Carroll S. Taylor and Sandy Benson

Name: Carroll S. Taylor and Sandy Benson
Start: 2025-03-01T15:00:00-05:00
Location: 3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779

Schedule

Sat, 01 Mar, 2025 at 03:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

3 East Jackson Street, Sylva, NC, United States, North Carolina 28779 | Sylva, NC

Carroll S. Taylor and Sandy Benson visit City Lights Bookstore on Saturday, March 1st at 3:00pm. Carroll will read from her new poetry collection, "Facing Toward the East: Poems of Redemption", and Sandy from her book, "Dear Folks: Letters Home 1943-1946 World War II".
"Facing Toward the East", Poems of Redemption, which was published in June 2024 by Redhawk Publications, is Carroll S. Taylor’s first published book of poetry.
“I have worked on a number of the poems for several years. I decided, at age seventy-five, it’s time to set them free!” Taylor explains. Poet Mary Ricketson writes, “Facing Toward the East loves you down to people of the South, like Miss Rose and Miss Lurie, and wonders who will come to visit us when we are ‘facing toward the East.’”

About "Dear Folks": George David Geib served as a pilot in the US Army Air Force during World War II. In his frequent letters home, he chronicled his training and travels, which included sailing across the Atlantic on the luxury-liner-turned-troop-transport, the Queen Mary.
Stationed first in England and later in France, he piloted troops, prisoners, and supplies across the European Theater of Operations. He dropped glider planes across enemy lines, and he experienced the terror of being fired upon by anti-aircraft weapons. After the war, he flew VIPs and Allied troops all across Europe, and he had the opportunity to observe the Nuremberg Trials for a day.
His mother saved his letters and presented them to him when he returned home after the war. He lugged them around with him for decades, through many moves and career changes. Finally, in 1989, he realized that this historical treasure trove would be lost forever unless he did something with it. Transcribing took him nearly four years. He carted the manuscript to his local quick print shop and ran off thirty copies to give to family and friends.
Three decades later, his daughter rediscovered her copy, along with her late parents’ only remaining one. She realized that, once again, these stories could be lost to posterity. She honored his memory by formally publishing them in the year he would have celebrated his one-hundredth birthday. The collection offers an inside look at military life during wartime through the eyes of a young pilot. It delves into the nitty gritty of army life, from stateside training camps to British military bases to tent cities in France. Seasoned with the musical hits and popular films of the day and contrasted against a backdrop of family back home during times of sacrifice, rationing, and worry, it will draw readers in and immerse them in history. This is a well-crafted account of, as George phrased it, “. . . the life and times of one United States Army Air Force cadet who became a pilot in the Troop Carrier Command in World War II.”