Midwest Books - Page 12

Three Lives for Mississippi

William Bradford Huie

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The only complete on-the-scene account of the heinous Freedom Summer murders in Mississippi

"This book is a part of the arsenal decent Americans can employ to make democracy for all truly a birthright and not a distant dream. It relates the story of an atrocity committed on our doorstep." -- Martin Luther King, Jr.

In the civil rights movement, 1964 was the year of Freedom Summer. On June 21, Mississippi, one of the last bastions of segregation in America and a bloody battleground in the fight for civil rights, reached the low point in its history. On that steamy night three young activists were abducted and murdered in Neshoba County near the small town of Philadelphia.

Their names were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Two were from the North and labeled locally as "outside agitators." Chaney was a Mississippi black. The murders not only shook the nation and shamed the state of Mississippi but also forced loose the iron grip of white supremacy in the South.

William Bradford Huie was sent to this seething community by the New York Herald Tribune to cover the breaking story. Probing for answers and conducting interviews, he wrote this documentary account in the heat of the dangerous and dramatic moment, not in the safe zone of retrospection.

This is not a political or sociological study, a collection of articles or a diary, but a journalist's fact-filled story of people that fate brought together in a tragic confrontation. Huie tells the history of each young man and studies the personalities of the killers. He reveals not only the harrowing events in this heinous case but also the prejudice of ordinary citizens who allowed murder to serve as their defense of prejudice. He helps us know the young martyrs closely and introduces us to their killers and to the hatred and suspicion that led inexorably to murder. This Banner Books edition includes Huie's report on the trial three years later. Nineteen local men were charged. Seven were found guilty of conspiracy but none of murder.

William Bradford Huie (1910-1986), an Alabama journalist and novelist who fought prejudice and hypocrisy throughout his professional life, especially in his native South, wrote many books, including The Americanization of Emily, The Execution of Private Slovik, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, Mud on the Stars (all made into films), and Wolf Whistle, the story of the Emmett Till lynching.

Plantation Homes of Louisiana and the Natchez Area

David King Gleason

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Lovely Louisiana 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

This book just takes your breath away. The houses are so beautiful and the photographs so vivid. Louisiana is perhaps the most blessed with homes from the old south and this book does them such a great service. It's nothing short of amazing that so many of them have survived, it's a testement to the quality of the builders, mostly slaves, the cypress wood used so often and benign neglect. Thank God these wonderful homes where not burned during the Civil War or torn down by short sighted developers. It's really lucky for us that this part of Louisiana has been virtually asleep for 150 years, but in the last 30 years it has awaken like a Pheonix and these houses have been restored and cared for, I am so grateful to Mr. Gleason for having created this book and for the preservationists that saved the homes themselves. I have visited many of these grand plantations and you can't help but be in awe of the beauty and saddened at the same time about the cruel institution that created them. I most appreciate the homes that have maintained their slave quarters, everyone should have to see the way these people lived, it was not all zippidy do da zippidy aye, I assure you...one must always view the historic south through this prism to understand the struggle to overcome. I highly recommend this book to anyone with a love for all things beautiful.

What my heart wants to tell

Verna Mae Slone

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A beautiful Appalachian memoir! 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Simple and truthful. If you love the Appalachian South, you'll enjoy this one.

Beautiful description of the bedrock of Appalachia strength 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Appalachia has gotten a bad rap...hillbillies, poor, ignorant, etc. Those who have lived there, or know people who have, know this is false. After all, Appalachians formed the bedrock of the union movement in this country (think United Mine Workers), fought much of the Civil War, and ran our steel miils.

Ms. Slone does a powerful job of exposing the powerful inner strength developed by residents of these mountains over the generations. She makes you believe that "hillbilly" is not an epithet, but--as she says--an adaptation of the Shakesperean Wiiliam ("Billy") to the mountains--hence, hill billy's.

A great book for anyone who wants to understand (or who already admires) this very important region in our country.

Editorial Review:

This book was written to honor my father. I loved him so much that I was not willing to let the memory of him die. I would have loved him even if he had not been my father. He is only one of many mountain people--proud, brave, sturdy, hard-working, god-fearing, and sensitive--living in a place and time so unique and different that its very simplicity is too profound to be fully understood and explained.

Prince among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold Into Slavery in the American South

Terry Alford

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

Editorial Review:

In 1807, an Irish ship's surgeon recognized a slave at a Mississippi produce market as the son of an African king who had saved his life many years earlier. "The Prince," as he had become known to local Natchez, Mississippi, residents, had been captured by warring tribesmen when he was 26 years old, sold to slavetraders, and shipped to America. An educated, aristocratic slave, Abd Rahman Ibrahima was made overseer of the large cotton and tobacco plantation of his master, who refused to sell him to the doctor for any price. After 25 years of petitioning, Dr. Cox finally gained Ibrahima his freedom, through the intercession of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Clay. Sixty-six-year-old Ibrahima sailed for Africa the following year, with his wife, two sons, and several grandchildren, and died there of fever just five months after his arrival. Prince Among Slaves is the first full account of Ibrahima's life, pieced together from first-person accounts and historical documents. It is not only a remarkable story, but the story of a remarkable man, who endured the humiliation of slavery without ever losing his dignity or his hope for freedom.

Buried Treasures of the American Southwest

W.C. Jameson

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

A standard reference 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

This book is a must for the bookshelves of treasure hunters and armchair dreamers. The history of lost gold and hidden treasures in the American Southwest is summarized here as well as it can be.

Editorial Review:

The search continues even today. Modern-day counterparts of the Spanish conquistadors and the early 19th-century settlers still cling to the image of El Dorado. Searchers still arrive with little more than their dreams and hopes for the elusive riches.

Racial Situations

John Hartigan Jr.

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

Editorial Review:

Racial Situations challenges perspectives on race that rely upon oft-repeated claims that race is culturally constructed and, hence, simply false and distorting. John Hartigan asserts, instead, that we need to explain how race is experienced by people as a daily reality. His starting point is the lives of white people in Detroit. As a distinct minority, whites in this city can rarely assume they are racially unmarked and normative--privileges generally associated with whiteness. Hartigan conveys their attempts to make sense of how race matters in their lives and in Detroit generally. Rather than compiling a generic sampling of white views, Hartigan develops an ethnographic account of whites in three distinct neighborhoods--an inner city, underclass area; an adjacent, debatably gentrifying community; and a working-class neighborhood bordering one of the city's wealthy suburbs. In tracking how racial tensions develop or become defused in each of these sites, Hartigan argues that whites do not articulate their racial identity strictly in relation to a symbolic figure of black Otherness. He demonstrates, instead, that intraracial class distinctions are critical in whites' determinations of when and how race matters.

In each community, the author charts a series of names--"hillbilly," "gentrifier," and "racist"--which whites use to make distinctions among themselves. He shows how these terms function in everyday discourses that reflect the racial consciousness of the communities and establish boundaries of status and privilege among whites in these areas.

A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 (Blacks in the New World)

Kenneth L. Kusmer

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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.
36 of 39 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 46 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.

Payne Hollow, Life on the Fringe of Society

Harlan Hubbard

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

a story of simple life with the land 5 out of 5 stars.
51 of 54 people found this review helpful.

This is a wonderful book about life outside of normal hustle and bustle of modern life. Harlan and his wife, Anna, lived in Payne Hollow, and spent their time living from the land and with the land. They built their home, tended their garden, fished the river, and lived their lives there. It is in some ways a beautiful love story that reminded me of what it would be like to be a castaway on a desert island. But in this case, one is castaway in the hills of Kentucky, on the Ohio river.

The book is really a journal of their lives there, and when reading it, one feels how simple yet full lives their lives were. From Harlan's rising early in the winter mornings to tend the goats, to the early passages about working by lantern light on simple tasks, to the way he wrote about the seasonal rhythms, I was taken with their story. I found that it was a tender book to read, and I found that the way they lived was so much more than the suburbanites. Harsher, perhaps, but more. The book has some sketches by Harlan, and some woodcuts. A great story.

Editorial Review:

This is a new edition with an Afterword by Don Wallis and a Publisher's Note about the history of the book.

The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics

Dan T. Carter

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Masterful examination of Wallace's political career 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful.

This is an excellent study on the political career of George Wallace, the former Alabama Governor famed for his stand against integration in the early 1960's and his subsequent runs for the Presidency. Carter portrays Wallace as a complex individual, who seems to have been motivated from the start more by ambition than principle. The book gives an extremely well researched and readable account of Wallace's early life, his family, friendships and formative experiences. Carter attempts to show that Wallace early on became politically ambitious for the Alabama Governor's office and that he originally adopted the stance of a moderate (for the time) southern populist, going so far as to refuse to break away from the Democratic party in 1948 and supporting Truman over Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat party.

In the 1958 Alabama gubernatorial election Wallace was defeated by a more blatantly racist, segregationist opponent and vowed in a famed statement of racial epithet never to be the racial moderate in any future elections. True to his word he ran a 1962 campaign on the stance of continued defiance to federal government attempts to integrate Alabama schools and extend voting rights to the state's black population. Successfully elected, he made a national name for himself by his confrontations with the federal courts (including initially trying to defy or evade the court orders of man who had once been a good friend - Federal Judge Frank Johnson) and the Kennedy Justice Department. The book doesn't shy away from the resulting violence of some of Wallace's followers and the more extreme racist comments and actions of many of those who supported him in the 1960's. I think Carter makes a good case that by his disregard for federal law enforcement agencies and civil rights protesters that Wallace in some degree bore some of the responsibility for the actions of the more extreme and violent of those opposed to integration and expanded civil rights for black citizens.

Carter also provides great detail into minds of the inner circle of those men who managed Wallace's candidacy in his state and later national campaigns for President, including talented speechwriter but also violent racist Klansman Asa Carter (no relation to the author), who would later become famous as the author of the historical novel that inspired the Clint Eastwood movie "The Outlaw Josey Wales". Biographer Carter's premise is that by Wallace's strong showings in the presidential elections of 1968 and 1972 (before he was derailed by an assassination attempt) that Wallace succeeded in moving the national political debate to the right, especially in the area of social policies and politics. Carter has gone on record in other books and speeches as trying to link the Republican policies of welfare reform, re-examination of affirmative action policies and anti-crime legislation as being directly descended from Wallace's bigoted early campaigns. While I think he stretches the point I do think that some of Wallace's populist appeal did pave the way for successful Presidential campaigns of other southerners, such as Georgia's Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Arkansas' Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Carter sees Republican Ronald Reagan as more of a direct descendant of Wallace, but this reviewer sees it as a fact that most successful Presidential races since 1968 whether Republican or Democrat have taken Wallace's anti-Washington bureaucrat populist rhetoric and support for a stronger defense and lower taxes as being more important than his racial stances.

Of course Wallace himself moderated his racial stances through the succeeding years, until he was running as a populist with appeal to both blacks and whites in the 1980's and appealing for forgiveness to many of those he had wronged. Carter dutifully reports this later conversion, although he seems to question some of the sincerity behind the public conversion.

The book doesn't represent itself as a conventional biography as much as an examination of Wallace's life and the effects of his political campaigns on national and regional politics, and for that reason I can forgive what I see as a failure of the book to give as much detail and scrutiny to Wallace's life after 1972 as Carter gave the previous years. The book does a powerful job of conveying the reality of Lurleen Wallace's life and trials as George's wife as well as her fights with the cancer that finally killed her. Her stint as a successful stand in candidate for Governor in 1966 and her short term in office before her death is given a good overview. However I would have liked to have seen as much detail and information on Wallace's later family and personal life, including his other marriages and relationships with his children. I also would have been interested in finding out more about the Alabama political scene of the 1980's and 1990's and Wallace's lasting effect on those politics, but I can't argue with the fact that Carter has written a masterful portrait on both the man and his era and the waves he caused by his political campaigns. A definite 5 stars for this award winning (justly so, I might add) political biography.

Editorial Review:

In the first unauthorized study of Wallace in two decades, a professor of history shows how Wallace's segregationist politics launched the anti-Washington populist movement that ultimately swept Republicans to power in 1994. 25,000 first printing.