Five Smooth Stones

New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 1966 Crown Publishers, New York. 1966. Hardcover. Book Club Edition. Book is tight, square, and unmarked. Book Condition: Good; bumped tail and upper tips; light shelfwear; moisture stain on textblock top with no color penetration to pages but has light warping of pages at their tops. DJ: Fair; missing pieces at head, tail, and panel tops; large closed tears on panels. Tan grained vinyl boards and spine with white lettering on the spine and stones in white on the front board. 853 pp 8vo. This is a novel set in the era of the American civil rights movement. The novel's African-American protagonist, David Champlain, was born into the poverty and Jim Crow justice of Depression-era New Orleans. His father was lynched by a white mob and he was raised by his grandparents. David himself is brilliant and lucky and graduated from a Midwestern college, then Harvard Law School, then Oxford. David and a white woman, Sara Kent, fall in love, but David fears for their future as a mixed-race couple in America. David chooses to practice international law and serve abroad as a diplomat. But the death – perhaps murder – of his grandfather brings David back to New Orleans, where he is plunged into the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement and takes a leadership role. Tragedy ensues. The book title comes from the biblical story of David and Goliath; where in chapter 17 verse 40 of the First Book of Samuel it says: "Then he [David] took his staff in his hand, chose five smooth stones from the stream, put them in the pouch of his shepherd's bag and, with his sling in his hand, approached the Philistine, as David fights in the Civil Rights issues of the South. A clean presentable copy in a Brodart mylar jacket.