A New York Times bestseller! 2012 Outstanding Book Award from the American Association of Journalists and Authors (ASJA). Allen and Linda Anderson adopted a traumatized one-year-old cocker spaniel who had been abandoned. Soon, the troubled dog they named "Leaf" turned their home into a war zone. Although Leaf and Allen were forging a friendship with visits to dog parks and bonding time, Leaf's emotional issues overwhelmed the couple. Shortly after Leaf's arrival, Allen, who had spent eight years as a big city police officer and survived so many close calls that Linda called him "Miracle Man," received a diagnosis from his doctor that made him think his luck had finally run out. Allen had an unruptured brain aneurysm that could be fatal, and the surgery to repair it might leave him debilitated. Having seen his father live for years with the effects of a massive stroke, he dreaded that the worst fate might not be death. What Allen didn't know is that he and Leaf, like comrades facing the ultimate battle, would be there for each other with the miracle of this man and this dog coming together at exactly the right time. .

"The American Negro," Arthur Schomburg wrote in 1925, "must remake his past in order to make his future." Many Harlem Renaissance figures agreed that reframing the black folk inheritance could play a major role in imagining a new future of racial equality and artistic freedom. In "Deep River "Paul Allen Anderson focuses on the role of African American folk music in the Renaissance aesthetic and in political debates about racial performance, social memory, and national identity.
"Deep River" elucidates how spirituals, African American concert music, the blues, and jazz became symbolic sites of social memory and anticipation during the Harlem Renaissance. Anderson traces the roots of this period's debates about music to the American and European tours of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s and to W. E. B. Du Bois's influential writings at the turn of the century about folk culture and its bearing on racial progress and national identity. He details how musical idioms spoke to contrasting visions of New Negro art, folk authenticity, and modernist cosmopolitanism in the works of Du Bois, Alain Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Sterling Brown, Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Carl Van Vechten, and others. In addition to revisiting the place of music in the culture wars of the 1920s, "Deep River "provides fresh perspectives on the aesthetics of race and the politics of music in Popular Front and Swing Era music criticism, African American critical theory, and contemporary musicology.
"Deep River "offers a sophisticated historical account of American racial ideologies and their function in music criticism and modernist thought. It will interest general readers as well as students of African American studies, American studies, intellectual history, musicology, and literature.

The poems in this volume were generated over the past dozen years, prompted always by his wonder of the world and its beauty, the haps and mishaps of life and the magic and mystery of love.

When Allen Anderson's mother sends him a Christmas card asking, "Your father and I wonder sometimes what we did as parents that made us such heels in our children's eyes?" Allen writes his parents an emotional 16-page letter. In it he details over 60 events he feels were unjust during his teenage years at home. Oatmeal Killed the Dinosaurs draws upon Allen's letter to tell his inspirational story. In turn the reader is forced to question the motivation of their own parents: Were they motivated to do the best for their child, or themselves? For Allen, a young man in the Navy, his answer-and perhaps yours-lies within the pages of Oatmeal Killed the Dinosaurs.