Heroes and Other Mortals: Stories of Our Better Angels

by Frye Gaillard, Cynthia Tucker (Foreword by)

Overview

Frye Gaillard did not set out to write this book. One day as he was thumbing through a cardboard box of his essays, columns, and profiles, he simply realized that he had done it. Each article told the story of a person standing against social injustice or exploring the pain and ambiguity of the human condition.

By blending interviews and stories of well-known figures like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Sidney Poitier, Vine Deloria, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Jane Goodall with lesser-known heroes like Rabbi Abraham Heschel (who marched from Selma to Montgomery), Regina Benjamin (a Black doctor who was integral to the grassroots efforts of Katrina recovery), Kathy Mattea (who wrote powerful songs about coal mining and its real effects on the people of Appalachia), and Elyn Saks (who pioneered modern mental illness treatments while dealing with her own schizophrenia), Gaillard celebrates the people who have tried to make things better.

While many of Gaillard’s subjects succeeded in what they were trying to do, others did not. Each story, however, contains a measure of inspiration. Against the backdrop of our turbulent time—our era of lesser angels on the rise—Gaillard asks, where would the rest of us be without them?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781588385451
Publisher:	NewSouth Books
Publication date:	04/01/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	180
File size:	889 KB

About the Author

FRYE GAILLARD is a former writer-in-residence in the English and history departments at the University of South Alabama. He is the author of thirty books, including With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions; Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement That Changed America, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award; The Dream Long Deferred: The Landmark Struggle for Desegregation in Charlotte, North Carolina, winner of the Gustavus Myers Award; and A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s (Georgia), an NPR best book of 2018. He lives in Mobile, Alabama.
CYNTHIA TUCKER is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist who has spent most of her career in journalism, having previously worked for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a Washington-based political correspondent. Her work as a journalist has been celebrated by the National Association of Black Journalists, who inducted her into its hall of fame, Harvard University, and the Alabama Humanities Foundation. Tucker spent three years as a visiting professor at the University of Georgia's Grady College of Journalism and is currently the journalist-in-residence at the University of South Alabama. Her weekly column focuses on political and cultural issues, including income inequality, social justice, and public education reform.

Editorial Reviews

Collected here are the greatest hits from decades of fearless, in-depth journalism on issues of race, culture, global politics, identity, and more. From Frye Gaillard’s earliest essay on South Africa to his recent interview with the daughter of the infamous Governor George Wallace, this book serves as a testament to one of our country’s most vital and clear-sighted writers. Gaillard is a writer capable of peering back into the depths of what this country has been to divine what it still might become. His stories offer us hope.

Charlotte Pence

Were it simply a collection of the best essays from one of America’s great writers, Frye Gaillard’s Heroes and Other Mortals would be a true journalistic and literary gift—compelling, beautifully-crafted profiles of crusading, committed people, some more well-known than others. But Heroes is much more than that. Even while writing unsparingly about some of life’s darkest situations, Gaillard seeks and finds the best of the human spirit, the best in us. His remarkable ability to get to the core of people’s souls, to crystalize what makes them human and extract the essence of their goodness leads to a lesson for all. Heroes is compelling, inspiring, affirming, relentlessly hopeful. We've needed this book.

author of Fallout - Mark Ethridge

A provocative collection of essays, interviews, profiles, and stories that illuminates the turbulent, pivotal moments of our shared past. . . . For a long time, I have been guided by the belief that good writing is good thinking, thinking that asks hard questions, reveals hidden patterns, and acknowledges the conundrum of truth-telling and hope. In so many ways, Heroes and Other Mortals is such a book.

Alabama Writers Forum - Patricia Foster