Signals from a Lampless Beacon

A long-dark lamp is rekindled. The South is unshrouded from the Gothic cloth woven by so many poets, dramatists, and novelists of stature. Characters share their obsessive lunacies and tragic error with the rest of humankind; their heritage of cultivation, moral strength, and compassion is allowed to stand forth in a chronicle of two races, of three families, of four generations, beginning in Wartime of 1941-1945. Abduction aboard a U-boat; violation, suicide, and intimations of redemption; glob