Category: Book Reviews
Books old and new that offer eye-opening perspectives on the deep South and the story of its people.
31.10.2019
Dan B. Miller, Erskine Caldwell; The Journey from Tobacco Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.
“…lurid covers and movie posters only reinforced the indignation many southerner felt….”
25.10.2019
Erika Dethlefs Passantino, Coffee Hour in Flensburg; Stories of War and Peace, of Adventure and Love. Amazon, 2019.
As a Georgia writer and reader, I occasionally come across something remarkable: a book I nearly missed by…
17.09.2019
Hank Margeson photographer, text by Joseph Kitchens. Quail Plantations of South Georgia and North Florida. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.
One day in the summer of 1991 I was sitting at my desk at Pebble Hill Plantation near…
11.09.2019
Laurence Bergreen, Columbus: The Four Voyages, 1492-1504. New York: Penguin, 2012.
Those who have read Samuel Elliott Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942) will wonder if this work…
07.08.2019
Britain, Cotton, Slavery and Civil War
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton, A Global History. New York: Penguin Random House,2014. This book inspired my idea…
29.07.2019
There’s Still Time for an End-of-Summer read
Summer is winding down, but if you make it to the beach one last time before fall, I…
20.07.2019
Jack Weatheford, Indian Givers; How Indians of the Americas Transformed the World. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988. (Paperback edition from Crown Publishers, Ballantine Books Edition 1990.)
Brilliant. When I became the director of the Native American-focused Funk Heritage Center at Reinhardt University, I knew…
05.07.2019
J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper Press, 2016.
The Melting Pot of Grievances; Finding Context for Hillbilly Elegy We are drawn to conflict. In our literature,…
05.06.2019
William Rawlings, A Killing on Ring Jaw Bluff ; The Great Recession and the Death of Small-Town Georgia. Macon: Mercer University Press, 2013.
Occasionally, we unsuspectingly begin a book and discover that it opens a door onto our own family’s story…
10.05.2019
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles; American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
Professor Jasanoff has condensed the myriad monographs on what happened to the loyalist refugees after the American Revolution…