In Re Babb

Sanora Babb’s long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers’ plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author’s firsthand experience. This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt’s father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the drudgery of their everyday life are aspirations, failed dreams, and fleeting moments of hope. The land is their dream. The Dunne family and the farmers around them fight desperately for the land they love, but the droughts of the thirties force them to abandon their fields. When they join the exodus to the irrigated valleys of California, they discover not the promised land, but an abusive labor system arrayed against destitute immigrants. The system labels all farmers like them as worthless “Okies” and earmarks them for beatings and worse when hardworking men and women, such as Milt and Julia, object to wages so low they can’t possibly feed their children. The informal communal relations these dryland farmers knew on the High Plains gradually coalesce into a shared determination to resist. Realizing that a unified community is their best hope for survival, the Dunnes join with their fellow workers and begin the struggle to improve migrant working conditions through democratic organization and collective protest. Babb wrote Whose Names are Unknown in the 1930s while working with refugee farmers in the Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps of California. Originally from the Oklahoma Panhandle are herself, Babb, who had first come to Los Angeles in 1929 as a journalist, joined FSA camp administrator Tom Collins in 1938 to help the uprooted farmers. As Lawrence R. Rodgers notes in his foreword, Babb submitted the manuscript for this book to Random House for consideration in 1939. Editor Bennett Cerf planned to publish this “exceptionally fine” novel but when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath swept the nation, Cerf explained that the market could not support two books on the subject. Babb has since shared her manuscript with interested scholars who have deemed it a classic in its own right. In an era when the country was deeply divided on social legislation issues and millions drifted unemployed and homeless, Babb recorded the stories of the people she greatly respected, those “whose names are unknown.” In doing so, she returned to them their identities and dignity, and put a human face on economic disaster and social distress.

In many US courts and internationally, family law cases constitute almost half of the trial caseload. These matters include child abuse and neglect and juvenile delinquency, as well as divorce, custody, paternity, and other traditional family law issues. In this book, the authors argue that reforms to the family justice system are necessary to enable it to assist families and children effectively. The authors propose an approach that envisions the family court as a "care center," by blending existing theories surrounding court reform in family law with an ethic of care and narrative practice. Building on conceptual, procedural, and structural reforms of the past several decades, the authors define the concept of a unified family court created along interdisciplinary lines — a paradigm that is particularly well suited to inform the work of family courts. These prior reforms have contributed to enhancing the family justice system, as courts now can shape comprehensive outcomes designed to improve the lives of families and children by taking into account both their legal and non-legal needs. In doing so, courts can utilize each family’s story as a foundation to fashion a resolution of their unique issues. In the book, the authors aim to strengthen a court’s problem-solving capabilities by discussing how incorporating an ethic of care and appreciating the family narrative can add to the court’s effectiveness in responding to families and children. Creating the court as a care center, the authors conclude, should lie at the heart of how a family justice system operates. The authors are well-known figures in the area and have been involved in family court reform on both a US national and an international scale for many years.

Allen Iverson transcended race, celebrity, and pop culture and emerged from a troubled past to become one of the most successful and highly compensated athletes in the world. Babb examines what drove his successes and failures, getting behind the familiar, sanitized, and heroic version of Iverson-- the hard-charging, hard-partying athlete who played every game as if it were his last. He brings to life a private, loyal, and often generous Allen Iverson who rarely made the headlines, revealing the back story behind some of Iverson's most memorable moments, and delves deep to discover where Iverson's demons lurked. Over time, Iverson himself came to believe his own hype: that he lived in a world where celebrity is eternal and riches are everlasting.

From a former US Assistant Surgeon General comes the epic tale of a young man’s struggle to survive a journey across America during the Civil War. Told by his stepmother that he alone had been responsible for the death of his mother, abandoned by the earlier departure of his father for the California 1849 goldfields, and threatened with being locked in a cage with his stepmother’s psychotic brother, eight-year-old Benjamin Franklin “B .F.” Windes decides to abandon home and trail his father’s path. Thus begins a trip of constant struggle with disease, severe weather, hardship, Indian attack, and death on his lone journey across much of what is now the United States. B.F. spends the next eleven years in gold rush towns in California—first as a barber, then as a physician’s assistant—before departing for the Caribbean at age nineteen, where he becomes a blockade-runner during the American Civil War. At war’s end, he discovers that the men he had been dealing with were nothing more than common murderers and thieves—Bushwhackers. He travels to the Missouri Ozarks where he meets the girl of his dreams. But their romance is threatened when he finds himself battling a man from his past in order to safeguard his family and his future. Orphan Hero, based on the life of the author’s great-grandfather in the mid-nineteenth century, is a tale of courage and perseverance in the face of incredible hardship. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

"Sanora Babb's novel, long out of print, is almost entirely autobiographical in origin and continues her story begun in the memoir, An Owl on Every Post. The introduction by Douglas Wixson, English Professor Emeritus, provides a great deal of historical information on the author and insights into this novel. Set in the early 1930s, it is a rich character study of the classic American individualist, Des Tannehill, and his family...The novel's depicition of Depression-era America and its lost families is one that will haunt readers long after the final page." -- back cover.

Discover the science behind the food-mood connection, plus 75 nutritious recipes that will help you heal your gut and your mind! “The easiest way to sneak more anti-inflammatory foods into your diet.” —Prevention The latest research shows the connection between a healthy gut and a healthy mind. Inflammation markers are frequently found in the blood of people with anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders, proving the existence of a food-mood connection. In this follow-up to Anti-Inflammatory Eating Made Easy, nutritionist Michelle Babb shows how reducing inflammation and balancing the flora in the gut results in a happier, healthier you—not just in body, but in mind. Drawing on what she’s learned from her most successful clients, Babb begins by explaining the science behind an anti-inflammatory eating plan before delivering 75 tasty recipes that range from very simple to easy gourmet. Featuring ingredients that were not in her previous book, Anti-Inflammatory Eating for a Happy, Healthy Brain provides you with the tools you need to create a variety of meals that will satisfy your taste buds, your microbiome, and your mood.

On the west bank of the Mississippi lies the New Orleans neighborhood of Algiers. Short on hope but big on dreams, its mostly poor and marginalized residents find joy on Friday nights when the Cougars of Edna Karr High School take the field. For years, this football program has brought glory to Algiers, winning three consecutive state championships and sending dozens of young men to college on football scholarships. Although he is preparing for a fourth title, head coach Brice Brown is focused on something else: keeping his players alive. An epidemic of gun violence plagues New Orleans and its surrounding communities and has claimed many innocent lives, including Brown’s former star quarterback, Tollette “Tonka” George, shot near a local gas station. In Across the River, award-winning sports journalist Kent Babb follows the Karr football team through its 2019 season as Brown and his team—perhaps the scrappiest and most rebellious group in the program’s history—vie to again succeed on and off the field. What is sure to be a classic work of sports journalism, Across the River is a necessary investigation into the serious realities of young athletes in struggling neighborhoods: gentrification, eviction, mental health issues, the drug trade, and gun violence. It offers a rich and unflinching portrait of a coach, his players, and the West Bank, a community where it’s difficult—but not impossible—to rise above the chaos, discover purpose, and find a way out.