Illinois Authors

Junebug Books Montgomery, AL : 2002

BearManor Media Montgomery, AL : 2023

In 1980, the U.S. elected an actor to the White House; Hollywood icon Ronald Reagan landed the world's leading role. While most of America celebrated, a white-hot rage simmered just out of sight. In 1982, a B-movie named Class of 1984 appeared in theaters. A vicious reworking of Blackboard Jungle, here was a film for the new America: a punishing wasteland of burnouts and punks, of rampaging youth and swift violence, where greed was rewarded and virtue disdained. Next came Bad Boys, The Outsiders, and Repo Man. As each attempted to diagnose this endemic of disaffected, angry young men, the subtext was clear: America had failed its youth. Children were paying the price for every adult sin. Ben Beard, author of The South Never Plays Itself, grew up on these films. He returns to them now, revealing common threads and hidden patterns. With insight, empathy, and humor, Beard analyzes how these disparate works have come together to form a lattice, a warning, a clarion call, and a potential salve for the still-tender wounds of youth. Equal parts memoir, cultural history, and cinematic excavation, as well as a pop-culture odyssey into early 1980s Americana—a land of guns, gangs, drugs, and the occult—The Bad Class attempts to understand the present by returning to the past, by probing this raw sliver of cinephilia, when a different plague was raging, the culture was sick, and the best films were trash.

NewSouth Books 2020

Since The Birth of a Nation became the first Hollywood blockbuster in 1915, movies have struggled to reckon with the American South―as both a place and an idea, a reality and a romance, a lived experience and a bitter legacy. Nearly every major American filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter has worked on a film about the South, from Gone with the Wind to 12 Years a Slave, from Deliverance to Forrest Gump. In The South Never Plays Itself, author and film critic B. W. Beard explores the history of the Deep South on screen, beginning with silent cinema and ending in the streaming era, from President Wilson to President Trump, from musical to comedy to horror to crime to melodrama. Beard’s idiosyncratic narrative―part cultural history, part film criticism, part memoir―journeys through genres and eras, issues and regions, smash blockbusters and microbudget indies to explore America’s past and troubled present, seen through Hollywood’s distorting lens. Opinionated, obsessive, sweeping, often combative, sometimes funny―a wild narrative tumble into culture both high and low―Beard attempts to answer the haunting question: what do movies know about the South that we don’t?

NewSouth Books Montgomery, AL : 2009

A unique catalog of historic civil rights events, This Day in Civil Rights History details the struggles, sacrifices, and triumphs on the road to equal rights for all U.S. citizens. From the Quakers’ 17th-century antislavery resolution to slave uprisings during the Civil War, to the infamous Orangeburg Massacre in 1968, and beyond, authors Horace Randall Williams and Ben Beard present a vivid collection of 366 events―one for every day of the year plus Leap Day―chronicling African Americans’ battle for human dignity and self-determination. Every day of the year has witnessed significant events in the struggle for civil rights. This Day in Civil Rights History is an illuminating collection of these cultural turning points.