The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork recounts newspaperman Hunter James's attempts to save his 100-year-old family farm and homestead from extinction. Wise, irreverent, pugnacious, and often hilarious, James fights back against the galloping urbanization of his beloved North Carolina piedmont. Interweaving current affairs and family history, James details the growth of the Winston-Salem area as a center of Moravian piety and later as the world's largest tobacco manufacturing center.

This personal history shows he is not the only James to have had a difficult time fitting in with...

Far from the storm centers of the American civil rights movement, off-camera and outside most reporters' beats, countless, nameless individuals reached their own accords with the era's massive changes. Unsure what was expected of them--or even who expected it--blacks and whites taught themselves how to live and work in a new world, often not of their own making.

Drawing on the author's long career as a southern journalist, this series of closely related sketches, stories, and essays recounts what James calls the "hidden story of the civil rights movement." Set mainly in Georgia, North...

In March 1987, the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the national news media found themselves in rare agreement: Jim Bakker, the charismatic, cash-hungry televangelist, was an accomplished sinner but a rather unconvincing penitent. The story had just broken that Bakker had fornicated with Jessica Hahn, a New York church secretary, and then tried to pay her off with $256,000. Once exposed, Bakker weepily begged Falwell to help him steer his ministry through the scandal. Falwell assented--but then demanded Bakker's resignation when he learned that the Hahn affair only hinted at Bakker's profligacy....