An enduring story of one young man's coming of age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.

    The secret diaries of a twenty-three-year-old White Russian princess who worked in the German Foreign Office from 1940 to 1944 and then as a nurse, these pages give us a unique picture of wartime life in that sector of German society from which the 20th of July Plot -- the conspiracy to kill Hitler -- was born.Includes index.

    Mine, in contrast, was extremely rich but not ''respectable'' at all... Banine's family were peasants who became millionaires overnight when oil gushed from their lands - and the course of her own life would be just as dramatic. This is her unforgettable memoir of an 'odd, rich, exotic' childhood, growing up in Azerbaijan in the turbulent early twentieth century, caught between east and west, tradition and modernity. She remembers her luxurious home, with endless feasts of sweets and fruit; her beloved, flaxen-haired German governess; her imperious, swearing, strict Muslim grandmother; her bickering, poker-playing, chain-smoking relatives. She recalls how the Bolsheviks came, and they lost everything. How, amid revolution and bloodshed, she fell passionately in love, only to be forced into marriage with a man she loathed - until the chance of escape arrived. By turns gossipy and romantic, wry and moving, Days in the Caucasus is a coming of age story and a portrait of a vanished world. It shows what it means to leave the past behind, yet how it haunts us.

    And Bromfield skillfully portrays that marriage between dream and reality that is so necessary in working the land as he writes, "Wait until Spring comes!" This beautiful new edition of Pleasant VAlley is as useful now, maybe even more so. than when it was first published in the early 1940s.