South Books

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

Erik Larson

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Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 257 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

a reminder of tragedy 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Isaac's Storm, published in 1999, is the story of the most horrible hurricane in American history. While reading, I wondered if Hurricane Katrina had outstripped the Galveston hurricane described by Larson. It did not. The Galveston hurricane claimed at least 6,000 lives and the entire town. Hurricane Katrina, however, claimed less than 2,000 lives according to most estimates. While Katrina is the most tragic natural disaster of our age, our forebears experienced even worse. The Isaac of the title is Isaac Cline, the U.S. Weather Bureau's chief observer in Galveston. Larson weaves meteorological details of the storm with the story of Isaac and other Galveston residents as well as the bureaucratic failures that left the city vulnerable. The story is touching and, at times, horrifying. Larson clearly conveys the fear residents felt during the storm and the way it changed the lives of survivors forever. I cannot imagine living through such an ordeal. This is a wonderful precursor of Larson's later work, The Devil in the White City. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed that book.

Editorial Review:

Reading in his signature dispassionate style, narrator Edward Herrmann brings an eerie calm to this powerful chronicle of the deadliest storm ever to hit the United States--a huge and terribly destructive hurricane that struck land near Galveston, Texas in September of 1900. Author Erik Larson re-creates the events leading up to the disaster in astonishing detail, tracing the thoughts and actions of Isaac Cline, a scientist with America's burgeoning U.S. Weather Bureau. Cline's unwavering confidence--"In an age of scientific certainty one could not allow one's judgment to be clouded..."--blinds the meteorologist to the deadly onslaught about to be unleashed. Herrmann's calculated performance reflects the impending doom and dangers inherent to an unquestioned and absolute faith in science. (Running time: 5 hours, 3 cassettes) --George Laney

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

John Berendt

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Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Customs & Traditions
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> True Accounts -> Murder & Mayhem

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 489 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

enjoyed it immensley 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is a good, fast, enjoyable read, filled with a good mix of history, humor and good old-fashioned storytelling.

Great Read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Just read the book - you can't help but enjoy the characters and the irony.

Editorial Review:

John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has been heralded as a "lyrical work of nonfiction," and the book's extremely graceful prose depictions of some of Savannah, Georgia's most colorful eccentrics--remarkable characters who could have once prospered in a William Faulkner novel or Eudora Welty short story--were certainly a critical factor in its tremendous success. (One resident into whose orbit Berendt fell, the Lady Chablis, went on to become a minor celebrity in her own right.) But equally important was Berendt's depiction of Savannah socialite Jim Williams as he stands trial for the murder of Danny Hansford, a moody, violence-prone hustler--and sometime companion to Williams--characterized by locals as a "walking streak of sex." So feel free to call it a "true crime classic" without a trace of shame.

Screen Doors and Sweet Tea: Recipes and Tales from a Southern Cook

Martha Hall Foose

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Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Regional & International -> U.S. Regional -> General
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Regional & International -> U.S. Regional -> South

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Gifted chef and storyteller Martha Hall Foose invites you into her kitchen to share recipes that bring alive the landscape, people, and traditions that make Southern cuisine an American favorite.

Born and raised in Mississippi, Foose cooks Southern food with a contemporary flair: Sweet Potato Soup is enhanced with coconut milk and curry powder; Blackberry Limeade gets a lift from a secret ingredient–cardamom; and her much-ballyhooed Sweet Tea Pie combines two great Southern staples–sweet tea and pie, of course–to make one phenomenal signature dessert. The more than 150 original recipes are not only full of flavor, but also rich with local color and characters.

As the executive chef of the Viking Cooking School, teaching thousands of home cooks each year, Foose crafts recipes that are the perfect combination of delicious, creative, and accessible. Filled with humorous and touching tales as well as useful information on ingredients, techniques, storage, shortcuts, variations, and substitutions, Screen Doors and Sweet Tea is a must-have for the American home cook–and a must-read for anyone who craves a return to what cooking is all about: comfort, company, and good eating.

Cavalryman of the Lost Cause: A Biography of J. E. B. Stuart

Jeffry D. Wert

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Military & Spies
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Military -> United States Civil War

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Cavalryman of the Lost Cause is the first major biography in decades of the famous Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart. Based on research in manuscript collections, personal memoirs and reminiscences, and regimental histories, this comprehensive volume reflects outstanding Civil War scholarship.

James Ewell Brown Stuart was the premier cavalry commander of the Confederacy. He gained a reputation for daring early in the war when he rode around the Union army in the Peninsula Campaign, providing valuable intelligence to General Robert E. Lee at the expense of Union commander George B. McClellan. Stuart has long been controversial because of his performance in the critical Gettysburg Campaign, where he was out of touch with Lee for several days; this left Lee uncertain about the size and movement of the Union army, information that would prove decisive when the battle began. In an engagement with the cavalry of Union general Philip Sheridan in spring 1864, Stuart was killed. He was only thirty-one.

Jeffry D. Wert provides new details about Stuart's childhood and youth, and he draws on letters between Stuart and his wife, Flora, to show us the man as he was: eager for glory, daring sometimes to the point of recklessness, but a devoted and loving husband and father. Stuart has long been regarded as the finest Confederate cavalryman and one of the best this country has ever produced. Wert shows how Stuart's friendship with Stonewall Jackson and his relationship with Lee were crucial; at the same time Stuart's relationships with his subordinates were complicated and sometimes troubled.

Cavalryman of the Lost Cause is a riveting biography of a towering figure of the Civil War, a fascinating and colorful work by one of our finest Civil War historians.

The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous: Fighting to Save a Way of Life in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

Ken Wells

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Regional U.S. -> South
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 21st Century

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

With a long and colorful family history of defying storms, the seafaring Robin cousins of St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, make a fateful decision to ride out Hurricane Katrina on their hand-built fishing boats in a sheltered Civil War–era harbor called Violet Canal. But when Violet is overrun by killer surges, the Robins must summon all their courage, seamanship, and cunning to save themselves and the scores of others suddenly cast into their care.

In this gripping saga, Louisiana native Ken Wells provides a close-up look at the harrowing experiences in the backwaters of New Orleans during and after Katrina. Focusing on the plight of the intrepid Robin family, whose members trace their local roots to before the American Revolution, Wells recounts the landfall of the storm and the tumultuous seventy-two hours afterward, when the Robins’ beloved bayou country lay catastrophically flooded and all but forgotten by outside authorities as the world focused its attention on New Orleans. Wells follows his characters for more than two years as they strive, amid mind-boggling wreckage and governmental fecklessness, to rebuild their shattered lives. This is a story about the deep longing for home and a proud bayou people’s love of the fertile but imperiled low country that has nourished them.

The Hurricanes: One High School Team's Homecoming After Katrina

Jere Longman

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Subjects -> Sports -> Football (American) -> General
Subjects -> Sports -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Louisiana

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina pummeled the lower end of Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, a peninsula housing one of the nation’s most isolated, vulnerable, and vital counties. A year later several ravaged communities came together to form South Plaquemines High. Kids who were former rivals defiantly nicknamed their football team the Hurricanes and made the 2006 state playoffs.

In 2007, South Plaquemines set its sights on a state championship. The Hurricanes used a trailer as a makeshift locker room and lifted weights in a destroyed gym that had no electricity. For the players, many of them still living in FEMA trailers, football offered a refuge.

Bestselling author Jeré Longman spent two seasons following the team. In The Hurricanes, the team’s journey provides a lens through which to view the legacy of Katrina, the cycle of poverty in rural America, and the attempt to maintain traditions in the face of uncertainty. Football is a familiar remnant of the way things used to be—and a sign of hope in a place of disaster.

1 Dead in Attic: After Katrina

Chris Rose

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Death & Distruction: The Katrina Story 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I am a voracious reader, and if a book grabs my interest & attention, I usually read a good book in 1 to 2 days. This book is exhausting; it took me 4 settings to complete it. Why? This book is excellent & captures the true misery & humman impact of this deadly storm. The author puts his articles for a newspaper in one book and so truly rivets the reader, as his accounts of life after Katrina conveys the awful sense of depression and calamity, while also including the stories of every day Americans, who put their lives aside, to serve the people in the Gulf coast area. I laughed and cried as I read his stories. susanf

Editorial Review:

Dead in Attic is a collection of stories by Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose, recounting the first harrowing year and a half of life in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Celebrated as a local treasure and heaped with national praise, Rose provides a rollercoaster ride of observation, commentary, emotion, tragedy, and even humor -- in a way that only he could find in a devastated wasteland.

They are stories of the dead and the living, stories of survivors and believers, stories of hope and despair. And stories about refrigerators.

Dead in Attic freeze-frames New Orleans, caught between an old era and a new, during its most desperate time, as it struggles out of the floodwaters and wills itself back to life.

Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

Timothy B. Tyson

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Ethnic & National -> African-American & Black
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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

When he was but 10 years old, Tim Tyson heard one of his boyhood friends in Oxford, N.C. excitedly blurt the words that were to forever change his life: "Daddy and Roger and 'em shot 'em a nigger!" The cold-blooded street murder of young Henry Marrow by an ambitious, hot-tempered local businessman and his kin in the Spring of 1970 would quickly fan the long-flickering flames of racial discord in the proud, insular tobacco town into explosions of rage and street violence. It would also turn the white Tyson down a long, troubled reconciliation with his Southern roots that eventually led to a professorship in African-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison--and this profoundly moving, if deeply troubling personal meditation on the true costs of America's historical racial divide. Taking its title from a traditional African-American spiritual, Tyson skillfully interweaves insightful autobiography (his father was the town's anti-segregationist Methodist minister, and a man whose conscience and human decency greatly informs the son) with a painstakingly nuanced historical analysis that underscores how little really changed in the years and decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1965 supposedly ended racial segregation. The details are often chilling: Oxford simply closed its public recreation facilities rather than integrate them; Marrow's accused murderers were publicly condemned, yet acquitted; the very town's newspaper records of the events--and indeed the author's later account for his graduate thesis--mysteriously removed from local public records. But Tyson's own impassioned personal history lessons here won't be denied; they're painful, yet necessary reminders of a poisonous American racial legacy that's so often been casually rewritten--and too easily carried forward into yet another century by politicians eagerly employing the cynical, so-called "Southern Strategy." --Jerry McCulley

Remarkable Trees of Virginia

Nancy Ross Hugo

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Subjects -> Outdoors & Nature -> Reference
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This stunning collaboration between the noted garden writer Nancy Ross Hugo and the photographer Robert Llewellyn showcases the fruits of an effort begun in 2004 to research, locate, and photograph Virginia's most remarkable trees. Four years later, more than one thousand trees had been officially nominated to the project and many others suggested for possible inclusion. The results, presented in this elegant, four-color volume, are astounding. Hugo and Kirwan, the project coordinators, have selected a sample of trees and "tree places" that illustrate the enormous variety, startling beauty, and fascinating history of Virginia's trees. Here you will see, through Llewellyn's incomparable lens, not only some of Virginia's largest trees, including a newly discovered national champion overcup oak in Isle of Wight County, but also some of the state's oldest, including baldcypress trees over 800 years old in Southampton County and red cedars over 450 years old in Giles. You will find unique trees like a willow oak in which a tricycle is embedded, fine specimens like the massive American beech in front of Sleepy Hollow Methodist Church in Falls Church, and outrageously shaped trees, like the water tupelos in the Cypress Bridge area of Southampton County. You will find trees associated with famous people and events as well as trees associated with ordinary people in extraordinary ways. Perhaps best of all, you will learn about communities that have gone to great lengths to protect their trees and about places where the public can visit some of the best trees and "treescapes" in the state.

Remarkable Trees of Virginia is a celebration of trees, but it doesn't dodge hard issues. In a section on urban forests, the authors describe the major problems facing trees in urban areas and point out strategies urban foresters are using to solve them. They describe the ecological services trees provide and issue a call for action both to protect trees in their existing habitats and to find more places where trees can "grow large and long."

Hugo, Kirwan, and Llewellyn present a treasury of Virginia's trees that is, indeed, remarkable.

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America

John M. Barry

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 105 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

When Mother Nature rages, the physical results are never subtle. Because we cannot contain the weather, we can only react by tabulating the damage in dollar amounts, estimating the number of people left homeless, and laying the plans for rebuilding. But as John M. Barry expertly details in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, some calamities transform much more than the landscape.

While tracing the history of the nation's most destructive natural disaster, Barry explains how ineptitude and greed helped cause the flood, and how the policies created to deal with the disaster changed the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Existing racial rifts expanded, helping to launch Herbert Hoover into the White House and shifting the political alliances of many blacks in the process. An absorbing account of a little-known, yet monumental event in American history, Rising Tide reveals how human behavior proved more destructive than the swollen river itself.