South Books - Page 12

Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into Texas (Bathroom Reader)

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A bowl-side companion 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

The UNCLE JOHN'S BATHROOM READER series presents collections of one- and two- page trivia that are perfect for reading when diversion is required.

The PLUNGES INTO TEXAS volume focuses on a wide range of Texas lore, covering history, celebrity, food, politics, travel, and other bizarre bits of esoteric information. There are smidgens about the origin of Big Tex, the down-and-dirty personal life of Sam Houston, the ghostly cat who haunts the capitol, and the legality of dinning on road kill.

From LBJ to Red Adair to ZZ Top, stories about the movers and shakers of the Lone Star State offer the reader quick snippets to amuse and entertain while other business is at hand. No Texas home should be without it.

Editorial Review:

Especially for armchair (or throne room) travelers and trivia buffs, Uncle John has compiled over 300 pages of interesting stories, little known facts, and gossipy tidbits about the Lone Star State. This outsize state has no shortage of tall tales, colorful characters, and strange tourist attractions, and readers in any room in the house will be fascinated with the doings of Ima Hogg, George and George W., the Great Mosquito Festival, the first oil well, the Confederate Air Force, Larry McMurtry, LBJ, ZZ Top, Nolan Ryan, the Cadillac Ranch, the Dallas Cowboys (and Cowgirls), and much, much more.

There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Vintage)

Jason Sokol

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Whites 'n' rights 3 out of 5 stars.
12 of 14 people found this review helpful.

There's a lot to admire in Jason Sokol's "There Goes My Everything," but also a good deal to regret.

The idea was excellent. Why should history always be written by the victors? The civil rights movement in the South threw up many fascinating personalities and served up many dramatic incidents. Since, as Sokol says, it was done by black people, with whites almost helpless observers, the retellings naturally concentrate on the main actors.

There are many more and thicker biographies of Martin Luther King Jr. than of Ross Barnett.

But although southern whites may have been helpless against a tide of history -- Sokol's view, not mine -- they were not only passive actors. Even when they were, they went through mental changes -- conniption fits, many times -- that have an interest all their own.

Sokol set out to interview surviving actors, both converts to integration and diehard segregationists; and to ransack the archives for contemporary journalism, essays, reports by do-gooders etc. This is a dissertation for a degree in history, and it reads like it. Not much verve but plenty of detail.

To sum 400 pages in a sentence, Sokol found that the South was never of one mind about civil rights. No kiddin'!

Sokol's approach is somewhat loose-jointed, although chapters embrace themes. The best is the one on schools, but it also raises the most troubling conceptual problem for Sokol's thesis, which is that racism was both widespread and deep in the South.

Most people, most Southerners accept that it was deep, but events, including many compiled here, bring that into question. Racism was in the South's face because it was enacted into law -- rather late, too. Jim Crow took a long time to grow up. So, why did the racial system crumble so quickly?

Sokol does not give much background, but he does note that in 1948, Henry A. Wallace's run for the presidency comprised a biracial strategy in the South. "Wallace's efforts failed in the end, although his campaign showed that some southerners might oppose segregation if given a viable forum in which to do so."

For historical reasons, the South was a one-party region. Sokol never really takes on the issue of how much racism was at the service of politics, rather than the other way around, although in a remark or two he does indicate that he is aware of the question.

So, can a structure that is built on deep foundations be brought down by a moderate storm? As Sokol himself says, many -- in fact, the majority -- of southern places adopted and adapted to civil rights without storm and stress. A few incidents gave the lead to the many. Can indifference to skin color be racism? Can racists be indifferent to skin color?

It would not be hard to pick up a daily newspaper in 2007 and find examples of far more enduring racism elsewhere. When a memorial to those who gave their lives for civil rights in the South was proposed, only about three dozen names were collected; and the collectors could hardly be charged with trepidation. Why did the South resist so mildly?

Sokol doesn't ask the question, but he answers it in a way. Most whites were at bottom indifferent to race, as compared with, say, keeping schools open. They may have said they were segregationists, and as long as they didn't have to choose between segregation and something else, they were. But when blacks (and their white accomplices, of whom I was one back in the '60s) made them choose, segregation usually fell behind.

It certainly makes it difficult for a historian when his target will not hold still, but Sokol is good at switching back and forth.

The switching also contributes to the book's irritating repetitiveness. If Sokol wrote, "Of those white southerners who came to accept integration, more were repulsed by segregationist violence than attracted to civil rights demonstrations," he wrote it 20 times. And, again, why were they not attracted to violence in the `50s and `60s? They had lived with lynchings for a long time.

The chapter on "The Contours of Political and Economic Change" is Sokol's weakest. The economic argument would have benefited from some numbers. Also, it is more than questionable whether the decline of tenant farming had much to do with black assertiveness. The decline arrived in many places long before civil rights agitation did. See, for example, my review of a rare book by an actual white tenant farmer, "Throwed Away" by Linda Flowers.

I have other knocks against this otherwise interesting book, but I will mention just one more.

There is not a word about music, other than references to "We Shall Overcome." Sokol mentions, briefly, how sports led to interracial commonality. But submitting to an organization that has been integrated by somebody else is a far different thing from going up to the window as a private individual and buying a ticket to the James Brown review. I knew quite a number of southern white boys (but few girls) who got integrated that way.

Editorial Review:

During the civil rights movement, epic battles for justice were fought in the streets, at lunch counters, and in the classrooms of the American South. Just as many battles were waged, however, in the hearts and minds of ordinary white southerners whose world became unrecognizable to them. Jason Sokol’s vivid and unprecedented account of white southerners’ attitudes and actions, related in their own words, reveals in a new light the contradictory mixture of stubborn resistance and pragmatic acceptance–as well as the startling and unexpected personal transformations–with which they greeted the enforcement of legal equality.

The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity

James C. Cobb

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

The Most Southern Place on Earth, The Mississippi Delta and 5 out of 5 stars.
33 of 36 people found this review helpful.

I loved what the book! As a 4th generation Mississippi Deltan, seventh generation Mississippian, white , 48 year old male, I was very impressed with Mr Cobb's research. He certainly dispelled many of the myths that we were taught as we grew up from a segregated society to a desegregated society. I now live in Colorado but my family and friends still live in the Delta. I wish this book was required reading in the schools in the Delta as well as anywhere segregation and racism exists to help people better understand why these problems that continue to plague these areas will not go away. A great study on the Mississippi Delta with more fact than fiction.

Revisionist and Politically Correct 1 out of 5 stars.
24 of 43 people found this review helpful.

Growing up in the Delta I find a lot to dislike about this exercise in academic revisionism of Southern history. The author is clearly ignorant of those times that shaped the history of the Delta, the floods of 1927 and '37 followed by the migrations of black people to the North followed by the mechanical cotton picker, followed by the emmigration of light industry to the "new" south. This superficial book is typical of the ideological rectitude among apologists that permeate parochial history departments. A person wishing to understand the psyche of the Delta should read instead, "Lanterns on the Levee",or "Rising Tide", both available from Amazon.com.

Editorial Review:

In this comprehensive account, Cobb offers new insight into 'the most southern place on earth, ' untangling the enigma of the grinding poor but prolifically creative Mississippi Delta.

Time: Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Changed America

Editors of Time Magazine

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

DESCRIPTION: On Sept. 2, 2005, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued a "desperate S.O.S." His city, one of America’s most historic and gracious urban centers, had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Now 80% of it lay underwater, while some citizens huddled on rooftops waiting for rescue, and others turned the flooded streets into canals of anarchy. In the first decade of the 21st century, despair, disease and death had transformed a great American city into a scene of third-world privation, even as heroic rescue workers battled to save lives, restore order and aid the suffering.

Now Time chronicles the story of the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history in Hurricane Katrina, An American Tragedy. Here, in stunning pictures and gripping first-hand accounts, is the terrible tale of Katrina’s deadly wrath and savage aftermath. Here is America’s Gulf Coast — from New Orleans to Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi — in ruins. Here are the struggling survivors and their valiant rescuers, the looters and the police who fought to control them, the homeless refugees who poured across the southeast and the resourceful agencies that took them in.

It is an epic tale, told as only Time can tell it. Award-winning pictures reveal the scope of the disaster. Oral histories offer unforgettable accounts of nature’s power and man’s resourcefulness. Illuminating graphics show how hurricanes form — and why New Orleans flooded. Powerful reporting puts readers on the scene, while insightful analysis explores the questions left in Katrina’s wake: could the tragedy have been prevented, and why was aid so late to arrive?

Moving and informative, sweeping in scope and ringing with the voices of those who were there, Hurricane Katrina, An American Tragedy is the definitive account of a disaster that will haunt Americans for decades to come.

Florida Cow Hunter: The Life and Times of Bone Mizell

Jim Bob Tinsley

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

last of the original cracker cowboys 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Very informative. I've been researching the Florida Cattle History and found information to support my theroy. This is my second copy.

Florida Cow Hunter 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I bought this for my husband and he loved it. He loves to relate to others some of Bone's antics making for interesting and lively conversation.

Before Tourist 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Using a bigger than life cow hunter, these tales of Florida before tourist and railroads ruined our only semi-tropical frontier, Bone Mizell is of raw grit and survival. I like an up to date map when I read a book of this type.

Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves (Race and Ethnicity in the American West)

Art T. Burton

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves appears as one of “eight notable Oklahomans,” the “most feared U.S. marshal in the Indian country.” That Reeves was also an African American who had spent his early life as a slave in Arkansas and Texas makes his accomplishments all the more remarkable. Bucking the odds (“I’m sorry, we didn’t keep black people’s history,” a clerk at one of Oklahoma’s local historical societies answered a query), Art T. Burton sifts through fact and legend to discover the truth about one of the most outstanding peace officers in late nineteenth-century America—and perhaps the greatest lawman of the Wild West era.

 

Fluent in Creek and other southern Native languages, physically powerful, skilled with firearms, and a master of disguise, Reeves was exceptionally adept at apprehending fugitives and outlaws, and his exploits were legendary in Oklahoma and Arkansas. A finalist for the 2007 Spur Award, sponsored by the Western Writers of America, Black Gun, Silver Star tells Bass Reeves’s story for the first time and restores this remarkable figure to his rightful place in the history of the American West.

(20070313)

Roanoke, 2nd Edition: The Abandoned Colony

Karen Ordahl Kupperman

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Interesting and relevant history. 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

I'm not certain why, but books on the "lost" colony of Roanoke seemed to catch my eye, so I added several to my wish list. I selected Karen O. Kupperman's volume as the first to read and found it interesting and insightful.

Roanoke, the Abandoned Colony is a little old and reflects it's 1984 vintage. Settlement of the North and South American continents is described as having occurred by way of a "land bridge" during the glacial epic 10,000 to 40,000 years ago. Native people are depicted as having followed their game animals across the Bering Strait into the Americas. Today this is considered somewhat less likely than it was prior to the 1990s, and alternative possibilities are usually given in more recent works on the topic.

Once beyond the background history of the native population, however, the author is on firmer ground. The ample documentation of early English settlement provides her with evidence for a thorough discussion of the period. Much of her background information, however, is taken from secondary rather than primary sources. The notes to the edition contain references to works written in the 1960s, 70s, and 80's about Roanoke, Raleigh, the Southeastern Indians, and so on, rather than documents by early explorers, although she consults those doing original research with primary sources or with archaeological field data.

I had rather expected a more sensational approach to the topic; most of us who know anything at all about Roanoke simply know of the mysterious disappearance of its colonists and the name Virginia Dare. Neglected beyond that introduction by most high school American history courses-in fact many college courses-the average reader is left with a lacuna in his/her understanding of the colonial era.

Ms Kupperman ably fills that breach. Her discussion of Indian culture and politics during the age is very insightful. When I studied American colonial history years ago, the Indian people were hardly considered at all, and then mostly as "background noise," sort of part of the flora and fauna of the continent. That they had political acumen, let alone a political agenda, was not even considered, a lapse that made the history of the period lopsided and confusing. The academic perspective at the time-prior to the establishment of American Indian Studies programs in colleges and universities-was no doubt an outgrowth of the European point of view. Historians and like minded individuals in US society saw the expression of expansionism and the displacement and even extermination of native peoples as part of its "manifest destiny." So integral is this perspective to society's concept of itself even now, that it requires works like Roanoke to remove the cultural blinders. Through it all, though, the author neither blames nor excuses. Like a good journalist, she describes and explains what occurred, giving cultural background information on all parties that helps clarify interactions. Her discussion of 16th century English policy with respect to Ireland is especially relevant.

One of the most interesting facets of the book, but definitely one that took me a while to appreciate, was the degree to which it involved the history of Elizabethan England and the life of Sir Walter Raliegh and other English explorers. In fact this period of North American history from the perspective of its European heritage is pretty much about England and its relations with others: its international fortune, its social structure and social outlook, and so on.

While the story of Roanoke is part of US history, understanding its experience and demise only makes sense when placed in the context of what was going on world wide at the time. In fact, it's possible that the history of no specific place on the globe ever makes complete sense without referring to world context.

Overall the book gives a very detailed and informative account of early English experience in North America. With the above caveats, it would make an excellent source book for high school history and a good addition to a school library.

Editorial Review:

The story of Roanoke is a tale marked by courage, miscalculation, exhilaration, intrigue, and enduring mystery. Now in its second edition, Roanoke: The Abandoned Colony tells the tragic and heroic story of the lost colony during the years between Columbus's voyages and the landing of the Mayflower. Award-winning historian Karen O. Kupperman brings to life the struggle of the settlers and the complex Native American cultures they encountered; and examines reasons for the colony's failure and what might have become of the first English settlers in the New World.

A Religious Orgy in Tennessee: A Reporter's Account of the Scopes Monkey Trial

H.L. Mencken

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Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"The native American Voltaire, the enemy of all puritans, the heretic in the Sunday school, the one-man demolition crew of the genteel tradition."-Alistair Cooke

Fiercely intelligent, scathingly honest, and hysterically funny, H.L. Mencken's coverage of the Scopes Monkey Trial so galvanized the nation that it eventually inspired a Broadway play and hit movie.

Mencken's no-nonsense sensibility is still exciting: his perceptive rendering of the courtroom drama; his piercing portrayals of key figures Scopes, Clarence Darrow, and William Jennings Bryan; his ferocious take on the fundamentalist culture surrounding it all-including a raucous midnight trip into the woods to witness a secret "holy roller" service.

Shockingly, these reports have never been gathered together into a book of their own-until now.

A Religious Orgy in Tennessee includes all of Mencken's reports for The Baltimore Sun, The Nation, and The American Mercury. It even includes his coverage of Bryan's death just days after the trial-an obituary so withering Mencken was forced to rewrite it (both versions are included, although the rewrite seems, if anything, even less forgiving).

With the rise of "intelligent design," Mencken's work has never seemed more unnervingly timely-or timeless.

The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 9: Literature (New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture)

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Editorial Review:

Offering a comprehensive view of the South's literary landscape, past and present, this volume of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture celebrates the region's ever-flourishing literary culture and recognizes the ongoing evolution of the southern literary canon. As new writers draw upon and reshape previous traditions, southern literature has broadened and deepened its connections not just to the American literary mainstream but also to world literatures—a development thoughtfully explored in the essays here.

Greatly expanding the content of the literature section in the original Encyclopedia, this volume includes 31 thematic essays addressing major genres of literature; theoretical categories, such as regionalism, the southern gothic, and agrarianism; and themes in southern writing, such as food, religion, and sexuality. Most striking is the fivefold increase in the number of biographical entries, which introduce southern novelists, playwrights, poets, and critics. Special attention is given to contemporary writers and other individuals who have not been widely covered in previous scholarship.

Haunted West Virginia: Ghosts and Strange Phenomena of the Mountain State (Haunted)

Patty A. Wilson

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Editorial Review:

Thrilling stories of supernatural occurences in West Virginia, including the restless spirits of Harpers Ferry, the legendary Mothman of Point Pleasant, the ghosts of Twistabout Ridge, the phantom hitchhikers on the West Virginia Turnpike, and many more.