Beyond overcoming, Judith Mudd-Krijgelmans' memoir is one of hope and resilience. Flowers for Brother Mudd: One Woman's Path from Jim Crow to Career Diplomat explores the paradox of an African American and a Catholic - a minority within a minority - who craved a wider future. Find out how a girl from Louisville, Kentucky's Smoke Town forged independent-mindedness to survive a segregated society. Learn what propelled this "colored girl" to jet across the world for three decades in a career that she chose at age 16. This former diplomat recounts the cushioning love of her upstanding, social studies teacher father, who rose from tobacco farming to head a school in coal country; and imaginative mother from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. She salutes the Ursuline Sisters; educators at Morgan State and American Universities; and in India where she went on a Fulbright. In the face of a bleak future if Civil Rights changes hadn't come, she shows how a person of color could thrive and strive to tell her story to the world.