About Jim’s Books:

The Class of ’65

In the midst of racial strife, one young man showed courage and empathy. It took forty years for the others to join him…

Being a student at Americus High School was the worst experience of Greg Wittkamper’s life. Greg came from a nearby Christian commune, Koinonia, whose members devoutly and publicly supported racial equality. When he refused to insult and attack his school’s first black students in 1964, Greg was mistreated as badly as they were: harassed and bullied and beaten. In the summer after his senior year, as racial strife in Americus—and the nation—reached its peak, Greg left Georgia.

Forty-one years later, a dozen former classmates wrote letters to Greg, asking his forgiveness and inviting him to return for a class reunion. Their words opened a vein of painful memory and unresolved emotion, and set him on a journey that would prove healing and saddening.

The Class of ’65 is more than a heartbreaking story from the segregated South. It is also about four of Greg’s classmates—David Morgan, Joseph Logan, Deanie Dudley, and Celia Harvey—who came to reconsider the attitudes they grew up with. How did they change? Why, half a lifetime later, did reaching out to the most despised boy in school matter to them? This noble book reminds us that while ordinary people may acquiesce to oppression, we all have the capacity to alter our outlook and redeem ourselves.

Smokelore

No other food captures the essence of America like barbecue. The story of barbecue touches on almost every aspect of our history. It involves indigenous culture, the colonial era, slavery, the Civil War, the settling of the West, the coming of immigrants, the Great Migration, the rise of the automobile, the growth of suburbia, the rejiggering of gender roles, and more. Not just a Southern or Southwestern thing, barbecue encompasses every region and demographic group.

Smokelore follows the delicious and contentious history of barbecue in America from the ox roast that celebrated the groundbreaking of the U.S. Capitol building to the first barbecue launched into space almost 200 years later. The narrative covers the golden age of political barbecues, the evolution of the barbecue restaurant, the development of backyard cooking, the spectacle of barbecue contests, the global influences on American barbecue, the roles of race and gender in barbecue, and the many ways barbecue has been portrayed in our art and literature. The 50,000-word text is augmented with 26 recipes and 205 images, many of them rarely seen before.

It’s a spicy story with cameo appearances by notable people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, and Martin Luther King Jr. But most of the tale was authored by the generations of ordinary Americans who made barbecue the closest thing we have to a national dish.