In Belle Place, Louisiana, where the sugarcane grows a mile high to the bright blue sky, Celeste struggles with her mentally ill mother, Tut, and works with her grandmother Maymay to hold the Creole Bastille family together. Celeste has bigger dreams for her life, and is falling for the handsome and wealthy Vashan. But, when Tut runs away to live with the man she met working in the sugarcane to escape her reputation as the town whore, Maymay fears that Celeste will end up like her mother. And just as things are finally looking up for Tut, her past returns with violent, tragic results. Will Celeste end up like her mother, or will she redeem her family from the hoodoo curse that haunts them? And will she find love with someone from a culture just as exotic as her own?

In Blue Sky Dream: A Memoir of America’s Fall from Grace, award-winner David Beers offers a powerful, personal vision of the rise and fall of the American middle class. Here is a dazzling literary chronicle of a family, a people, and a nation: the “blue sky tribe” of ever-optimistic middle-class Americans who believed in something called the American Dream, then woke up one day to discover it was gone. Blue Sky Dream is a book incredibly rich in ideas, in ways of seeing the recent past with stunning clarity. David Beers explores issues that define our times—downsizing, middle-class anxiety, the profound anger with government, the sense that something has gone awry with the United States—with such skill, personal immediacy, and compassion that readers will see their own histories in his prose. Blue Sky Dream can rightly be called a communal memoir, because in telling his family’s tale—growing tensions and disillusionment in their suburban paradise, a son rejecting his parents’ values, one sudden and inexplicable moment of violence—Beers tells the story of his people, the blue sky tribe “who imagined ourselves to be living the inevitable future, and are very surprised today to discover we were but a strange and aberrant moment that is now receding into history.”

The Ever-Changing Sky provides a comprehensive and non-mathematical guide to spherical astronomy. The reader is guided through terrestrial and celestial co-ordinate systems, time measurement and celestial navigation, to the prediction of the rising and setting of the stars, Sun and Moon. It focuses on the geometrical aspects of the night sky without using complex trigonometry. The book progresses to a general study of the Earth and sky, including the stars and constellations (with useful star maps provided), the motions and appearance of the Moon, tides and eclipses, the orbits of the planets and the smaller bodies of the Solar System (asteroids, meteors, meteorites and comets). Finally, there is a brief overview of atmospheric phenomena (including rainbows and haloes). This text will be invaluable to students taking courses in naked-eye astronomy, amateur and professional astronomers, as well as more general readers wanting to know how the night sky changes.

Blue Sky was born out of the ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it has proved to have much more talent, tenacity and imagination than most other idealistic initiatives from that time. Blue Sky

It's 1942: Tomi Itano, 12, is a second-generation Japanese American who lives in California with her family on their strawberry farm. Although her parents came from Japan and her grandparents still live there, Tomi considers herself an American. She doesn't speak Japanese and has never been to Japan. But after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, things change. No Japs Allowed signs hang in store windows and Tomi's family is ostracized. Things get much worse. Suspected as a spy, Tomi's father is taken away. The rest of the Itano family is sent to an internment camp in Colorado. Many other Japanese American families face a similar fate. Tomi becomes bitter, wondering how her country could treat her and her family like the enemy. What does she need to do to prove she is an honorable American? Sandra Dallas shines a light on a dark period of American history in this story of a young Japanese American girl caught up in the prejudices and World War II.

This collection represents my journey through life, these poems are written between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three. Throughout this book I have written about my struggle with mental illness, addiction and relationships. I self-published The Sky Is Not Always Blue in July 2020. The proceeds made from publishing this book will be donated to the charity called Mind in Guernsey. They are part of a bigger charity throughout the UK and Wales that help to support people struggling with mental health.