The Charleston Library Society happily announces the launch of a community partnership with Evening Post Books & Buxton Books. Beginning this summer, we will offer substantive, informative and entertaining “virtual” programs until the Library Society can resume onsite gatherings. Convening every other Thursday at 4:30PM, the series will present a diverse group of Southern Authors as they discuss their works and the influence of the South in their worlds.
Jeff Upshaw and Bob Deans will be in conversation with Polly Buxton discussing what it was like coming of age in the 1960s South. Authors of Twelve Days in Sunset and The Bicycle Man, Upshaw and Deans reflect on 1960s southern boyhoods from different vantage points — the Mississippi Delta and the suburbs of Richmond Virginia! An RSVP is required to attend this event.
All attendees will receive an email invitation to the Zoom event on Wednesday, June 24th. For any questions, contact Dutch Reutter at dreutter@charlestonlibrarysociety.org
ABOUT THE BOOKS:
Twelve Days in Sunset –
During a 1967 summer stay with his grandparents in tiny Sunset Mississippi, twelve-year-old city boy Shiloh Brown, for the first time in his sheltered life, faces bullying, hatred and racism—yet discovers loyalty, honor and friendship. The special bond between Shy and Queen, the family’s black cook, lasts for a lifetime.
The Bicycle Man-
In 1968, delivering the newspaper each morning becomes a hero’s journey into the riven heart of a nation torn by racial ferment and divisive war. For the community outside Richmond, the racial fault line is a bamboo grove by a honeysuckle swamp. The messenger for national promise and peril is Sandy, whose morning paper route becomes a kind of hero’s journey into the troubled soul of a nation torn by the fight for civil rights, war in Vietnam and the larger search for national purpose. And helping him sort it all out is a mysterious figure with a tragic secret who stands by the boy as Sandy confronts a staggering loss.
This is a story of friendship. This is a story of hope. It’s the story of an era that helped shape our country and define our times, told through one boy’s extraordinary journey through his own small patch of America. And it’s the story of a debt he can never repay to someone he knows only as, The Bicycle Man.