South Books

The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story

Julia Reed

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Julia Reed went to New Orleans in 1991 to cover the reelection of former (and currently incarcerated) governor Edwin Edwards. Seduced by the city's sauntering pace, its rich flavors and exotic atmosphere, she was never entirely able to leave again. After almost fifteen years of living like a vagabond on her reporter's schedule, she got married and bought a house in the historic Garden District. Four weeks after she moved in, Hurricane Katrina struck.

With her house as the center of her own personal storm as well as the ever-evolving stage set for her new life as an upstanding citizen, Reed traces the fates of all who enter to wine, dine (at her table for twenty-four), tear down walls, install fixtures, throw fits and generally leave their mark on the house on First Street. There's Antoine, Reed's beloved homeless handyman with an unfortunate habit of landing in jail; JoAnn Clevenger, the Auntie Mame—like restaurateur who got her start mixing drinks for Dizzy Gillespie and selling flowers from a cart; Eddie, the supremely laid-back contractor with Hollywood ambitions; and, with the arrival of Katrina, the boys from the Oklahoma National Guard, fleets of door-kicking animal rescuers and the self-appointed (and occasionally naked) neighborhood watchman. Finally, there's the literally clueless detective who investigates the robbery in which the first draft of this book was stolen. Through it all, Reed discovers there really is no place like home.

Rich with sumptuous details and with the author's trademark humor well in the fore, The House on First Street is the chronicle of a remarkable and often hilarious homecoming, as well as a thoroughly original tribute to our country's most original city.

All over but the Shoutin'

Rick Bragg

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 296 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Destined to be a Southern classic ... ! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Destined to be a Southern classic, Bragg's "All Over But the Shoutin'" rings true. It is not only a well-written, journalist's memoir, but offers readers who aren't from the South an insightful look at why Southern men often act as they do.

On the one hand the book is a rags-to-riches story about a poor white boy from the cotton fields of northeast Alabama who reads, works and writes his way out of poverty; from being a small-town sportwriter all the way up to to heading the Atlanta office the New York Times and winning the Pulitzer Prize. Like visiting with an old friend and having a glass of ice-tea and an all-afternoon, after-funeral conversation under the shade-tree in the back-yard back home, Bragg recounts his career via the Talladega Daily Home, the Anniston Star, the Birmingham News, the Miami Herald, the LA Times (very briefly), and the New York Times. Running throughout are stories and themes of: the homeless in the mean streets of Miami; the class-structure and deaths, rapes and tortures of Haiti (which he covered two or three times for the Miami paper and the NYT); his year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow; covering Harlem and the violence experienced by the storeowners from robberies and murders; covering a tornado that hit on a Sunday morning near his hometown in 1994 (and the resulting shock to the faith of those who lost loved ones in a church that day); and, the 1994 Smith murders in Union, South Carolina and the Oklahoma City bombing.

That said, the real theme of the book is his love, concern and focus on his relationship with his mother back near Jacksonville, Alabama, his two brothers -- one older and one younger -- and, how to regard the life and his relationship with an abusive, hard-drinking and usually absent father. Having roots in the Sand Mountain area myself, I can attest to the fact that there must be something in the water (and moonshine) around there as meanness, drinking and sn snake-handling Sunday-morning gospel religion are "par-for-the-course." There's a tightrope facing folks around there trying to rise above their circumstances - it heads upward and, instead of a net, those who slip, fall into a hard life of factory-work, or worse yet, no work at all. Then, clutching for a Bible or the bottle -- and, sometimes both -- men and their families work like hell to survive.

This book will become a must-read for anyone interested in Southern area studies, Southern literature, or just understanding the Southern psyche. While we're all different, I have to admit that the "Southern man" I see throughout this book is similar to those of my own family, and men I've known all my life -- a different breed, with a hard, determined drive to succeed be it through books, muscle or whatever. And, as Bragg points out, though we're every bit as smart in our own way as well-schooled intellectuals, don't mess with the chip on our shoulders -- as that very well may bring out a bit of the rattlesnake that lurks in our dark side.

While not easy to read from cover-to-cover over a few days, it's a great book to place on the bedside table to read a few pages at a time.

Editorial Review:

One reason Rick Bragg won a Pulitzer Prize for his feature articles at the New York Times is that he never forgets his roots. When he writes about death and violence in urban slums, Bragg draws on firsthand knowledge of how poverty deforms lives and on his personal belief in the dignity of poor people. His memoir of a hardscrabble Southern youth pays moving tribute to his indomitable mother and struggles to forgive his drunken father. All Over but the Shoutin' is beautifully achieved on both these counts--and many more.

Ava's Man

Rick Bragg

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 70 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The same fierce pride and love that animated All Over but the Shoutin' glow in Rick Bragg's new book. In fact, he informs us in the prologue that it was the readers of his bestselling 1997 memoir about his mother's struggle to raise three sons out of dire poverty who told him what he had to write about next. "People asked me where I believed my own momma's heart and backbone came from ... they said I short-shrifted them in the first book." Bragg sets out to make amends in this heartfelt biography of his maternal grandfather, Charlie Bundrum, who with wife Ava nurtured seven children through hard times that never seemed to ease in rural Alabama and Georgia. "He was a tall, bone-thin man who worked with nails in his teeth and a roofing hatchet in a fist as hard as Augusta brick," writes Bragg, "who inspired backwoods legend and the kind of loyalty that still makes old men dip their heads respectfully when they say his name." Charlie's children adored him so much that 40 years after his premature death in 1958 at age 51, Bragg's elderly aunts and mother began to cry when asked about him. Chronicling Charlie's hardscrabble life in the flinty, expressive cadences of working-class Southern speech, Bragg depicts a rugged individual who would find no place in the homogenized New South. The marvelous stories collected from various relatives--Charlie facing down a truckload of mean drunks with a hammer, hatchet, and 12-gauge shotgun, or brewing illegal white whiskey in the woods ("He never sold a sip that he did not test with his own liver")--are not just snapshots of a colorful character. They're also the author's tribute to an oral culture with tenacious roots and powerful significance in the American South. --Wendy Smith

Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central High

Melba Pattillo Beals

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 121 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Well-Written Must Read! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I read Warriors Don't Cry for school, and when I began reading it, I knew I would enjoy it. Yes, I enjoyed it, but it is actually very terrifying to read. Everything that Beals writes is based on fact, and it is very terrifying to imagine that this is what she and the other young black students faced when segregating into an all-white school.

This is a must-read, and is a well-written, terrifying look into the world before blacks and whites could be as one in a school. It's a must read!

Editorial Review:

You've gotta learn to defend yourself. Never let your enemy know what you are feeling.
-- The soldier assigned to protect Melba

Please, God, let me learn how to stop being a warrior. Sometimes I just need to be a girl.
-- Melba's diary, on her sixteenth birthday

In 1957 Melba Pattillo turned sixteen. That was also the year she became a warrior on the front lines of a civil rights firestorm. Following the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board Education, she was one of nine teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock's Central High School. This is her remarkable story.

You will listen to the cruel taunts of her schoolmates and their parents. You will run with her from the threat of a lynch mob's rope. You will share her terror as she dodges lighted sticks of dynamite, and her pain as she washes away the acid sprayed into her eyes. But most of all you will share Melba's dignity and courage as she refuses to back down.

Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (World As Home, The)

Janisse Ray

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The scrubby forests of southern Georgia, dotting a landscape of low hills and swampy bottoms, are not what many people would consider to be exalted country, the sort of place to inspire lyrical considerations of nature and culture. Yet that is just what essayist Janisse Ray delivers in her memorable debut, a memoir of life in a part of America that roads and towns have passed by, a land settled by hardscrabble Scots herders who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, and who bear the derogatory epithet "cracker" with quiet pride.

Ray grew up in a junkyard outside what had been longleaf pine forest, an ecosystem that has nearly disappeared in the American South through excessive logging. Her family had little money, but that was not important; they more than made up for material want through unabashed love and a passion for learning, values that underlie every turn of Ray's narrative. She finds beauty in weeds and puddles, celebrates the ways of tortoises and woodpeckers, and argues powerfully for the virtues of establishing a connection with one's native ground.

"I carry the landscape inside like an ache," Ray writes. Her evocations of fog-enshrouded woods and old ways of living are not without pain for all that has been lost--but full of hope as well for what can be saved. --Gregory McNamee

The Thread That Runs So True: A Mountain School Teacher Tells His Story

Jesse Stuart

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

First published in 1949, Jesse Stuart's now classic personal account of his twenty years of teaching in the mountain region of Kentucky has enchanted and inspired generations of students and teachers. With eloquence and wit, Stuart traces his twenty-year career in education, which began, when he was only seventeen years old, with teaching grades one through eight in a one-room schoolhouse. Before long Stuart was on a path that made him principal and finally superintendent of city and county schools. The road was not smooth, however, and Stuart faced many challenges, from students who were considerably older -- and bigger -- than he to well-meaning but distrustful parents, uncooperative administrators and, most daunting, his own fear of failure. Through it all, Stuart never lost his abiding faith in the power of education. A graceful ode to what he considered the greatest profession there is, Jesse Stuart's The Thread That Runs So True is timeless proof that "good teaching is forever and the teacher is immortal."

Cross Creek

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Classic of Regional Writing 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Rawlings explores the lives and interations of the odd assortment of people living in Cross Creek, Florida in the early 1900s. It is often assigned reading for teens, but I doubt that most of them can appreciate it. Her accounts of neighbors feuding and subsistance living gives us many lessons in human behavior.
The lyrical descriptions of wildlife and the orange groves and wild landscape are very appealing. Your mouth waters as you read her essays on downhome foods like hush puppies. She turned those into a cookbook which I'll have to try out.
Modern readers squirm uncomfortably at her use of the N----- word and her characterization of blacks as irresponsible, drunken, immoral, etc. It is probably a faithful representation of common thinking at the time it was written, so recognize it as a snapshot of the times. Then move past that to luxuriate in the beautiful passages in the book. (I deducted 1 star for this)
The reader becomes absorbed in Rawlings' love of the land and the creation of a home. It gives much the same feelings as A Year in Provence or Under a Tuscan Sun.

Editorial Review:

Originally published in 1942, Cross Creek has become a classic in modern American literature. For the millions of readers raised on The Yearling, here is the story of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's experiences in the remote Florida hamlet of Cross Creek, where she lived for thirteen years. From the daily labors of managing a seventy-two-acre orange grove to bouts with runaway pigs and a succession of unruly farmhands, Rawlings describes her life at the Creek with humor and spirit. Her tireless determination to overcome the challenges of her adopted home in the Florida backcountry, her deep-rooted love of the earth, and her genius for character and description result in a most delightful and heartwarming memoir.

Heart in the Right Place

Carolyn Jourdan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 18 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

What a Great Book! 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

A very good friend recommended this book to me because I don't live very far from the town where the author's father practiced medicine. It turned out to be an excellent recommendation because I don't know when I have enjoyed a book more than I did this one. Being a native of the same area as the author I recognized many of the characters that she describes although they have different names and live a little farther to the east. I even had a relative who was just like Miss Hiawatha. Miss Hiawatha in case you are wondering is one of the many delightful characters that populate this book.

The basic plot of this book follows a powerful Washington DC attorney (the author) who has to take a leave from her job as a Senate council to come back home to East Tennessee to help out her parents. Her father is a doctor in a small town just outside of Knoxville who offers care to anyone and everyone regardless of their ability to pay and he even takes things like chickens in trade. Because of that he can't afford to hire a receptionist when his wife suffers a heart attack and has to take some time off. The author plans on spending a few days helping out but days turn into months and she ends up getting very attached to the job.

As she tries to settle in to her new duties the author runs into a cast of characters that could never be called up from even the most fertile imagination. Besides Miss Hiawatha there is a farmer who has the worst luck in the world and a George Jones like character who gets drunk and drives his lawnmower down the four-lane highway. And those three are just the appetizers. There are parts of this book that will make you laugh so hard that you will cry. Of course with this being the story of a doctor's office there are other very sad stories that will make you cry for other reasons. This author has a distinct talent for causing her readers to get very attached to the characters that she writes about.

On the technical side this is a very well written book and it contains some very thought provoking chapters. The author put a lot of feeling into this book and it shows. Above all though this is just an enjoyable book about some wonderful and sometimes eccentric people who reside in East Tennessee. This was a very good book and it is one that will always hold a special place in my personal library.

Editorial Review:

Carolyn Jourdan, an attorney on Capitol Hill, thought she had it made. But when her mother has a heart attack, she returns home—to the Tennessee mountains, where her father is a country doctor and her mother works as his receptionist. Jourdan offers to fill in for her mother until she gets better. But days turn into weeks as she trades her suits for scrubs and finds herself following hazmat regulations for cleaning up bodily fluids; maintaining composure when confronted with a splinter the size of a steak knife; and tending to the loquacious Miss Hiawatha, whose daily doctor visits are never billed. Most important, though, she comes to understand what her caring and patient father means to her close-knit community.

With great humor and great tenderness, Heart in the Right Place shows that some of our biggest heroes are the ones living right beside us.

A Season of Night: New Orleans Life After Katrina

Ian McNulty

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

For many months after Hurricane Katrina, life in New Orleans meant negotiating streets strewn with debris and patrolled by the United States Army. Most of the city was without power. Emptied and ruined houses, businesses, schools, and churches stretched for miles through once thriving neighborhoods.

Almost immediately, however, die-hard New Orleanians began a homeward journey. A travelogue through this surreal landscape, A Season of Night: New Orleans Life after Katrina offers a deeply intimate, firsthand account of that homecoming. After the floodwaters drained, author Ian McNulty returned to live on the second floor of his wrecked house without electricity or neighbors. For months his sanity was writing this book on a laptop by candlelight.

By turns haunting, inspiring, and darkly comic, this memoir offers a behind-the-headlines story of resilience and renewal. From bittersweet camaraderie in the wreckage to depression and violent rampages in the lawless night to the first flickers of cultural revival and the explosive joy of a post-Katrina Mardi Gras, A Season of Night delivers an unprecedented tale from the wounded but always enthralling Crescent City.

Nine Years Among the Indians, 1870-1879: The Story of the Captivity and Life of a Texan Among the Indians

Herman Lehmann

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

good book in proper context 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Fascinating read, yet must be read with the realization that this is a picture of a culture under intense (mostly wartime) stress and flux. The account happens at a time of major population incursions of whites into native lands and a time when native groups are being pushed into each other's subsistence territories by such incursions. It also occurs at a time when a number of destabilizing introductions (such as horses and guns) have recently come into native communities. Keep in mind that this picture of Apache & Comanche culture is about as reflective in the broader, overall sense as an German soldier's account of his life from 1916-1946 would be of overall German culture down through the ages. Read in proper historical context, this book is excellent. Read as a sweeping generalization of Apache life, it is bound to give a skewed impression.

Editorial Review:

Here is a genuine Little Big Man story, with all the color, sweep, and tragedy of a classic American western. It is the tale of Herman Lehmann, a captive of the Apaches on the Southern Plains of Texas and New Mexico during the 1870s. Adopted by a war chief, he was trained to be a warrior and waged merciless war on Apache enemies, both Indian and Euro-American. After killing an Apache medicine man in self-defense, he fled to a lonely hermitage on the Southern Plains until he joined the Comanches. Against his will, Lehmann was returned to his family in 1879. The final chapters relate his difficult readjustment to Anglo life.

Lehmann’s unapologetic narrative is extraordinary for its warm embrace of Native Americans and stinging appraisal of Anglo society. Once started, the story of this remarkable man cannot be put down. Dale Giese’s introduction provides a framework for interpreting the Lehmann narrative.