College football fans need no introduction to Bud Wilkinson, but few of them know the great University of Oklahoma football coach as a devoted father. In Dear Jay, Love Bud, Jay Wilkinson, Bud’s younger son, shares forty-seven letters his father wrote to him while he was in college and graduate school. Spanning the early to mid-1960s, these letters reveal Bud’s deep love for his son, as well as the philosophy and values that led to his remarkable success in sports and in life. Beginning with the first letter Bud wrote when Jay left home, this collection shows a father guiding his son toward his own path while stressing the importance of service to others. The embodiment of the scholar-athlete, Bud mixes encouragement with intellectual discussions. When Jay reads American philosopher William James for a class at Duke University, his father, a serious student of literature, reads the book, too, and uses its insights to help Jay deal with the challenges of his freshman year. Bud writes about his own challenges, as well, including his debate over whether to accept the Kennedy administration’s invitation to head the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Jay’s comments about each of these letters provide context and further insight. By the time Jay becomes a graduate student at the Episcopal Theological School, the correspondence turns toward religion and politics, as Bud reflects on the philosophical issues of the day and on his unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 1964. His belief that the greatest leaders are not always the most popular made him an unlikely politician even then, but a wonderful role model and interlocutor for his son. Bud’s thoughts on ethics in business and politics are as inspiring today as when he wrote them a half-century ago.
In 1893 Western Sicily, Gaetano DiGiovanni, twenty-five years old, foresees a day when he abandons his turbulent, hard-scrabble life in the Palermo Province hinterlands for the promise of America. His fourteen-and-a-half-year-old wife, Angelina Bucaro DiGiovanni, is at his side. Gaetano becomes an old-style Mafiosi "man of respect," called Don Tano Baiocco in Sicily and New Orleans. For the next half century, "Tano Baiocco" guides his burgeoning family through Atlantic Ocean crossings, murder, extortion, vendetta, bootlegging, hostage-taking Fascists cracking down on Sicilian Mafiosi, labor influence on the New Orleans banana docks, two criminal trials, a secret interment in the family burial vault, the Great Depression and World War II. Employing a culture-based nineteenth-century Sicilian mindset, including omerta and deception, Gaetano "Baiocco" DiGiovanni, his wife, children, and son-in-law, Natale Guinta, largely conceal the dark aspects of the family history from their offspring and following generations, who by the early twenty-first century have established themselves as pillars of their American communities. Then one day in 2009, one of Gaetano's many upright American granddaughters, distraught over her discovery of the truth about the 1921 Mafia assassination of Gaetano's oldest son, her Uncle Domenico, presents a few old newspaper articles to her own stunned son, the author of this book. She obliquely challenges him to dig out the whole truth of the family history. "One day, you're gonna write a book about my family," she says, "and it won't be so pretty. Why all the secrets? Why all the lies?" A Lie Will Suffice is the result of twelve years of research, cited in detailed endnotes and an extensive bibliography, that attempts to answer a mother's questions, to unravel and explain the sometimes difficult-to-discern, complex, but ultimately triumphant DiGiovanni-Guinta family history. It ends with the opaque revelation to the author by his Godfather, ten months before his Godfather's death, of the most closely held family secret.
Bud Wilkinson, Bear Bryant, and Woody Hayes-these are the names that come to mind when the talk turns to great collegiate football coaches. Wilkinson achieved the American Dream playing by the rules. No short cuts or quick fixes. As Americans search for success and role models, a retrospective view of Wilkinson offers a road map to the top, and a look at a durable American hero.
Explore your imagination! Patrick Picklebottom and the Longest Wait is a raucous, silly story about a young boy who finds himself bored while waiting for story time, but through creativity, discovers that the journey can be more fun than the destination.
Patrick Picklebottom and the Penny Book is a fun, relatable story about a boy who finds his greatest adventures away from expensive hi-tech toys and devices, and within the pages of his latest book.
For two centuries the question has persisted: Was Meriwether Lewis’s death a suicide, an accident, or a homicide? By His Own Hand? is the first book to carefully analyze the evidence and consider the murder-versus-suicide debate within its full historical context. The historian contributors to this volume follow the format of a postmortem court trial, dissecting the case from different perspectives. A documents section permits readers to examine the key written evidence for themselves and reach their own conclusions.
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