Bøger af Daniel Blake Smith

In spite of the world's struggle and sorrow, life sometimes shows us the wonderful. Brian Fenton's life is falling apart. A professor at a failing "directional college," Brian suddenly learns he must either take early retirement or double his workload. As he confronts the embarrassment of his job going south, Brian discovers that his loopy son, Danny, is paying a surprise visit-which can only mean a hand out for money and a need to crash. To top it all off, Brian is fielding frantic calls about his aging father who's declining rapidly with dementia. Once a family doctor in Juniper, the small Texas town where Brian was raised, "Doc Fenton" is going down fast-forcefully reminding Brian of his own mortality and the painful issues separating him from his domineering father-a man his loving wife calls "Mr. Wonderful." When Brian's father passes, the gathered Fenton family partakes in a volatile small-town Texas funeral-at once hilarious and poignant-which produces startling revelations about Doc Fenton that propel Brian and the whole family into a new direction, a new path forward. In the engaging vein of Ann Patchett's Commonwealth and Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You, Daniel Blake Smith's debut novel is at once a comic and heart-wrenching family saga. It offers a piercingly honest window into how we struggle to make sense of ourselves, our families, and our life purpose. If we're lucky, we discover Mr. Wonderful.

Though the tragedy of the Trail of Tears is widely recognized today, the pervasive effects of the tribe's uprooting have never been examined in detail. Despite the Cherokees' efforts to assimilate with the dominant white culture-running their own newspaper, ratifying a constitution based on that of the United States-they were never able to integrate fully with white men in the New World.In An American Betrayal, Daniel Blake Smith's vivid prose brings to life a host of memorable characters: the veteran Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson, who adopted a young Indian boy into his home; Chief John Ross, only one-eighth Cherokee, who commanded the loyalty of most Cherokees because of his relentless effort to remain on their native soil; most dramatically, the dissenters in Cherokee country-especially Elias Boudinot and John Ridge, gifted young men who were educated in a New England academy but whose marriages to local white girls erupted in racial epithets, effigy burnings, and the closing of the school.Smith, an award-winning historian, offers an eye-opening view of why neither assimilation nor Cherokee independence could succeed in Jacksonian America.

Inside the Great House explores the nature of family life and kinship in planter households of the Chesapeake during the eighteenth century-a pivotal era in the history of the American family. Drawing on a wide assortment of personal documents-among them wills, inventories, diaries, family letters, memoirs, and autobiographies-as well as on the...