began immediately to find a worthy successor. A number of political luminaries thought themselves imminently qualified, among them three former governors, a former congressman, and the state’s current treasurer. All would be competing against the appointed senator, David Gambrell in the Democratic primary. The winner would face US Representative Fletcher Thompson in the general election. Thompson promised to tie any Democrat to one of the most unpopular political figures in America, George McGovern. The 1972 race definitely was not for the timid or faint hearted. Outside of Houston County, few people knew Sam Nunn’s name. This book chronicles the journey McElroy took with Sam Nunn as he presented a message of common sense conservatism to the voters of Georgia in 1972. Nunn’s principled approach to making government work through cooperation and compromise, and his demonstrated mastery of complex issues, placed him among a rare few considered every four years for the highest office in the land.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H941
ISBN: 9780881466294
Price: $29.00
Chronicling the journey of ninety-year-old Sam Massell, each chapter is a book unto itself on the separate parts of his life. He has excelled in four careers, including twenty years in commercial real estate, twenty-two years in elected offices, thirteen years in the tourism industry, and is now in his thirtieth year of association management. In 1969, Sam Massell was elected the first Jewish mayor of Atlanta, Georgia. Since leaving office he has been inducted into numerous “Halls of Fame” for service in fields of business, government, civil rights, hospitality, and influence. This is a textbook case of behind-the-scenes fact and frivolity of the sins of a workaholic and the success of an idea man, a leader, and the subject of a well-written history.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H942
ISBN: 9780881466317
Price: $35.00
In September 1864, at a gathering in Macon, Georgia, Confederate President Jefferson Davis admitted that two-thirds of his troops were absent, most without leave. Some had opposed secession to begin with. Others came to see the conflict as a “rich man’s war.” But it was hardship and hunger among their families that drew most soldiers back home. For more than a century and a half, historians have often ignored the Confederacy’s home front difficulties, which had so much to do with desertion and defeat. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Civil War knows that Confederate armies were outnumbered two to one. In a presumptive way, the manpower disparity is usually attributed to the North’s larger population. Lost in that simplistic view is the impact that desertion had on sapping the Confederacy’s fighting strength. And this is but one of the many critical issues historians too often brush aside.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H943
ISBN: 9780881466324
Price: $35.00
Using a corpus of family letters, his FBI file, and a series of interviews, Frederick L. Downing portrays Clarence Jordan as a pioneer (on the frontier of the New South), a prophet, and a moral exemplar. As a New Testament Greek scholar and founder of Koinonia Farm, there were two distinctive poles to the prophetic nature of Jordan’s life and work: one which sought to critique and dismantle the status quo, and the other which attempted to evoke a new way of being.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P554
ISBN: 9780881466409
Price: $30.00
The name of Union general William T. Sherman is still reviled in Atlanta, 150 years after his soldiers devastated this important Georgia city. Thirty-seven days of artillery bombardment, July-August 1864, wrecked countless downtown buildings and killed perhaps a score of civilians. Longtime Atlantan Stephen Davis describes Sherman’s shelling in detail unmatched in the Civil War literature.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H948
ISBN: 9780881466447
Price: $30.00
"When we prepared to leave Washington in January 1981, my White House staff and cabinet members took up a collection to buy me a going-away gift," says Jimmy Carter. "My friends then gave the collected funds to Sears, Roebuck and Co., with directions to supply me with whatever tools and equipment I needed for a completely furnished woodworking shop in what had been our garage. This has turned out to be one of the best gifts of my life, and I have devoted a good portion of my spare time to developing my skills and designing and building furniture."
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P557
ISBN: 9780881466478
Price: $17.00
In this brief illustrated guide to the national monument located in Macon, Georgia, that conserves ancient Mississippian mounds and 12,000 years of human presence along the Ocmulgee River, Matthew Jennings and Gordon Johnston, introduce readers to the park's history, archaeology, Native cultures, and landscape. This new guide braids into Jennings's concise historical overview Gordon Johnston's field notes and poems, written while Johnston was writer-in-residence at Ocmulgee National Monument.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P566
ISBN: 9780881466584
Price: $18.00
Julie and Jim Bragg were grief-stricken when the sheriff and chaplain left--their sons Brax and Taylor, homebound on a July road trip, had been killed on a Texas highway. They asked God to send helpers if they were meant to survive this tragedy. Within the hour, as family gathered, baffling events occurred. A young stranger, clothed in white, visible only to Julie, walked slow circles in the yard. A new vase of lilies was on the piano, though no one had placed it there. Three weeks later, friends presented a memorial concert, calling it Bragg Jam, and the brothers' legacy was born.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H952
ISBN: 9780881466621
Price: $30.00
The core question of this book: how a great lawyer who comes to represent important causes, emerges out of the racist, paternalistic, and self-perpetuating establishment of rural Georgia in the 1950s? What about Tommy Malone led him to take on the power structure in his community and begin representing people who were injured against prominent doctors and hospitals? It wasn't money because there wasn't any money to be made at that time. The answers are as varied as human experience, but undoubtedly, Malone sensed a "guiding hand" directing him to the good. There was no teacher or mentor to illumine the path forward, just the gradual accretion of experience, knowledge, insight, and pain on a sensitive soul, kindling fierce passion and righteous anger.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H965
ISBN: 9780881466898
Price: $40.00
In December 1817, the English architect William Jay arrived at the busy port of Savannah, Georgia. In the coming four and a half years, he designed several public buildings and private residences in Savannah and a few structures in Charleston, South Carolina. All of his work was remarkable; yet, soon after his departure in 1822, only vague recollections of Jay survived in Savannah, and in Charleston he was forgotten altogether. Early in the twentieth century, Jay’s work was observed by a few prominent architectural historians, and accounts of his life and labors began to appear. He suffered many disappointments, but he gained remarkable achievements, not least of which was his lasting imprint on “showy Savannah.”
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H973
ISBN: 9780881466980
Price: $27.00
TALES FROM GEORGIA'S GNAT LINE is about the South--the Deep South; Larry Walker’s part of the world. It’s about good people, and some not so good. It’s about a part of the United States that was, and is, somewhat different from the rest. And it’s about cotton, because in many ways cotton caused Southerners to do some of the things that otherwise good people would not have done. It’s never been easy to be a Southerner, black or white. This book is about the South of the past, the present, and, if read carefully, of the future.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P585
ISBN: 9780881467109
Price: $30.00
Having lived on Cumberland Island for more than forty years, Carol Ruckdeschel’s goal has been to document present conditions of the island’s flora and fauna, establishing a baseline from which to assess future changes. This compilation of data, along with historic information, presents the most comprehensive picture of the island’s flora, fauna, geology, and ecology to date.
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