“Although of a relatively scarce breed,” the Arkansas Times observed in the obituary of the itinerant writer it had once employed, “Mike Trimble was Arkansas’s and perhaps the country’s greatest self-deprecating journalist.” Readers will find in this fifty-year inventory of Trimble’s wit and wisdom all the vindication they might seek for that quaint judgment—the rare humble author. Whether he was chronicling, in the 1980s, rising political worthies like the far-into-the-future governors Asa Hutchinson and Mike Beebe, or, more often, the ordinary and feckless people that he encountered every day, befriended, and spent most of his career writing about, Trimble usually found a way, subtly or artlessly, to bring up his own failings, such as identifying the wrong person as the dead woman in an obituary he had written in his earliest days for his first employer, the Texarkana Gazette. Like the yokels in the vaudeville duos Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Rowan and Martin, and Fey and Poehler, Trimble’s confessed bumblings were purposeful and studied instruments of his humor.
Arkansas produced more than its quota of weirdos, fabulists, con men, oleaginous politicians, charlatans, creeps, visionaries, and fantastical creatures—from Albert Pike, Arvin the Wino, Dr. Brinkley the Great Depression’s goat-gland sex therapist, Editor Weston, and the salty riverboat queen Ray Dorthy all the way to Say McIntosh and Red the Irish Setter. Mike Trimble, the South’s best and funniest storyteller, put them all down on paper for some of the best reading since Catch-22. Trimble turned humor into art and history into vaudeville.
Thin Safety Margin charts the history of SEFOR, a twenty-megawatt reactor that operated for three years in the rural Ozark Mountains of Arkansas as part of an internationally sponsored program designed to demonstrate the Doppler effect in plutonium-oxide-fueled fast reactors. Authors Jerry Havens and Collis Geren draw upon this history to assess the accidental explosion risk inherent in using fast reactors to reduce the energy industry’s carbon dioxide emissions.
If a sufficiently powerful fast-neutron explosion were to cause the containment of a reactor such as SEFOR’s to fail, the reactor’s radiotoxic plutonium fuel could vaporize and escape into the surrounding environment, resulting in a miles-wide swath of destruction. The demonstration that the Doppler effect could prevent limited runaway reactivity in the event of an accident or natural disaster proved a critical development in producing safe nuclear technology. But while SEFOR was hailed as a breakthrough in nuclear safety, Havens and Geren’s examination of the project, including the partial SCRAM that occurred in late 1970, confirms experts’ concerns regarding the limits of the Doppler effect and presents a compelling argument for caution in adopting fast reactors like SEFOR to reduce carbon emissions.
A thoroughly researched and extensively documented look at race relations in Arkansas druing the forty years after the Civil War, Town and Country focuses on the gradual adjustment of black and white Arkansans to the new status of the freedman, in both society and law, after generations of practicing the racial etiquette of slavery.
John Graves examines the influences of the established agrarian culture on the developing racial practices of the urban centers, where many blacks living in the towns were able to gain prominence as doctors, lawyers, successful entrepreneurs, and political leaders. Despite the tension, conflict, and disputes within and between the voice of the government and the voice of the people in an arduous journey toward compromise, Arkansas was one of the most progressive states during Reconstruction in desegregating its people.
Town and Country makes a significant contribution to the history of the postwar South and its complex engagement with the race issue.
"A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry."
—Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press