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In Facing the Planetary William E. Connolly expands his influential work on the politics of pluralization, capitalism, fragility, and secularism to address the complexities of climate change and to complicate notions of the Anthropocene. Focusing on planetary processes—including the ocean conveyor, glacier flows, tectonic plates, and species evolution—he combines a critical understanding of capitalism with an appreciation of how such nonhuman systems periodically change on their own. Drawing upon scientists and intellectuals such as Lynn Margulis, Michael Benton, Alfred North Whitehead, Anna Tsing, Mahatma Gandhi, Wangari Maathai, Pope Francis, Bruno Latour, and Naomi Klein, Connolly focuses on the gap between those regions creating the most climate change and those suffering most from it. He addresses the creative potential of a "politics of swarming" by which people in different regions and social positions coalesce to reshape dominant priorities. He also explores how those displaying spiritual affinities across differences in creed can energize a militant assemblage that is already underway.

Faith and Political Philosophy consists of fifty-three letters between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, two of the most important political theorists of the twentieth century. In this correspondence, Strauss and Voegelin explore the nature of their similarities and differences, offering insightful observations about one another's work, about the state of the discipline, and about the influences working on them. The letters shed light on many assumptions made in their published writings, often with an openness that removes all vestiges of uncertainty.

Abram Tertz is the pseudonym of Andrei Sinyavsky, the exile Soviet dissident writer whose works have been compared to fabulists like Kafka and Borges. Tertz's settings are exotic but familiar and as compelling as those of lunatics and mystics. This edition contains the nightmarish "Pkhentz," a story missing from the first English edition.

In this close, personal history, the result of eight years of intensive research, Reed finds Faubus to be an opaque man, “an insoluable mixture of cynicism and compassion, guile and grace, wickedness and goodness,” and, ultimately, “one of the last Americans to perceive politics as a grand game.”

New York Times Book Review Notable Book for 1997
1998 Certificate of Commendation, American Association for State and Local History

In contemporary feminist theory, the problem of feminine subjectivity persistently appears and reappears as the site that grounds all discussion of feminism. In Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, Linda M. G. Zerilli argues that the persistence of this subject-centered frame severely limits feminists' capacity to think imaginatively about the central problem of feminist theory and practice: a politics concerned with freedom.

Offering both a discussion of feminism in its postmodern context and a critique of contemporary theory, Zerilli here challenges feminists to move away from a theory-based approach, which focuses on securing or contesting "women" as an analytic category of feminism, to one rooted in political action and judgment. She revisits the democratic problem of exclusion from participation in common affairs and elaborates a freedom-centered feminism as the political practice of beginning anew, world-building, and judging. 

In a series of case studies, Zerilli draws on the political thought of Hannah Arendt to articulate a nonsovereign conception of political freedom and to explore a variety of feminist understandings of freedom in the twentieth century, including ones proposed by Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, and the Milan Women's Bookstore Collective. In so doing, Zerilli hopes to retrieve what Arendt called feminism's lost treasure: the original and radical claim to political freedom.

A philosophical response that brings together feminist and ecological approaches to solving the global environmental crisis that the capitalist economic system has created
 
In the face of ecological catastrophe, neither feminists nor environmentalists have the option of merely supporting an environmental politics that would preserve an imagined nature somewhere outside capitalism. As Johanna Oksala contends, the political goal must be more radical: to challenge the capitalist economic system itself and the mechanisms by which it expropriates life on the planet.
 
Feminism, Capitalism, and Ecology lays the critical groundwork for this political project. It develops a new way of bringing feminist and ecological responses to capitalism together into a cohesive framework. By exposing the systemic logic by which environmental destruction and gender oppression are jointly rooted in capitalism, Oksala establishes the theoretical foundations for an effective political alliance. The traditions of materialist ecofeminism and Marxist feminism are critical starting points. But the rapid rise of biotechnology and the steady increase of precarity necessitate a model of resistance that responds to the distinctive challenges of contemporary biocapitalism. Timely and urgent, this book articulates a theoretically sophisticated response and maps out our real-world options in this existential struggle.

In this memoir, Geraldine A. Ferraro reflects on her experience as the first and only woman nominated by a major party to run on the presidential ticket. This book reveals the process that led to her nomination as the 1984 Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate and gives a revealing behind-the-scenes look at campaign politics, especially the ruthless criticism directed at her and her family. Ferraro brings to life the dynamics of the women in Congress and how the different life experiences that they bring to the table affect the policy making process. She also gives a real understanding of the pioneering women, including Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Millie Jeffrey and many others who worked together to make sure that a women was on the Democratic ticket in 1984.

Ferraro's run for vice-president was an important moment in American history. The time is right for telling a new generation this story of women's collective political power and the difference women office holders can and do make to public policy.

Former Wisconsin governor Philip F. La Follette forged a political path characterized by his progressive, innovative vision. Growing up in the shadow of revered senator "Fighting Bob" La Follette made for a politically charged childhood and laid the groundwork for Phil's emergence as a powerful figure in Wisconsin politics. A gregarious and fiery politician, Phil's efforts led to the passage of the country's first unemployment compensation act, aid programs for workers and farmers, and the reorganization of state government.

This approachable, comprehensive book traces La Follette's journey through public office as well as his life after the waning of the Progressive era. Phil La Follette’s is a history of continuing progressivism, of innovative solutions to social problems, and of loyalty to a political ethos that goes far beyond love of country. Kasparek's treatment of this Fighting Son is a monument not only to La Follette but to progressive politics in Wisconsin.

Contemplations of survival by one of the leading Czech writers of the twentieth century

It occurred to me why I was able to forgive the Italians, but never the Germans. Was it because the Italians never slept on mattresses stuffed with the hair of Luster Leibling or Weltfeind Flusser?

In this pair of short novels, Arnošt Lustig continues his lifelong project of creating a universe-at once concrete and dreamlike-to examine the horrors of the Holocaust and the impossible burden of living as a survivor.
The Abyss is the fragmented memories of David Wiesenthal, aged twenty, tortured by what he has witnessed and by the knowledge that luck-not skill, not courage, certainly not goodness-separated the survivors from the doomed. He seeks solace remembering the women he's loved or desired, even the one who represents his death.
In Porgess, the narrator recounts the life of the title character, "the most handsome boy in Jewish Prague" who was paralyzed on the last day of World War II. The two discuss their mutual fascinations-women, jazz, the significance of numbers-in sometimes bitter, sometimes sardonic voices, but always with the specters of the dead and the guilt of survival close at hand.

In First Son, Keith Koeneman chronicles the sometimes Shakespearean, sometimes Machiavellian life of an American political legend. Making deft use of unprecedented access to key players in the Daley administration, as well as Chicago's business and cultural leaders, Koeneman draws on more than one hundred interviews to tell an up-close, insider story of political triumph and personal evolution.

With Koeneman as our guide, we follow young Daley from his beginnings as an average Bridgeport kid thought to lack his father's talent and charisma to his unlikely transformation into an iron-fisted leader. Daley not only escaped the giant shadow of his father but also transformed Chicago from a gritty, post-industrial Midwestern capital into a beautiful, sophisticated global city widely recognized as a model for innovative metropolises throughout the world.

But in spite of his many accomplishments, Richard M. Daley's record is far from flawless. First Son sets the dramatic improvement of certain parts of the city against the persistent realities of crime, financial stress , failing public housing, and dysfunctional schools. And it reveals that while in many ways Daley broke with the machine politics of his father, he continued to reward loyalty with favors, use the resources of city government to overwhelm opponents, and tolerate political corruption.

A nuanced portrait of a complex man, First Son shows Daley to be sensitive yet tough, impatient yet persistent, a street-smart fighter and detail-driven policy expert who not only ran Chicago, but was Chicago.

More than one hundred years before Barack Obama, George Edwin Taylor made presidential history. Born in the antebellum South to a slave and a freed woman, Taylor became the first African American ticketed as a political party’s nominee for president of the United States, running against Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.
    Orphaned as a child at the peak of the Civil War, Taylor spent several years homeless before boarding a Mississippi riverboat that dropped him in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Taken in by an African American farm family, Taylor attended a private school and eventually rose to prominence as the owner/editor of a labor newspaper and as a vocal leader in Wisconsin’s People’s Party. At a time when many African Americans felt allegiance to the Republican Party for its support of abolition, Taylor’s sympathy with the labor cause drew him first to the national Democratic Party and then to an African American party, the newly formed National Liberty Party, which in 1904 named him its presidential candidate. Bruce L. Mouser follows Taylor’s life and career in Arkansas, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Florida, giving life to a figure representing a generation of African American idealists whose initial post-slavery belief in political and social equality in America gave way to the despair of the Jim Crow decades that followed.


Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the American Association for School Libraries

Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association for School Libraries

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

Second Place, Biography, Society of Midland Authors

Honorable Mention, Benjamin F. Shambough Award, the State Historical Society of Iowa

 This book brings together a unique combination of experts in conflict resolution and focuses on the role forgiveness can play in the process. It deals with theology, public policy, psychological and social theory, and social policy implementation of forgiveness. This book is essential for libraries, scholars, conflict negotiators, and all people who hope to understand the role of forgiveness in the peace process.

The book's first section explores how ideas like "forgiveness" and "reconciliation" are moving out from the seminary and academy into the world of public policy and how these terms have been used and defined in the past. The second section looks at forgiveness and public policy. One of the chapters, by Donald W. Shriver Jr., addresses forgiveness in a secular political forum.

The third section of the book draws us to a more thorough analysis of the relationship between forgiveness and reconciliation from voices in the academic and theological community, and the final section highlights the work of practitioners currently working with religion, public policy, and conflict transformation, particularly in areas such as Ireland and Africa. 

Contributors include Desmond M. Tutu, Rodney L. Petersen, Miroslav Volf, Stanley S. Harakas, Raymond G. Helmick, SJ, Joseph V. Montville, Douglas M. Johnston, Donna Hicks, Donald W. Shriver, Jr., Everett L. Worthington, Jr., John Paul Lederach, Ervin Staub, Laurie Anne Pearlman, John Dawson, Audrey R. Chapman, Olga Botcharova, Anthony da Silva, SJ, Geraldine Smythe, OP, Andrea Bartoli, Ofelia Ortega, and George F. R. Ellis.

This engaging biography of Augustus Garrett and Eliza Clark Garrett tells two equally compelling stories: an ambitious man’s struggle to succeed and the remarkable spiritual journey of a woman attempting to overcome tragedy. By contextualizing the couple’s lives within the rich social, political, business, and religious milieu of Chicago’s early urbanization, author Charles H. Cosgrove fills a gap in the history of the city in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Garretts moved from the Hudson River Valley to a nascent Chicago, where Augustus made his fortune in the land boom as an auctioneer and speculator. A mayor during the city’s formative period, Augustus was at the center of the first mayoral election scandal in Chicago. To save his honor, he resigned dramatically and found vindication in his reelection the following year. His story reveals much about the inner workings of Chicago politics and business in the antebellum era.

The couple had lost three young children to disease, and Eliza arrived in Chicago with deep emotional scars. Her journey exemplifies the struggles of sincere, pious women to come to terms with tragedy in an age when most people attributed unhappy events to divine punishment. Following Augustus’s premature death, Eliza developed plans to devote her estate to founding a women’s college and a school for ministerial training, and in 1853 she endowed a Methodist theological school, the Garrett Biblical Institute (now the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary), thereby becoming the first woman in North America to found an institution of higher learning.

In addition to illuminating our understanding of Chicago from the 1830s to the 1850s, Fortune and Faith in Old Chicago explores American religious history, particularly Presbyterianism and Methodism, and its attention to gender shows how men and women experienced the same era in vastly different ways. The result is a rare, fascinating glimpse into old Chicago through the eyes of two of its important early residents.

Containing the debate between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky on epistemology and politics, this book also features the most significant essays by the most important French thinkers who influenced and were influenced by Foucault. Foucault's teachers, colleagues, and collaborators take up his major claims, from his first to final works, and provide us with the authoritative context in which to understand Foucault's writings.

This volume also includes several important works by Foucault previously unpublished in English. The other contributors are Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Hadot, Michel Serres, and Paul Veyne.

Here for the first time is the French Foucault.

This volume offers lucid and important texts that will appeal to students and professors at every level of study. It is essential reading for all scholars of twentieth-century philosophy and critical theory.

Were the thirteen essays Michel Foucault wrote in 1978–1979 endorsing the Iranian Revolution an aberration of his earlier work or an inevitable pitfall of his stance on Enlightenment rationality, as critics have long alleged? Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that the critics are wrong. He declares that Foucault recognized that Iranians were at a threshold and were considering if it were possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the European Enlightenment. 

Foucault in Iran centers not only on the significance of the great thinker’s writings on the revolution but also on the profound mark the event left on his later lectures on ethics, spirituality, and fearless speech. Contemporary events since 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Arab Uprisings have made Foucault’s essays on the Iranian Revolution more relevant than ever. Ghamari-Tabrizi illustrates how Foucault saw in the revolution an instance of his antiteleological philosophy: here was an event that did not fit into the normative progressive discourses of history. What attracted him to the Iranian Revolution was precisely its ambiguity.

Theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich, this interdisciplinary work will spark a lively debate in its insistence that what informed Foucault’s writing was not an effort to understand Islamism but, rather, his conviction that Enlightenment rationality has not closed the gate of unknown possibilities for human societies. 

General Francisco Franco ruled Spain for nearly forty years, as one of the most powerful and controversial leaders in that nation's long history. He has been the subject of many biographies, several of them more than a thousand pages in length, but all the preceding works have tended toward one extreme of interpretation or the other. This is the first comprehensive scholarly biography of Franco in English that is objective and balanced in its coverage, treating all three major aspects of his life—personal, military, and political. The coauthors, both renowned historians of Spain, present a deeply researched account that has made extensive use of the Franco Archive (long inaccessible to historians). They have also conducted in-depth interviews with his only daughter to explain better his family background, personal life, and marital environment, as well as his military and political career.
            Franco: A Personal and Political Biography depicts his early life, explains his career and rise to prominence as an army officer who became Europe's youngest interwar brigadier general in 1926, and then discusses his role in the affairs of the troubled Second Spanish Republic (1931–36). Stanley G. Payne and Jesús Palacios examine in detail how Franco became dictator and how his leadership led to victory in the Spanish Civil War that consolidated his regime. They also explore Franco's role in the great repression that accompanied the Civil War—resulting in tens of thousands of executions—and examine at length his controversial role in World War II. This masterful biography highlights Franco's metamorphoses and adaptations to retain power as politics, culture, and economics shifted in the four decades of his dictatorship.

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians

Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Reviewers

“An important book, destined to elicit a heated academic debate surrounding the man who ruled Spain for forty years and whose figure still casts a long shadow four decades after his death.”—Journal of Modern History

Known for his fearlessness in both the political arena and the battlefield, Frank Blair is a Missouri legend. As a member of one of the most prominent and powerful political families in America during the nineteenth century, possibly the equivalent of the twentieth-century Kennedys, Frank was steeped in politics at an early age. The youngest son of Francis Preston Blair, editor of Andrew Jackson's Washington Globe and adviser to Presidents Andrew Jackson through Andrew Johnson, Frank Blair was greatly influenced by his father, who had high political expectations of him.

Volatile and combative, Blair was either strongly admired or hated by the public figures of his day. He held adamantly to his opinions and fought hard for his political causes. He was an ardent supporter of Abraham Lincoln and championed the president's program in Congress and in Missouri against the frequent assaults of the Radicals. Credited with being the principal leader in saving Missouri for the Union in 1861, Blair later served with great distinction at Vicksburg, Chattanooga, and in the Sherman campaigns throughout Georgia and the Carolinas. He is one of only two Missourians ever honored by his state in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol.

Frank Blair: Lincoln's Conservative reveals the full extent of Blair's importance as a national political figure. Specialists in nineteenth-century America, students of Missouri history, and Civil War buffs will welcome this study, which will long stand as the definitive work on this influential and colorful character.

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In his time Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was the most famous American in the world. Even those personally unacquainted with the man knew him as the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack, as a pioneer in the study of electricity and a major figure in the American Enlightenment, as the creator of such life-changing innovations as the lightning rod and America’s first circulating library, and as a leader of the American Revolution. His friends also knew him as a brilliant conversationalist, a great wit, an intellectual filled with curiosity, and most of all a master anecdotist whose vast store of knowledge complemented his conversational skills. In Franklin in His Own Time, by reprinting the original documents in which those anecdotes occur, Kevin Hayes and Isabelle Bour restore those oft-told stories to their cultural contexts to create a comprehensive narrative of his life and work.

The thirty-five recollections gathered in Franklin in His Own Time form an animated, collaborative biography designed to provide a multitude of perspectives on the “First American.” Opening with an account by botanist Peter Kalm showing that Franklin was doing all he could to encourage the development of science in North America, it includes on-the-spot impressions from Daniel Fisher’s diary, the earliest surviving interview with Franklin, recollections from James Madison and Abigail Adams, Manasseh Cutler’s detailed description of the library at Franklin Court, and extracts from Alexander Hamilton’s unvarnished Minutes of the Tuesday Club. Franklin’s political missions to Great Britain and France, where he took full advantage of rich social and intellectual opportunities, are a source of many reminiscences, some published here in new translations. Genuine memories from such old friends as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as opposed to memories influenced by the Autobiography, clarify Franklin’s reputation. Robert Carr may have been the last remaining person who knew Franklin personally, and thus his recollections are particularly signific

Frank Lautenberg was the embodiment of the American dream. The son of Eastern European immigrants who toiled in the factories of northern New Jersey, he rose to become a Fortune 500 CEO and eventually a five-term US senator. Yet his is not a simple rags-to-riches tale, but is rather the story of someone who used his newfound affluence and influence to improve the lives of ordinary Americans.
 
Told by one of the people who knew him best, his widow Bonnie, Frankly Speaking reveals the political strategies that made Lautenberg one of the Senate’s most powerful advocates for the health and safety of America’s citizens. He championed seemingly minor, unglamorous reforms that made a big difference to everyday lives, from raising the national drinking age to preventing domestic abusers from purchasing guns. These campaigns earned him powerful enemies in the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms industries, and he was subjected to some of the most brutal campaign mudslinging in American history.  Yet, as this inspiring biography reveals, New Jersey’s longest-serving senator was not afraid to take big political risks if it meant standing up for his principles, whether that meant opposing the Iraq War or protecting LGBTQ and women’s rights. 
 

Few figures loom as large in the intellectual history of revolution and postcolonialism than Frantz Fanon. An intellectual who devoted his life to activism, he utilized his deep knowledge of psychology and philosophy in the service of the movement for democratic participation and political sovereignty in his native Martinique and around the world.
 
With FranzFanon, Peter Hudis presents a penetrating critical biography of the activist’s life and work. Countering the prevailing belief that Fanon’s contributions to modern thought can be wholly defined by an advocacy of violence, Hudis presents his work instead as an integrated whole, showing that its nuances—and thus its importance—can only be appreciated in light of Fanon’s efforts to fuse philosophical theory and actual practice. By taking seriously Fanon’s philosophical and psychological contributions, as well as his political activism, Hudis presents a powerful and perceptive new view of the man and his achievement.
 
This brief, richly perceptive introduction to Fanon will give new force to his ideas, his life, and his example for people engaged in radical political theory and taking action against oppression around the world today.
 

What does it mean to be free? We invoke the word frequently, yet the freedom of countless Americans is compromised by social inequalities that systematically undercut what they are able to do and to become. If we are to remedy these failures of freedom, we must move beyond the common assumption, prevalent in political theory and American public life, that individual agency is best conceived as a kind of personal sovereignty, or as self-determination or control over one’s actions.

In Freedom Beyond Sovereignty, Sharon R. Krause shows that individual agency is best conceived as a non-sovereign experience because our ability to act and affect the world depends on how other people interpret and respond to what we do. The intersubjective character of agency makes it vulnerable to the effects of social inequality, but it is never in a strict sense socially determined. The agency of the oppressed sometimes surprises us with its vitality. Only by understanding the deep dynamics of agency as simultaneously non-sovereign and robust can we remediate the failed freedom of those on the losing end of persistent inequalities and grasp the scope of our own responsibility for social change. Freedom Beyond Sovereignty brings the experiences of the oppressed to the center of political theory and the study of freedom. It fundamentally reconstructs liberal individualism and enables us to see human action, personal responsibility, and the meaning of liberty in a totally new light.

When a group of young political activists met in 1944 to launch the African National Congress Youth League, it included the nucleus of a remarkable generation of leaders who forged the struggle for freedom and equality in South Africa for the next half century: Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, Jordan Ngubane, Ellen Kuzwayo, Albertina Smith, A. P. Mda, Dan Tloome, and David Bopape. It was Anton Lembede, however whom they chose as their first president.

Lembede, who had just begun practicing law in Johannesburg, was known for his sharp intellect, fiery personality, and unwavering commitment to the struggle at hand. The son of farm laborers from the district of Georgedale, Natal, Lembede had worked tirelessly to put himself through school and college, and then to qualify for the bachelor of laws degree. When he began law practice in 1943, he had also earned the respect of his fellows, not only for his intellectual achievements (which were many), but also for his dedication to the cause of freedom in South Africa. “I am,” he explained, “Africa’s own child.”

His untimely death in 1947 at the age of 33 sent a wave of grief through the Congress Youth, who had looked to him for moral as well as political leadership. With the publication of Freedom In Our Lifetime, the editors acknowledge Lembede’s early contribution to the freedom movement, in particular his passionate and eloquent articulation of the African-centered philosophy he called “Africanism.”

What is the opposite of freedom? In Freedom as Marronage, Neil Roberts answers this question with definitive force: slavery, and from there he unveils powerful new insights on the human condition as it has been understood between these poles. Crucial to his investigation is the concept of marronage—a form of slave escape that was an important aspect of Caribbean and Latin American slave systems. Examining this overlooked phenomenon—one of action from slavery and toward freedom—he deepens our understanding of freedom itself and the origin of our political ideals.
           
Roberts examines the liminal and transitional space of slave escape in order to develop a theory of freedom as marronage, which contends that freedom is fundamentally located within this space—that it is a form of perpetual flight. He engages a stunning variety of writers, including Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Frederick Douglass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Rastafari, among others, to develop a compelling lens through which to interpret the quandaries of slavery, freedom, and politics that still confront us today. The result is a sophisticated, interdisciplinary work that unsettles the ways we think about freedom by always casting it in the light of its critical opposite.  

In the first full biography of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), Alan Ebenstein chronicles the life, works, and legacy of the visionary thinker, from his early years in fin-de-siècle Vienna to his remarkable career as a Nobel Prize winning economist, political philosopher, and leading public intellectual. Ebenstein gives a balanced, integrated account of Hayek's diverse body of work, from his first encounter with free market ideas to his magisterial writings in later life on the legal, political, ethical, and economic requirements of a free society.

Illinois State Historical Society Superior Achievement Award, 2013

As the first African American elected to the Illinois General Assembly, John W. E. Thomas was the recognized leader of the state’s African American community for nearly twenty years and laid the groundwork for the success of future Black leaders in Chicago politics. Despite his key role in the passage of Illinois’ first civil rights act and his commitment to improving his community against steep personal and political barriers, Thomas’s life and career have been long forgotten by historians and the public alike. This fascinating full-length biography—the first to address the full influence of Thomas or any Black politician from Illinois during the Reconstruction Era—is also a pioneering effort to explain the dynamics of African American politics and divisions within the Black community in post–Civil War Chicago.

This first-hand account tells the story of turbulent civil rights era Atlanta through the eyes of a white upper-class woman who became an outspoken advocate for integration and racial equality

As a privileged white woman who grew up in segregated Atlanta, Sara Mitchell Parsons was an unlikely candidate to become a civil rights agitator. After all, her only contacts with blacks were with those who helped raise her and those who later helped raise her children. As a young woman, she followed the conventional path expected of her, becoming the dutiful wife of a conservative husband, going to the country club, and playing bridge. But unlike many of her peers, Parsons harbored an increasing uneasiness about racial segregation.
 
In a memoir that includes candid diary excerpts, Parsons chronicles her moral awakening. With little support from her husband, she runs for the Atlanta Board of Education on a quietly integrationist platform and, once elected, becomes increasingly outspoken about inequitable school conditions and the slow pace of integration. Her activities bring her into contact with such civil rights leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., and his wife, Coretta Scott King. For a time, she leads a dual existence, sometimes traveling the great psychic distance from an NAACP meeting on Auburn Avenue to an all-white party in upscale Buckhead. She eventually drops her ladies' clubs, and her deepening involvement in the civil rights movement costs Parsons many friends as well as her first marriage.