A great new book of Durham History: "The Secret Game"

Everyone in Durham should come to the event we're holding at Motorco next Thursday, March 19, at 7:00 OK, now that we got that out of the way...   The event is for an author named Scott Ellsworth and his new book, The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change and Basketball's Lost Triumph. The focus of the book is a basketball game that was played in Durham on Sunday March 19 , 1944 in a locked gym at the North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University). The teams involved were the NCC varsity and the best team that year from all-white Duke University. In the segregated Jim Crow south at the time, things like this were not supposed to happen. There were plenty of people that made it their business to see that things like this did not to happen. And to insure that if they did happen, there were swift and serious repercussions for all involved.   Yet this historic basketball game was played, with the help of a fascinating, courageous line-up of players and coaches from both teams. After a decade of interviews and research, Scott Ellsworth tells their story, and in telling it he also tells many extraordinary stories about the history of our town and the history of Duke and NC Central.   Although The Secret Game has some great writing about basketball and basketball history, it is much more than a basketball story. The Secret Game unearths marvelous social history and civil rights history. It is a book about race, history, segregation, courage, and fear, here in Durham, 70 years ago.   Here are just a few of the Durham stories I learned reading this remarkable book:   --In 1943 a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany named Ernst Manasse was teaching German at the North Carolina College for Negroes. After he and his wife invited some of his fellow professors to their Trinity Park apartment, neighbors complained, their landlord said he would shoot any Negroes coming onto the property, and the Klan threatened to burn down their house. Manasse and his wife Marianne felt they had seen this kind of hatred before...   --An up-and coming North Carolina College history professor named John Hope Franklin was one of Manasse's colleagues. Franklin, just after Pearl Harbor, attempted to enlist in a program for Navy officers, only to be told that because he was colored he'd never get in. "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought there was some kind of national emergency," he informed the white naval officer who met with him.   --The lead architect on Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium was a black man from Philadelphia named Julian Abele. He of course was never allowed inside to sit and watch a game-let alone attend the building's formal dedication on January 6, 1940.   --The 1943-44 men's basketball coach at North Carolina College, John McLendon, was one of the earliest proponents of the fast-break offense and a pressing defense. His Eagles teams were considered to be among the best in the country. McLendon came to North Carolina from Kansas, where he had studied the game with its inventor, Canadian James Naismith. Prior to playing the secret game, McLendon's 1943-44 team had lost just once-in the final game of the 1944 National Negro College Basketball Championship.   --The best team at Duke in 1943-44, the team that played in the secret game, was a group of medical students, most of them former college players (unlike most undergrads, medical students had draft deferments). Coming in to the secret game the med students were undefeated-including a victory over the Duke varsity team.   --Less than 3 months after the secret game was played, a colored soldier, in uniform, sat down only part-way back in a Durham city bus, next to two white soldiers. The colored soldier, a private from Pennsylvania named Booker T. Spicely, refused the driver's orders to move all the way to the back, saying "I thought I was fighting a war for democracy, but it looks like it doesn't work that way down here." When Spicely got off the bus, on Club Boulevard near the intersection with Broad Street-just a few blocks from The Regulator-the bus driver followed him off the bus and shot and killed him. Three months later, after 28 minutes of deliberation, an all-white jury found the bus driver not guilty of second-degree murder.   Author Scott Ellsworth has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, he is the author of Death in a Promised Land, an account of the 1921 Tulsa race riot. He is currently teaching at the University of Michigan.     We're hosting Scott Ellsworth, Thursday March 19, 7:00 at Motorco, 723 Rigsbee Avenue. (There's lots more seating available at Motorco than we have at the bookshop). Scott will talk, answer questions and sign books. The Secret Game is available now at the bookshop, and we will of course have lots of copies for sale at the event.   For some final words about the book, I'll turn it over to a couple of sports guys:   Mike Ryan, from ESPN and the Boston Globe says: "This is much more than a story about basketball... White people need to read this book. People of color need to read this book. Whoever you are, you need to read this book."   And a guy named Mike Krzyzewski has this to say: "The true story behind this extraordinary, long-buried game goes beyond any one school or any one state. The Secret Game is a triumphant look at how basketball has broken down barriers and helped create a new kind of America. Every citizen needs to know this story..."   See you at Motorco Thursday night--the 71st anniversary of the secret game.    Upcoming Events  JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN YOUNG SCHOLARS Tuesday, March 17, 7:00 p.m. In Running for Hope, Kendrick Parker isn't quite sure what's going on with his life. He doesn't know if the girl he is interested in really likes him back and his best friend is having troubles of her own. More importantly, his parents are keeping him up at night with their yelling. It's getting harder and harder to get to school on time, something his history and track coach, Mr. Douglass notices. Hoping to inspire Kendrick, Mr. Douglass hands him a copy of the graphic novel version of Mirror to America, renowned historian John Hope Franklin's autobiography. Little does he realize how much it will encourage him to take action.  Durham teenagers from The John Hope Franklin Young Scholars program will be in the store to read and discuss the hybrid story with graphic autobiographical sketches, the result of their 18-month collaboration.     CAT WARREN Wednesday, March 18, 7:00 p.m. In What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs, Durham resident and North Carolina State professor Cat Warren uses her odyssey with her dog Solo to enter the broader world of scent-detection dogs, revealing the remarkable capabilities of working dogs, their handlers, and their trainers. Taking the reader from crime scenes to training sites and science labs, talking and working with other handlers and trainers, and interviewing animal psychologists, forensic anthropologists, breeders, and scent researchers, Warren explains how working dogs can capture the hidden worlds their noses know and translate that arcane knowledge for humans.  The fascinating concepts behind the complex capabilities of working dogs emerge as Warren weaves the world of science and dog cognition with her own experiences in the field-all with an unsentimental yet sensitive touch.   LESLIE JAMISON Wednesday, March 18, 7:00 p.m OFFSITE Duke's Nelson Music Room New York Times bestselling author Leslie Jamison will give a public reading from her recent essay collection, The Empathy Exams, as part of the inaugural Kenan-CDS Visiting Writers Series. In The Empathy Exams, Jamison begins with her experience as a medical actor, paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose. Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about one another? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other?       SCOTT ELLSWORTH Thursday, March 19, 7:00 p.m. at Motorco Music Hall, 723 Rigsbee Ave, Durham This is the remarkable story of a secret basketball game played in a locked gym in Durham, at what is now North Carolina Central University, in the heart of 1944 Jim Crow North Carolina. Scott Ellsworth's The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change and Basketball's Lost Triumph brilliantly explores both the history of basketball and, a full decade before the birth of the Civil Rights Movement, the bravery of African Americans and whites in the South who were already fighting back against segregation. In the 1940s at all-white Duke University, a group of former college players had formed a top-notch team at the medical school, defeating not only the Duke varsity, but also any team that came their way-all except for one. Standing in the way was nothing less than segregation itself. But in the spring of 1944, two remarkable teams-one black, and one white-risked their futures, their jobs, and even their freedom to play a game the likes of which the South had ever seen before. A full decade before the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, and three years before Jackie Robinson desegregated major league baseball, these long forgotten basketball players made some remarkable history of their own. The Secret Game tells an extraordinary story--an extraordinary Durham story that everyone who lives here will want to read.   YA BOOK CLUB Friday, March 20, 7:00 p.m. Come one, come all to the greatest book club of all! Do you love YA? Are you interested in discussing or starting to read YA? The we'd love to have you! This is a book club for all ages, the only requirement is that you are interested in the young adult genre. (This is to discuss the book alone, not a writer's group). Hosted by Isabel of Tween 2 Teen Book Reviews. Snacks will be provided.  This month we'll be reading Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour, a YA mystery with a little bit of romance.     Learn more about these and all of our upcoming events by visiting   the events calendar on our web site.
Tom Campbell Regulator Bookshop 720 Ninth St. Durham, NC 27705 (919) 286-2700 http://www.regulatorbookshop.com/

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Good Books and Marvelous March Events

Around the Shelves Just out in paperback are two highly praised futuristic novels from Durham writers. The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne is a tale set in a dangerous future in India and Africa, while The Word Exchange by Alena Graedon is set in New York, in a time when a computer virus is corrupting text files on the internet. Both of these novels feature strong female protagonists, and both deliver a riveting, stimulating reading experience.     Also now in paperback is last year's National Book Award Winner, Phil Klay's Redeployment , a novel of the soldiers who fought in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On the lighter side there's a fascinating, fun new book called The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You  by Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin. What to read for disorders of the body, mind, or heart. Take two aspirin and read this in the morning!   And we hear that a certain company called ama... something is streaming a new video series based on Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch LA detective novels. I haven't seen any of the episodes of the video series, but I have read all the Harry Bosh novels, and I highly recommend them. The first in the series is The Black Echo.   Our current stock of signed first editions includes: --Kazu Ishiguro's The Buried Giant  --The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.  --Anne Tyler's A Spool of Blue Thread.  Upcoming Events  Double fudge brownies Monday night and an acclaimed debut "Appalachian noir" novel on Thursday night bookend our events this week. Next week we host the John Hope Franklin Young Scholars, learn what the dog knows, and investigate the human capacity for empathy.     Then next Thursday, March 19th, we host an event for a truly significant book of Durham history--The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change and Basketball's Lost Triumph by Scott Ellsworth. See below, and there will be more to come on this one.. JOANNE FLUKE Monday, March 9, 7:00 p.m. Readers keep coming back for another helping of Joanne Fluke's cozy mysteries, starring Minnesota bake shop owner Hannah Swensen and her delicious original recipes. Fluke's latest installment, Double Fudge Brownie Murder, features more than 20 recipes interspersed throughout, including Maple Fudge Sandwich Cookies, Chocolate Baked Doughnuts, Tangerine Dream Cake and, of course, Double Fudge Brownies. Joanne Fluke never fails to cook up culinary mysteries that are just as famous for their scrumptious excess of calories as for their eccentric characters and unexpected endings. Here, Fluke serves fans her most deliciously shocking series installment yet as Hannah works to clear her name, follow her heart, and find a killer more elusive than the perfect brownie... which Fluke will be providing for the audience!   GRETCHEN WING Tuesday, March 10, 7:00 p.m. Gretchen Wing returns to her hometown to read from Headwinds, the sequel to her young adult novel The Flying Burgowski. Set on an island in Washington State, Headwinds picks up the story of fourteen-year-old Jocelyn Burgowski, an otherwise normal girl who just happens to be a Flyer. But now, someone wants to bring the Flyer down. Where The Flying Burgowski focused on Jocelyn's discovery of her powers of flight, and her struggle to redeem her troubled mother, Headwinds sets Jocelyn on a darker course. In a race to discover her antagonist before she can be disempowered, Jocelyn must confront the questions all people face: Why is it so hard to be a good person? And how do you know when love is real?   CHRISTINE JERNIGAN Wednesday, March 11, 7:00 p.m. Family Language Learning: Learn Another Language, Raise Bilingual Children is a practical guide designed to support, advise and encourage any parents who are hoping to raise their children bilingually. It is unique in that it focuses on parents who are not native speakers of a foreign language. It gives parents the tools they need to cultivate and nurture their own language skills while giving their children an opportunity to learn another language. The book combines cutting-edge research on language exposure with honest and often humorous stories from personal interviews with families speaking a foreign language at home. By dispelling long-held myths about how language is learned, it provides hope to parents who want to give their children bilingual childhoods, but feel they don't know where to start with learning foreign languages. Jernigan teaches at North Carolina State and lives in Chapel Hill.   DAVID JOY Thursday, March 12, 7:00 p.m. NC author David Joy's debut novel, Where All Light Tends to Go, deals with eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely whose father runs a local meth ring. When Jacob botches a murder, he is torn between appeasing his kingpin father and leaving the mountains with the girl he loves. The area surrounding Cashiers, North Carolina is home to people of all kinds, but the world that Jacob lives in is crueler than most. Having dropped out of high school, subsequently cutting himself off from his peers, Jacob has been working for his father for years, all on the promise that his payday will come eventually. The only joy he finds comes from reuniting with Maggie, his first love, and a girl clearly bound for bigger and better things than their hardscrabble town. The world that Jacob inhabits is bleak and unrelenting in its violence and disregard for human life, and having known nothing more, Jacob wonders if he can muster the strength to rise above it. This novel is already drawing comparisons to Winter's Bone, "Breaking Bad," "Sons of Anarchy" and "Justified. "Joy's moments of poetic cognizance are the stuff of fine fiction, lyrical sweets that will keep readers turning pages...Where All Light Tends To Go is a book that discloses itself gradually, like a sunrise peeking over a distant mountain range"-Atlanta Journal-Constitution       JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN YOUNG SCHOLARS Tuesday, March 17, 7:00 p.m. In Running for Hope, Kendrick Parker isn't quite sure what's going on with his life. He doesn't know if the girl he is interested in really likes him back and his best friend is having troubles of her own. More importantly, his parents are keeping him up at night with their yelling. It's getting harder and harder to get to school on time, something his history and track coach, Mr. Douglass notices. Hoping to inspire Kendrick, Mr. Douglass hands him a copy of the graphic novel version of Mirror to America, renowned historian John Hope Franklin's autobiography. Little does he realize how much it will encourage him to take action.  Durham teenagers from The John Hope Franklin Young Scholars program will be in the store to read and discuss the hybrid story with graphic autobiographical sketches, the result of their 18-month collaboration.     CAT WARREN Wednesday, March 18, 7:00 p.m. In What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs, Durham resident and North Carolina State professor Cat Warren uses her odyssey with her dog Solo to enter the broader world of scent-detection dogs, revealing the remarkable capabilities of working dogs, their handlers, and their trainers. Taking the reader from crime scenes to training sites and science labs, talking and working with other handlers and trainers, and interviewing animal psychologists, forensic anthropologists, breeders, and scent researchers, Warren explains how working dogs can capture the hidden worlds their noses know and translate that arcane knowledge for humans.  The fascinating concepts behind the complex capabilities of working dogs emerge as Warren weaves the world of science and dog cognition with her own experiences in the field-all with an unsentimental yet sensitive touch.   LESLIE JAMISON Wednesday, March 18, 7:00 p.m OFFSITE Duke's Nelson Music Room New York Times bestselling author Leslie Jamison will give a public reading from her recent essay collection, The Empathy Exams, as part of the inaugural Kenan-CDS Visiting Writers Series. In The Empathy Exams, Jamison begins with her experience as a medical actor, paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose. Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about one another? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other?       SCOTT ELLSWORTH Thursday, March 19, 7:00 p.m. at Motorco Music Hall, 723 Rigsbee Ave, Durham This is the remarkable story of a secret basketball game played in a locked gym in Durham, at what is now North Carolina Central University, in the heart of 1944 Jim Crow North Carolina. Scott Ellsworth's The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change and Basketball's Lost Triumph brilliantly explores both the history of basketball and, a full decade before the birth of the Civil Rights Movement, the bravery of African Americans and whites in the South who were already fighting back against segregation. In the 1940s at all-white Duke University, a group of former college players had formed a top-notch team at the medical school, defeating not only the Duke varsity, but also any team that came their way-all except for one. Standing in the way was nothing less than segregation itself. But in the spring of 1944, two remarkable teams-one black, and one white-risked their futures, their jobs, and even their freedom to play a game the likes of which the South had ever seen before. A full decade before the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, and three years before Jackie Robinson desegregated major league baseball, these long forgotten basketball players made some remarkable history of their own. The Secret Game tells an extraordinary story--an extraordinary Durham story that everyone who lives here will want to read.   YA BOOK CLUB Friday, March 20, 7:00 p.m. Come one, come all to the greatest book club of all! Do you love YA? Are you interested in discussing or starting to read YA? The we'd love to have you! This is a book club for all ages, the only requirement is that you are interested in the young adult genre. (This is to discuss the book alone, not a writer's group). Hosted by Isabel of Tween 2 Teen Book Reviews. Snacks will be provided.  This month we'll be reading Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour, a YA mystery with a little bit of romance.     Learn more about these and all of our upcoming events by visiting   the events calendar on our web site.
Tom Campbell Regulator Bookshop 720 Ninth St. Durham, NC 27705 (919) 286-2700 http://www.regulatorbookshop.com/

Forward email This email was sent to regulatorbookshop.constantcontact720@blogger.com by regulatorbookshop@gmail.com |   Update Profile/Email Address | Rapid removal with SafeUnsubscribe™ | Privacy Policy. Regulator Bookshop | 720 Ninth Street | Durham | NC | 27705