At the age of fifty-seven, Bad Blake is on his last legs. His weight, his ticker, his liver, even his pick-up truck are all giving him trouble. A renowned songwriter and "picker" who hasn't recorded in five years, Bad now travels the countryside on gigs that take him mostly to motels and bowling alleys. Enter Ms. Right. Can Bad stop living the life of a country-western song and tie a rope around his crazy heart?

Presidents and Place: America's Favorite Sons highlights the interrelationship between America's leading political icons and various facets of space and place, including places of birth and death as well as regional allegiances, among others. Chapters examine the legacy of relationships between presidents and place in a variety of social and cultural forms, ranging from famous political campaigns to television series to developments in tourism. Beginning with the political iconography of New York's Federal Hall in early eighteenth-century America and ending with a focus on the Republican Party's electoral relationship with the South, the interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse nature of the chapters reveals that place has more than a biographical significance in relation to US presidents.

The Confederate States adopted their Permanent Constitution on March 11, 1861. The original document consisted of five vellum sheest pasted together to form a scroll over twelve feet long. The original document, along with many other documents of the Confederacy, was found at a train station in 1865 by a war-time correspondent, Felix DeFontaine. In 1883, he sold the manuscript to Mrs. George Wymberley Jones DeRenne. In 1939, the DeRenne family sold the document to the University of Georgia, where it now resides.

Like No Country for Old Men and Snow Falling on Cedars, a haunting, suspenseful, and dazzlingly written novel of secrets, corruption, tragedy, and vengeance from the author of Crazy Heart-the basis of the 2009 Academy Award-winning film-an electrifying crime drama and psychological thriller in which a young cop becomes the focal point for a community's grief and rage in the aftermath of a tragic accident. Out on a rural highway on a cold, icy night, Patrolman Ronny Forbert sits in his cruiser trying to keep warm and make time pass until his shift ends. Then a familiar beater Jeep Cherokee comes speeding over a hill, forcing the rookie cop to chase after it. The driver is his old friend turned nemesis, Matt Laferiere, the rogue son of a man as beaten down as the town itself. Within minutes, what begins as a clear-cut arrest for drunk driving spirals out of control into a heated argument between two young men with a troubled past and ends in a fatal hit and run on an icy stretch of blacktop. As the news spreads around town, Police Chief Gordy Hawkins remains certain that Ronny Forbert followed the rules, at least most of them, and he's willing to stand by the young cop. But a few manipulative people in town see opportunity in the tragedy. As uneasy relationships, dark secrets, and old grievances reveal themselves, the people of this small, tightly woven community decide that a crime must have been committed, and someone-Officer Ronny Forbert-must pay a price, a choice that will hold devastating consequences for them all.