Thad Coons's Books

Flashes of Light on a Dark and Stormy Night: A Flash Fiction Anthology

By: Michele Venné,Rita Ackerman,Anna Questerly,Kat Emmons,Charles L.M. Plumb,Thad Coons

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Flashes of Light on a Dark and Stormy Night: A Flash Fiction Anthology

By: Michele Venné,Rita Ackerman,Anna Questerly,Kat Emmons,Charles L.M. Plumb,Thad Coons

Six writers. Eleven months. It began with, “On a Dark and Stormy Night..." A group of us met in the back room of a bookstore. With a new prompt every month, and a specific word count to hit, this collection of flash fiction tales grew to fill a book. A benefit of anthologies is discovering a new author. And flash fiction stories can be enjoyed in minutes.

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Page Count

175

Publisher

My Joy Enterprises

Published Date

ISBN 10

0988625288

ISBN 13

9780988625280

Me 'N' Alvin

Growing Up in the Great Depression

By: Thad Box

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Me 'N' Alvin

Growing Up in the Great Depression

By: Thad Box

Essayist and poet Thad Box experienced poverty first hand as a small boy living on a tenant farm. His poems present a child's eye view of one of our country's major events. The Great Depression spawned a social and economic upheaval in American culture as great as the revolution that formed this country. With the possible exception of the Civil War, no event in our nation's history has been as significant. The people who lived through the Depression become fewer with each passing year. Most who were adults at the beginning of the depression are gone. Box's poems make history live through the tales of children. "Me 'n' Alvin" describes the joys and disappointments of a ten-year-old boy during the time between the stock market crash of 1929 and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Although it is about sharecropper children in the Central Texas Hill Country, it captures the hopes and dreams of poor kids everywhere who do not consider themselves poor. Box tells the stories through a series of narrative poems written in the vernacular, yet poetic voice of Hill Country people. He describes life of subsistence farmers and the heartbreak of being displaced by well meaning New Deal government programs. Games played by children, the wonder of becoming "rich" when the make-work dam construction pays 40 cents an hour, Sunday dinners, and celebrations are told through his eyes and with the voice of a precocious child.: Doing what hound dogs do or finding out about birds and bees are woven into the poems. Learning the facts of life was not just about sex. It often involved becoming aware of the problems of grownups: the lack of money, the stress of being put off the farm, the knowledge that the family was poor. But the joys of a child exploring his poverty cocoon, the love of his parents, the thrill of learning all become part of understanding the facts of life. A child's curiosity about sex is not ignored. The boys knew about billy goats, Maltese jacks, and roosters because their function on the farm was part of the natural process. But making the transition from understanding animal breeding to girls was an unending mystery. The book covers the time from shortly after Franklin Roosevelt's election in the 1930s until the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a time when many farm families were moving to California in search of a better life. Hobos and gypsies traveled from town to town in search of food. Soup kitchens filled less than basic needs of major cities. Obituaries of people who lived through these times fill newspapers across this land. This book is unique in that it captures a child's view of one of the major social changes of our country. The poems teach history with a smile.

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Page Count

163

Publisher

Xlibris Corporation

Published Date

ISBN 10

1401029647

ISBN 13

9781401029647

Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers

American Hilltop Fox Chasing

By: Thad Sitton

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Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers

American Hilltop Fox Chasing

By: Thad Sitton

Around a campfire in the woods through long hours of night, men used to gather to listen to the music of hounds' voices as they chased an elusive and seemingly preternatural fox. To the highly trained ears of these backwoods hunters, the hounds told the story of the pursuit like operatic voices chanting a great epic. Although the hunt almost always ended in the escape of the fox—as the hunters hoped it would—the thrill of the chase made the men feel "that they [were] close to something lost and never to be found, just as one can feel something in a great poem or a dream." Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers offers a colorful account of this vanishing American folkway—back-country fox hunting known as "hilltopping," "moonlighting," "fox racing," or "one-gallus fox hunting." Practiced neither for blood sport nor to put food on the table, hilltopping was worlds removed from elite fox hunting where red- and black-coated horsemen thundered across green fields in daylight. Hilltopping was a nocturnal, even mystical pursuit, uniting men across social and racial lines as they gathered to listen to dogs chasing foxes over miles of ground until the sun rose. Engaged in by thousands of rural and small-town Americans from the 1860s to the 1980s, hilltopping encouraged a quasi-spiritual identification of man with animal that bound its devotees into a "brotherhood of blood and cause" and made them seem almost crazy to outsiders.

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Page Count

263

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292777833

ISBN 13

9780292777835

Charges made by the Indiana State Board of Health against Thad. M. Stevens, M.D., Secretary of the Board: Together with Answers to Such Charges, with an Appendix, Containing Statements Offered in Proof and Other Matter

By: Thad. M. Stevens

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Charges made by the Indiana State Board of Health against Thad. M. Stevens, M.D., Secretary of the Board: Together with Answers to Such Charges, with an Appendix, Containing Statements Offered in Proof and Other Matter

By: Thad. M. Stevens

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

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BoD – Books on Demand

Published Date

ISBN 10

3385301742

ISBN 13

9783385301740

Breaking the Barrier to Upward Communication

Strategies and Skills for Employees, Managers, and HR Specialists

By: Thad B. Green,Jay Knippen

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Breaking the Barrier to Upward Communication

Strategies and Skills for Employees, Managers, and HR Specialists

By: Thad B. Green,Jay Knippen

Much has been written about communicating within organizations but relatively little on the critical skill of communicating upward. Green and Knippen, experts in employee motivation and performance, show how essential it is to the success of an organization, public or private, for employees to get their ideas up the ladder and into the hands of the top decision-makers. Their book outlines more than 40 specific upward communication needs and offers a structure that will ensure that the movement of ideas upward actually takes place. Unique in that it provides concrete advice for executives, managers, and employees alike, the book is especially important for human resource specialists, people engaged in training and developing the managers of tomorrow and contributing to the organization's success today. Green and Knippen are quick to identify the barriers to communication of any kind, and particularly the special barriers that inhibit the flow of ideas upward. They provide readers with concrete advice, not only on what to communicate upward but the essential skills of how to do it. They maintain that knowing both what to communicate and how to communicate are the most crucial talents that one can have, and yes, they can be taught. But not only do they help people in their careers, they also help people take control of their lives off the job as well. Those who want to improve these essential skills and in doing so get along better with people in higher level positions will find much wisdom here, in a readable, engaging presentation, and a thoughtful look at what they must do first, and do now.

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Page Count

369

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0313035407

ISBN 13

9780313035401

Harder Than Hardscrabble

Oral Recollections of the Farming Life from the Edge of the Texas Hill Country

By: Thad Sitton

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Harder Than Hardscrabble

Oral Recollections of the Farming Life from the Edge of the Texas Hill Country

By: Thad Sitton

Until the U.S. Army claimed 300-plus square miles of hardscrabble land to build Fort Hood in 1942, small communities like Antelope, Pidcoke, Stampede, and Okay scratched out a living by growing cotton and ranching goats on the less fertile edges of the Texas Hill Country. While a few farmers took jobs with construction crews at Fort Hood to remain in the area, almost the entire population—and with it, an entire segment of rural culture—disappeared into the rest of the state. In Harder than Hardscrabble, oral historian Thad Sitton collects the colorful and frequently touching stories of the pre-Fort Hood residents to give a firsthand view of Texas farming life before World War II. Accessible to the general reader and historian alike, the stories recount in vivid detail the hardships and satisfactions of daily life in the Texas countryside. They describe agricultural practices and livestock handling as well as life beyond work: traveling peddlers, visits to towns, country schools, medical practices, and fox hunting. The anecdotes capture a fast-disappearing rural society—a world very different from today's urban Texas.

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Page Count

316

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292702388

ISBN 13

9780292702387

From a Cocoon of Love and Poverty

A Memoir

By: Thad Box

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From a Cocoon of Love and Poverty

A Memoir

By: Thad Box

This book describes Thad Box's four-part journey from sharecropping through a career as aspiring rancher, educator, resource ecologist and environmentalist. The Cocoon of Love and Poverty, explores the influence of family, traditions, the Great Depression and rocky Texas hills on his basic values. Breaking from the Cocoon, discusses the broadening world opened by military service and college education. Spreading My Wings, examines development of philosophies of learning and service. Flying Like a Butterfly, demonstrates application of those philosophies. Written primarily for family, this gripping memoir should be read by anyone concerned with the environment and social justice.

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Page Count

385

Publisher

Xlibris Corporation

Published Date

ISBN 10

1401030211

ISBN 13

9781401030216

Freedom Colonies

Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow

By: Thad Sitton,James H. Conrad

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Freedom Colonies

Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow

By: Thad Sitton,James H. Conrad

A history of independent African American settlements in Texas during the Jim Crow era, featuring historical and contemporary photographs. In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory—they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural communities, often known as “freedom colonies,” African Americans created a refuge from the discrimination and violence that routinely limited the opportunities of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Freedom Colonies is the first book to tell the story of these independent African American settlements. Thad Sitton and James Conrad focus on communities in Texas, where blacks achieved a higher percentage of land ownership than in any other state of the Deep South. The authors draw on a vast reservoir of ex-slave narratives, oral histories, written memoirs, and public records to describe how the freedom colonies formed and to recreate the lifeways of African Americans who made their living by farming or in skilled trades such as milling and blacksmithing. They also uncover the forces that led to the decline of the communities from the 1930s onward, including economic hard times and the greed of whites who found legal and illegal means of taking black-owned land. And they visit some of the remaining communities to discover how their independent way of life endures into the twenty-first century. “Thad Sitton and James H. Conrad have made an important contribution to African American and southern history with their study of communities fashioned by freedmen in the years after emancipation.” —Journal of American History “This study is a thoughtful and important addition to an understanding of rural Texas and the nature of black settlements.” —Journal of Southern History

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Page Count

404

Publisher

Univ of TX + ORM

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292797125

ISBN 13

9780292797123

From Can See to Can’t

Texas Cotton Farmers on the Southern Prairies

By: Thad Sitton,Dan K. Utley

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From Can See to Can’t

Texas Cotton Farmers on the Southern Prairies

By: Thad Sitton,Dan K. Utley

Cotton farming was the only way of life that many Texans knew from the days of Austin's Colony up until World War II. For those who worked the land, it was a dawn-till-dark, "can see to can't," process that required not only a wide range of specialized skills but also a willingness to gamble on forces often beyond a farmer's control—weather, insects, plant diseases, and the cotton market. This unique book offers an insider's view of Texas cotton farming in the late 1920s. Drawing on the memories of farmers and their descendants, many of whom are quoted here, the authors trace a year in the life of south central Texas cotton farms. From breaking ground to planting, cultivating, and harvesting, they describe the typical tasks of farm families—as well as their houses, food, and clothing; the farm animals they depended on; their communities; and the holidays, activities, and observances that offered the farmers respite from hard work. Although cotton farming still goes on in Texas, the lifeways described here have nearly vanished as the state has become highly urbanized. Thus, this book preserves a fascinating record of an important part of Texas' rural heritage.

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Page Count

348

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0292777795

ISBN 13

9780292777798

Flashes of Light on a Dark and Stormy Night: A Flash Fiction Anthology

By: Michele Venné,Rita Ackerman,Anna Questerly,Kat Emmons,Charles L.M. Plumb,Thad Coons

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Flashes of Light on a Dark and Stormy Night: A Flash Fiction Anthology

By: Michele Venné,Rita Ackerman,Anna Questerly,Kat Emmons,Charles L.M. Plumb,Thad Coons

Average ratings

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Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

175

Publisher

My Joy Enterprises

Published Date

ISBN 10

0988625288

ISBN 13

9780988625280

Book's by Thad Coons

Flashes of Light on a Dark and Stormy Night: A Flash Fiction Anthology

Flashes of Light on a Dark and Stormy Night: A Flash Fiction Anthology

Me 'N' Alvin

Me 'N' Alvin

Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers

Gray Ghosts and Red Rangers

Charges made by the Indiana State Board of Health against Thad. M. Stevens, M.D., Secretary of the Board: Together with Answers to Such Charges, with an Appendix, Containing Statements Offered in Proof and Other Matter

Charges made by the Indiana State Board of Health against Thad. M. Stevens, M.D., Secretary of the Board: Together with Answers to Such Charges, with an Appendix, Containing Statements Offered in Proof and Other Matter

Breaking the Barrier to Upward Communication

Breaking the Barrier to Upward Communication

Harder Than Hardscrabble

Harder Than Hardscrabble

From a Cocoon of Love and Poverty

From a Cocoon of Love and Poverty

Freedom Colonies

Freedom Colonies

From Can See to Can’t

From Can See to Can’t

Flashes of Light on a Dark and Stormy Night: A Flash Fiction Anthology

Flashes of Light on a Dark and Stormy Night: A Flash Fiction Anthology

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