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THE TROUBLE BUSH by Earl Schenck Miers

THE TROUBLE BUSH

By

Publisher: Rand McNally

This is a memoir, or writer's autobiography here, of a blue baby that survived cerebral palsy, remained handicapped, married and raised a family, published some books and was appointed to some lush jobs in Washington as an expert on Lincolniana. Miers writes children's books mainly, but he has sold in the millions with a ten-volume history of the United States and a biography of JFK. He thinks of children's books as an art and is greatly delighted to be read in French, Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Bengali and Indonesian. An athetoid, his nerves in a sense are his ""trouble bush."" He tells of his early days in Brooklyn on Bushwick Avenue, his learning to type as a child to save his nervous fingers, sports reporting at sixteen, college days at Rutgers, the trees of Philadelphia, jousting with the Book-of-the-Month Club, success. Incredibly, he was forty before he discovered that the term for his ""nervousness"" was cerebral palsy (he's 56 now). His friendship with Lillian Smith (Strange Fruit) is touching. Today he belongs to some very uptown, no-Negro clubs he's trying to convert...Right ideas, blank style, the man yes.