Sunday, May 19th

2-4PM

Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement provides a window into the passion and significance of thirty-eight committed individuals who led a grassroots movement in a socially conservative state. The book is comprised of oral history narratives in which women activists share their motivation, struggles, accomplishments, and hard-won wisdom. Additionally interviews with eight men, all leaders who worked with or against the women, provide more insight into this rich--and also gendered--history.

The book sheds light on Louisiana and America's social and political history, as well as the national environmental movement in which women often emerged to speak for human rights, decent health care, and environmental protection. By illuminating a crucial period in Louisiana history, the women tell how "environmentalism" emerged within a state already struggling with the dual challenges of adjusting to the civil rights movement and the growing oil boom.

Peggy Frankland with Susan Tucker discuss and sign their book, Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement.

If you are unable to attend, you must call the book shop to order signed books.

Monday, May 20th

5:30-7PM

Sigrid is a woman who can keep secrets. She’s kept them from her husband, from her meddling mother-in-law, from her closest friend at work. In fact, her secret memories of a torrid love-affair are the only solace that remains to her.

It is 1943 – the height of the Second World War – and her home town of Berlin has become a city of women, and life is now defined by shortages, bombing raids, the drudgery of work, and the claustrophobic absurdities of propaganda. Her husband is in Russia, “stalled somewhere to the south of Moscow with a few hundred thousand other German husbands. She thinks about him nightly as she goes to sleep. Fears that he is suffering in the elements, but cannot quite wish him in the bed beside her. Does that make her as cold as the Russian winter? Maybe just her heart, she thinks.”

In this page-turning novel, David Gillham explores what happens to ordinary people thrust into extraordinary times, and how the choices they make can either destroy them or save them. Or both.

If you are unable to attend, you must call the book shop to order signed books.

Thursday, June 6th

6-7:30PM

The Blood of Heaven is the story of Angel Woolsack, a preacher’s son, who flees the hardscrabble life of his itinerant father, falls in with a charismatic highwayman, then settles with his adopted brothers on the rough frontier of West Florida, where American settlers are carving their place out of lands held by the Spaniards and the French. The novel moves from the bordellos of Natchez, where Angel meets his love Red Kate to the Mississippi River plantations, where the brutal system of slave labor is creating fantastic wealth along with terrible suffering, and finally to the back rooms of New Orleans among schemers, dreamers, and would-be revolutionaries plotting to break away from the young United States and create a new country under the leadership of the renegade founding father Aaron Burr.

The Blood of Heaven is a remarkable portrait of a young man seizing his place in a violent new world, a moving love story, and a vivid tale of ambition and political machinations that brilliantly captures the energy and wildness of a young America where anything was possible. It is a startling debut.

Kent Wascom discusses and signs his book, The Blood of Heaven.

If you are unable to attend, you must call the book shop to order signed books.