{"title":"Deep South Books","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"last-hotel-for-women-book-vicki-covington-9780817310035","title":"The Last Hotel for Women","description":"\u003cb\u003eIn her fourth novel Covington threads the turbulent racial unrest\u003cbr\u003e of Civil Rights-era Birmingham into the already complicated fabric of one\u003cbr\u003e white family's life.\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e On Mother's Day, 1961, a busload of freedom riders arrived\u003cbr\u003e in Birmingham, Alabama, from \"up North.\" A group of angry white men, including\u003cbr\u003e members of the Ku Klux Klan, armed with pipes and clubs, greeted them.\u003cbr\u003e Life in this most segregated of southern cities would never be the same.\u003cbr\u003e It is to this pivotal moment that novelist Vicki Covington returns.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Birmingham crackles with tension--at the foundry where\u003cbr\u003e Pete, Dinah Fraley's husband, works; on the baseball field where white\u003cbr\u003e and black company teams uneasily take turns; and most of all in Dinah's\u003cbr\u003e hotel, where Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor holds court just\u003cbr\u003e as he did when Dinah's mother ran the place as a bordello. 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With the extraordinary talent to make the reader see the Ball canning jars on the kitchen table, hear the clicks on the party line, and feel the bittersweet moments of 20-year-old Callie Tatum's first experiences with adult desire, Oliver portrays a young wife's increasingly dangerous infidelity with cinematic precision and palpable suspense. Soon, with only her housekeeper as a confidant, Callie breaks society's rules about race and class as well as her marriage vows. The result is a chain of events that will lead to tragedy and a woman's stunning decision about love, passion, and the future of her life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOriginally published in cloth in 1994, \u003cem\u003eGoodbye to the Buttermilk Sky\u003c\/em\u003e received considerable attention nationally and became a featured selection of the Quality Paperback Book Club. Its inclusion in the Deep South Books series from The University of Alabama Press will extend the book's reach and its life, while offering new readers access to the enthralling story.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe richly drawn, fully developed characters of\u003cem\u003e Buttermilk Sky\u003c\/em\u003e live on in the reader's mind long after the book has been finished. 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Police commissioner \"Bull\" Connor loosed dogs and turned fire hoses on black demonstrators; four young girls at Sunday school were killed when a bomb exploded in a black church; and Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote his famous letter from the Birmingham jail, defending his activism to fellow ministers.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBirmingham native Paul Hemphill, disillusioned with his hometown, had left home to pursue a journalistic career, so he witnessed these historic events with the rest of the world through newspaper and television reports. \"That grim old steel town,\" he writes, \"was the most blatantly segregated city of its size in the United States of America, and most of us regarded it with the same morbid  fascination that causes us to slow down and gawk at a bloody wreck on the highway.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThirty years later, Hemphill returned to Birmingham to explore the depths of change that had taken place in the decades since the violence. 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