Playing with Dynamite: The Story of One Newspaper Family in the South [signed] [first edition]

Playing with Dynamite takes one on a rollicking ride through the 60-year history of a tenacious Southern small town weekly giving a deep look into its early days as two New Englanders struggle to establish a paper in Madison, North Carolina, during the heart of the Great Depression. Newly married, poet Russell M. Spear and wife, Mimi, daughter of Lost Generation writer Sherwood Anderson, learn that newspapering will absorb their lives. Dynamite, a memoir of the evolution of this newspaper from a scrappy hand type sheet to a powerful North Carolina investigative stalwart in the computer age, carries us through the ugly era of desegregation and the complex choreography required of a small town publisher to survive while supporting the Civil Rights Movement.