From the bookflap:

Abel Jones Jr., a civil rights lawyer’s son turned black Washington neo-con, has met an unlikely end: collapsing at the Rebel Yell dinner theater, surrounded by actors in Confederate regalia, with his white second wife at his side. Hope Jones Blackshear, Abel’s first wife and mother of his only son, is left confounded by the turn his life took in his later years.

Sharing a drink after the funeral with Abel’s old friend Nicholas Gordon, Hope lets herself reminisce about first meeting Abel at Harvard, and their early married days as a foreign service couple in Manila and Martinique. But her own version of history is altered by that of Nicholas, a dandified Brit who seems to know more than he lets on. To fully understand the story of Abel Jones, for her own sake and that of their teenage son, Hope journeys from Nashville to Rome, seeking the connection between the Abel she loved, a child of Southern terror in the sixties, and the Abel who became a White House watchdog of global terror, driven to measures Hope could never have imagined.

The work of one of our gutsiest writers, Rebel Yell is a novel of resilient love, political intrigue, and family secrets, steeped in our country’s racial history and framing our unique political moment.

Want to see images of the Confederate Memorial at Arlington Cemetery? The Vatican Gardens? You know what to do. Click on the highlighted words.

Below find a list of the books featured in Rebel Yell. Check them out at your library, or on Amazon, or from one of the last of the great independent bookstores, but check them out. Each of these is worthy of a desert island. And each will enhance your understanding of what is going on in Rebel Yell.

Title	Author
The Wife of his Youth On Photography Passing The Marble Faun Icare Sonnets from the Portuguese The Assassins Wide Sargasso Sea Epitaph of a Small Winner Eugenie Grandet Man's Fate Where the Wild Things Are Their Eyes Were Watching God Tender is the Night Black Southerners in Confederate Armies The 39 Steps	Charles Chestnutt Susan Sontag Nella Larsen Nathaniel Hawthorne Philippe Desportes Elizabeth Barrett Browning Bernard Lewis Jean Rhys Machado De Assis Honore de Balzac Andre Malraux Maurice Sendak Zora Neale Hurston F. Scott Fitzgerald J.H. Segars and Charles Kelley Barrow John Buchan

Authors Referenced in Rebel Yell

Langston Hughes
Richard Wright
W.E.B. Dubois
Booker T. Washington
Malcolm X
Martin Luther King
John Hope Franklin
E. Franklin Frazier
Jane Austen
Ernest Hemingway
Southern Agrarians
Fugitives
Allen Ginsberg
Cornel West
Jacopo Sannazaro
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Robert Browning
Kinky Friedman


Films Referenced in Rebel Yell 

Check them out from a library, or check them out on Amazon, but check them out!

Title	Director
Idlewild Ghost Citizen Kane The 39 Steps Jules and Jim Tampopo Babette's Feast Big Night The Godfather Munich Waist Deep	Bryan Barber Jerry Zucker Orson Welles Alfred Hitchcock Francois Truffaut Juzo Itami Gabriel Axel Campbell Scott/Stanley Tucci Francis Ford Coppola Steven Spielberg Vondie Curtis-Hall

Reader's Guide and Recipes

Rebel Yell Reader’s Guide
Rebel Yell Recipes