Praying for Sheetrock Published in 1991,
Praying for Sheetrock is the true story of the often-criminal heyday of the good old boys in
McIntosh County on the rural coast of Georgia and the rise of civil rights there in the mid-1970s. It won the
Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award, the
Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Visions Award, was a finalist for the
National Book Award and the
National Book Critics Circle Award. SHEETROCK was named one of the "100 Best Works of American Journalism of the 20th Century" by a panel convened by the journalism faculty of New York University and one of
Entertainment Weekly's "The New Classics: Best Books of the Last 25 Years."
The Temple Bombing The Temple Bombing (1996) investigates an
incident of
domestic terrorism during the era of "
massive resistance" to
desegregation in
Atlanta in 1958 when an Atlanta
synagogue known as "The Temple" was bombed by a homegrown
Neo-Nazi organization. Rabbi
Jacob M. Rothschild, a friend and colleague of Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr., and other white and African-American leaders of the
civil rights movement, spoke and acted on behalf of civil equality despite the precarious social position of Southern Jews and the fears of his congregants that the violent racists would come after them. The book was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, the Georgia Author of the Year Award of the Georgia Writers Association, the Georgia Historical Society Award, the
Hadassah Myrtle Wreath Award, the
Salon Book Award, and the
American Civil Liberties Union National Civil Liberties Award. The infamous 1915 lynching—by a white mob including civic leaders—of the Jewish 31-year-old manager of the Atlanta Pencil Company,
Leo Frank, wrongly convicted and posthumously pardoned for the murder of 13-year-old child worker Mary Phagan, occurred within this same community: Frank was a member of The Temple. The Academy Award-winning film
Driving Miss Daisy (Best Picture, 1989), written by prize-winning Atlanta native
Alfred Uhry, makes dramatic use of the Temple bombing incident—Miss Daisy is a Temple member—though the chronology is fictionalized.
Last Man Out Last Man Out (2002) tells the story of
the 1958 mining disaster in
Springhill, Nova Scotia and the absurdist American
white supremacist coda to the spectacular rescue of a handful of Canadian men. Nearly a week after the collapse of the deepest coal mine in the world, long after all the missing were presumed dead, two groups of miners—injured and desperately dehydrated—were discovered a vertical mile underground. The worldwide focus on the rescue of the first group—through newspapers, television news reports, and movie theater news-reels—inspired a few highly placed officials in the administration of
Governor Marvin Griffin of Georgia, a staunch segregationist, to invite the survivors and their families to vacation on the coastal resort of
Jekyll Island. The state officials conceived it as a PR gimmick that would enlighten the world about the Georgia coast as a tourist destination equal to Florida's beaches. However, a second group of miners was found alive; when the survivors were finally extricated, the "last man out" turned out to be a
Black Nova Scotian,
Maurice Ruddick. All tourist accommodations in Georgia were segregated. Rather than a brilliant PR coup, Georgia officials inadvertently insulted Ruddick, a Canadian hero, causing a minor international incident.
Last Man Out was named a Best Book of the Year by
Chicago Tribune,
The Globe and Mail,
the Cox newspaper chain, and the
New York Public Library.
''There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Save Her Country's Children'' This 2006 book illuminates the Ethiopian orphan crisis caused by the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa through the portrait of one person on the frontlines: a middle-aged Ethiopian foster mother, Mrs. Haregewoin Teferra, and the scores of children crossing her threshold. It was winner of
Elle magazine's Elle's Lettres Readers Prize, a finalist for the
J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, an
American Library Association Notable Book and
Booksense Notable Book, and named a Best Book of the Year by
Publishers Weekly,
Christian Science Monitor,
Entertainment Weekly,
Chicago Tribune, and
The Atlanta Constitution.
There Is No Me Without You has been translated into 15 languages.
No Biking in the House without a Helmet [Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011] Greene's first humorous book and first memoir is an overview of family life with nine children from three continents, composed, according to the acknowledgements, with the consent and veto-power of all family members.
No Biking was named a Best Audio Book of 2011 and was an Oprah Mother's Day Pick. ==Awards and honors==