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Top-flight professional golfers need three things to succeed on the
PGA Tour: talent, desire, and determination. Tour winner Billy
Edwards added a fourth. Cocaine. Suspensions, personal disasters,
and legal nightmares did nothing to debunk Billy's belief that
without that fourth element, he would never succeed. But competing
on the tour and having a drug addiction were two worlds that were
not both sustainable. Something had to give...and many believed it
would be his career. What goes through the mind of a professional
athlete while they are competing on the largest stage? And how do
they do this while under then influence and in denial? How can
anyone get close enough to find out to even offer help when walls
of resistance carefully erected and painstakingly nurtured keeps
everyone at bay? Two different wives could not do it. Suspensions
from the tour couldn't. Even being arrested could not stop Billy
from destroying himself. Only one person had the access and the
trust to accomplish what no one else could. Get inside the ropes
and inside the head of a talented but troubled athlete as he
attempts to negotiate a minefield of his own making. Will his
talent and his mind power succeed over the dark urges residing in
his head, or will feeding the beast force him off the tour...or
kill him?
The title and the idea for this book began in 1958, when Mody
Boatright first published his essay, "The Family Saga as a Form of
Folklore." What Mody identified was a long established form of
folklore that was firmly entrenched among people everywhere. The
family saga--as Mody and this collection defines it--is made up of
an accumulation of separate family legends. These are the stories
of the old folks and the old times that are told among the family
when they gather for funerals or Thanksgiving dinner. These are the
"remember-when" stories the family tells about the time when the
grownups were children. Families with strong identities and strong
bonds eventually have a library of legends, treasures passed along
in the oral tradition. Because of shared humanity and common family
experiences, the legends of these old families follow a
recognizable pattern of topics, some of which are contained herein.
A large and chronologically extended collection of family legends
brought together under one cover--or one roof--is a family saga.
Included here are stories grouped by common topics, such as Ghosts
and the Supernatural, Feuding and Fighting, and Death and Burial.
They include tales from favorite storytellers Elmer Kelton, James
Ward Lee, Robert Flynn, Archie McDonald, and John Graves. Lavishly
illustrated, this volume is a fitting tribute to F. E. Abernethy's
dedication to the Texas Folklore Society.
Twenty-five years ago, Jerry B. Lincecum, Edward H. Phillips, and
Peggy A. Redshaw published Adventures of a Frontier Naturalist.
Collated from four overlapping memoirs, some not previously
published, Gideon Lincecum's account of his life as Indian trader,
physician, and naturalist is lively and full of insight. Lincecum's
experiences of following the frontier in the early 1800s, all the
way from Georgia to Texas, were not so unusual in themselves, but
the intellect and wit that inform his memoirs make them unique. His
scientific articles and collections of specimens, his
correspondence with leading scientists of the time, and his six
years among the colony of ex-Confederates in Tuxpan, Mexico, offer
a first-hand perspective on that age. Lincecum portrays many
aspects of frontier social life, including marriage and divorce,
slavery, education, religion, the social life of the Choctaws and
Chikasaws, medical controversies, and the building of towns. He
vividly describes the unspoiled flora and fauna of Texas in 1835
and tells tales of hunting deer, bear, turkey, and waterfowl. This
anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Jerry B. Lincecum
and Peggy A. Redshaw, offering their insights into the relevance of
Gideon Lincecum's writings today.
The effects of the Civil War on civilian life in Texas are
powerfully conveyed in the correspondence of Dr. Gideon Lincecum
(1793-1874), a natural scientist and philosopher who moved to Texas
in 1848 with his family of ten children and settled in Washington
County. Having retired from an extensive and lucrative botanical
medical practice in Mississippi, Gideon devoted much of his time in
Texas before the war to studying the natural sciences and carrying
on an extensive correspondence that included Northern scientists
and even Charles Darwin. He used a letterpress to make copies of
almost all of his letters, and these letterpress volumes, totaling
more than a thousand pages, were preserved by one of his daughters.
Gideon's letters provide a rich and detailed account of how one
individual and his large extended family, all of whom were strongly
committed to the Confederacy, kept up with the progress of the
conflict and coped with the multitude of problems it created.
Lincecum's resourcefulness in the face of shortages included
weaving spanish moss into blankets and investigating the
papermaking potential of milkweed. He was always optimistic about
the prospects of the Confederacy and always willing to further the
cause however he could. His dedication to the South often led him
into astonishing diatribes, as when he wrote his son Lysander: "It
would be a gratifying thing to my feelings, to be certified that
every man, woman and child in the bounds of the confederacy had
taken a solemn oath that to die fighting is far preferable to
submission, and so long as they have life and strength to damage a
yankee in any manner or form that they will continue to do so."
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