Blue Bicycle Books

Join us Wed., Dec. 18, 6 – 7:30 pm, for the Charleston release party of Say Grace: How the Restaurant Business Saved My Life (ForbesBooks, 184 pp., $25) by Steve Palmer, managing partner of Indigo Road (The Macintosh, Indaco and many more).

The author will talk and sign books, and Katie Daniel of Bar Mash will be on hand serving her award-winning mocktails.

About the Author: After an adolescence filled with addiction, rehabs, half-way houses, and homelessness, and with the help of colleagues, Steve Palmer was able to get sober. He is the managing partner of the Indigo Road Hospitality Group, which employs about a thousand people in 20 restaurants and bars that stretch across four Southern states and Washington, D.C. He is on a quest to help others learn how to be sober in an industry awash with alcohol and drugs.

Palmer has worked in hospitality since he was 13 years old. He has been recognized by The New York Times, NPR, Southern Living, Food & Wine, the James Beard Foundation, and Forbes Small Business Giants for his career as well as his charitable and community efforts. In 2016, Palmer co-founded Ben’s Friends, the food-and-beverage industry support group offering hope, fellowship, and a path forward to industry professionals struggling with substance abuse and addiction.

See the recent New York Times Visionary Series article on Palmer: After Rehab and Loss, A Restaurant Leader Helps His Colleagues

 Thurs., Dec. 19, 5:30 pm, Bernie Schein will discuss and sign his new memoir, Pat Conroy: Our Lifelong Friendship (Skyhorse, hb., 304 pp, $25.99). Both writers and educators, Schein and Conroy were best friends from the moment they met during a high school pickup basketball game until Pat Conroy’s death in 2016. A love letter and homage, and a way to share the Pat he knew, this book collects Bernie’s cherished memories about the gregarious, welcoming, larger-than-life man who remained his best friend, even during the years they didn’t speak. It offers a trove of insights and anecdotes that will be treasured by Pat Conroy’s many devoted fans.

Bernie Schein was born, bred, and Bar Mitzvahed in Beaufort, South Carolina. He was an educator for forty-five years, many of them in Atlanta. He is the author of three books, including If Holden Caulfield Were in My Classroom and the novel Famous All over Town. He has been published and featured in numerous newspapers and magazines, including Newsweek, the Jewish Advocate, Atlanta magazine, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and interviewed on NPR and radio stations across the country. He is now an educational consultant as well as a humorist and raconteur. He and his wife live in Beaufort, South Carolina.

Join us Thurs., Dec. 5, 5:30 pm as journalist Ken Woodley will be here to discuss his new book The Road to Healing (NewSouth Books, hb., 224 pp., $28).

Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its public school system in 1959 in “massive resistance” to the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board decision of 1954. The editorial pages of the local family-owned newspaper, The Farmville Herald, led the fight to lock classrooms rather than integrate them. The school system remained closed until the fall of 1964, when the County was forced by federal courts to comply with the school integration ordered by Brown. The vast majority of white children had continued their education in a private, whites-only academy. But more than 2,000 black students were left without a formal education by the five-year closure. Their lives were forever changed.

The Road to Healing: A Civil Rights Reparation Story in Prince Edward County, Virginia is Ken Woodley’s first-person account of the steps taken in recent years to redress the wound. The book’s centerpiece is the 18-month fight to create what legendary civil rights activist Julian Bond told the author would become the first Civil Rights-era reparation in United States history; it was led by Woodley, then editor of The Farmville Herald, still owned by the original family.

Ken Woodley was the editor for twenty-four years of the Farmville Herald in Prince Edward County, Virginia. A licensed lay preacher in the Episcopal Church, he has published daily spiritual meditations Forward Day By Day. He has also written half a dozen stories for elementary-aged children and is looking for the right publishing home for these. When he’s not writing, volunteering at an after-school program for at-risk children, or reading with his dog Pugsley in his lap, Woodley enjoys listening to half a dozen beautiful notes played slowly on an electric guitar rather than fifty played too fast to appreciate them. And he loves his wife, Kim.

Mon., Nov. 18, 7 pm, Obama Administration National Security Advisor and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice will speak at Grace Church Cathedral, 98 Wentworth St., downtown Charleston. A collaboration between Grace Church and Mt. Zion AME, this event is an offshoot of their monthly Okra Soup meetings.

Ambassador Rice will be in conversation with former Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr., about her new memoir, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For (Simon and Schuster, hb., 544 pp., $30). Booksigning to follow.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information please call Blue Bicycle Books, 843-722-2666.

Tough Love is a remarkable, and remarkably candid, story: of the ancestral legacies of Susan Rice’s elders—immigrants on one side and descendants of slaves on the other—and their formidable work as educators, community leaders, and public servants; of the family struggles that shaped her early life in Washington, D.C.; and of the pivotal moments from her dynamic career on the front lines of American diplomacy and foreign policy.

Ambassador Rice provides an insider’s account of some of the most complex issues confronting the United States over three decades, ranging from “Black Hawk Down” in Somalia to the genocide in Rwanda and the East Africa embassy bombings in the late 1990s, to Libya, Syria, a secret channel to Iran, the Ebola epidemic, and the opening to Cuba during the Obama years. With unmatched insight and characteristic bluntness, she reveals previously untold stories behind recent national security challenges, including confrontations with Russia and China, the war against ISIS, the struggle to contain the fallout from Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks, the U.S. response to Russian interference in the 2016 election, and the transition to the Trump administration.

“Reading Tough Love is like taking a master class in how to be a powerful woman.  It is also a classic American tale, relatable to anyone who has ever dreamed of success.  I was riveted from the first page of Tough Love to the last.” —Shonda Rhimes

“At the core of Rice’s story, and brilliant career, is a fearless commitment to the truth and an unwavering devotion to the lessons she inherited as the descendant of Jamaican immigrants in Maine and enslaved Africans in South Carolina: to prize education as the path up to the American Dream and to have the confidence to be herself.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Before the talk, the community is invited to join in the monthly “Okra Soup” meal and discussion at 5:30 pm, in Hanahan Hall at Grace, led by Rev. Kylon Middleton of Mt. Zion AME and Rev. Callie Walpole of Grace Cathedral.  This monthly gathering brings individuals of diverse backgrounds around the table for meaningful conversation while enjoying the most soulful of Lowcountry dishes: Okra Soup!

Join us Tues., Oct. 29, 6 pm as Cinelle Barnes will be here to launch her new essay collection Malaya: Essays on Freedom (Little A, hb., 204 pp., $24.95).

Out of a harrowing childhood in the Philippines, Cinelle Barnes emerged triumphant. But as an undocumented teenager living in New York, her journey of self-discovery was just beginning.

Because she couldn’t get a driver’s license or file taxes, Cinelle worked as a cleaning lady and a nanny and took other odd jobs—and learned to look over her shoulder, hoping she wouldn’t get caught. When she falls in love and marries a white man from the South, Cinelle finds herself trying to adjust to the thorny underbelly of “southern hospitality” as a new mother, an immigrant affected by PTSD, and a woman with a brown body in a profoundly white world. From her immigration to the United States, to navigating a broken legal system, to balancing assimilation and a sense of self, Cinelle comes to rely on her resilience and her faith in the human spirit to survive and come of age all over again.

Lyrical, emotionally driven, and told through stories both lived and overheard, Cinelle’s intensely personal, yet universal, exploration of race, class, and identity redefines what it means to be a woman—and an American—in a divided country.

Cinelle Barnes is a memoirist, essayist, and educator from Manila, Philippines, and is the author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memior (Little A, 2018) and Malaya: Essays on Freedom (Little A, 2019), and the editor of a forthcoming anthology of essays about the American South (Hub City Press, 2020). She earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Converse College. Her writing has appeared in Buzzfeed Reader, Catapult, Literary Hub, Hyphen, Panorama: A Journal of Intelligent Travel, and South 85, among others. Her debut was listed as a Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 by Bustle and nominated for the 2018 Reading Women Nonfiction Award. Barnes was a WILLA: Women Writing the American West Awards screener and a 2018-19 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards juror, and is the 2018-19 writer-in-residence at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, where she and her family live.