Cicely Tyson

Tyson has been blessed to grace the stage and screen for six decades. She has been the church girl who once rarely spoke a word; the teenager who sought solace in the verses of the old hymn for which this book is named. A daughter and mother, a sister, and a friend, she is also an observer of human nature and the dreamer of audacious dreams. Here, in her ninth decade, Tyson is a woman who has something meaningful to say. -- adapted from jacket

Set in rural Louisiana during the Depression, this heartfelt story tells of a sharecropper family struggling to overcome adversity. After stealing to feed his family, Nathan is sent to a prison camp. In their fight for survival, his determined wife and their eldest son hold the family together. Once the boy becomes an adult, he searches for his father but instead discovers manhood.

Adam, a brilliant trumpet player, is burdened with guilt following a car accident in which his wife and child were killed. He finds happiness briefly with another woman but turns to drink and is wrongly convicted as a drug-addict when arrested after a drunken brawl. Desperate for money, his agent books him a series of one-night stands and one night, while playing a farewell number with the band, Adam collapses. The audience believe him to be drunk...

Thirty years after they served together in Vietnam, a former Navy Corpsman Larry "Doc" Shepherd re-unites with his old buddies, former Marines Sal Nealon and Reverend Richard Mueller, to bury his son, a young Marine killed in the Iraq War.