Mississippi Books

Here's a short quote from this book:

"The ... narrative overflows with familiar icons of childhood and small-town American life - daydreams and disappointments, abseball and Boy Scouts, lawn ornaments and storm windows, Main Street and Founder's Square. But Keillor works his local-color material so that it debunks the same sentimentality and nostalgia that it evokes. ... in the final analysis the narrator's praise for small-town America is about as trustworthy as the boy's booming baritone."

Such a complex fella. Keillor left Lake Wobegone for a clear and understandable reason: he was stultified by the environment and the atmosphere where "artsy" types were viewed with deep suspicion and contempt.

However, this was the ground he stood on, unlike so many others, and it became his lifelong meal ticket...

Kerry Soper makes the case that Gary Trudeau is one of the most important cultural critics of the last 50 years. He does this with a significant amount of sophistication, wit and humor. For fans of Doonesbury, or anyone interested in the complex relationship between humorists and political cartoons and American culture, this book is a must read.

Karen Jackson Ford once again turns the long-standing conventional view and flips it with her deft intellect. A must for anyone who is a serious student of literature.

George Cukor is another Hollywood director with a reputation for claiming the status of craftsman, not artist, for himself, but he's far more forthcoming than Ford in the George Cukor Interviews book, edited by Robert Emmet Long. If Ford's pose was curmudgeonly and ultimately bitter, Cukor's is witty, self-deprecating, and pragmatic. Told of Cahiers du Cinema's analyses of his films, he says "I'm very amused reading these very nice articles about my work." Asked about his firing from Gone with the Wind, he replies, "I have never wasted time regretting setbacks of this kind; I am too much a fatalist, or perhaps just too conceited for that. I have always felt that if I couldn't make one picture I would just make another." Cukor proves himself an incisive judge of other people's work. He sardonically laments Lawrence of Arabia's narrative slackness: "I didn't know what their point was. It was lost in all those surging masses." Generally he's as respectful of actors in his comments as he is in his films, though he bristled at being called a "woman's director." "That one stuck with me regardless of my other attributes. And I, supine fool that I was, said `Yes, yes, I am.' Now that I'm older, I say `What the hell do you mean?'" Asked what drives him, he replies, "the irrepressible urge to tell people what to do." Included in both the Ford and Cukor volumes are a chronology, a filmography, an index, and a photo gallery.

Isbell has won many awards for his outstanding work as a photo journalist crossing many genres'. The Civil War is a particular passion of his and this work, along with his equally superb Vicksburg:Sentinels of Stone, was years in the making.

Study his photographs and note the stunning detail as Isbell captures not only color but shades, shadows, and unique lighting.

Each photograph is accompanied by excellent, meticulously researched historical information that is informative and very readable which makes these works much, much more than a book of photographs. Excellent for students and teachers as well as Civil War buffs. Highly recommended.

The stories of Mississippi's modern civil rights movement are too important to forget. This was a fight for democracy and "Ghosts" provides many details that would otherwise be forgotten. The murder of Medgar Evers and the resulting three trials that it took to put away Beckwith are carefully detailed and are important for any student of American history to explore.

I enjoyed reading this book by Dr. Sanders. It is full of great medical information and history.

If you are a lover of Southern food then this is the cookbook for you. The recipes are easy to follow and the book is rich with photographs of the South. I have bought copies for my friends out West and in the North. Everyone has loved it!

"Grassroots Garveyism" is one of the best books I've read on the organizing traditions of the Garveyites!!!! Many young itinerate preachers, like Malcolm X's mother and father, were organizers. It provides a class analysis of the membership, supported by the census--workers, peasants and tenant farmers and farm workers--also many in port cities involved & exploited in maritime industry--as well as many labor organizers. In contrast to Judith Stein's class analysis, this is a powerful revision of the UNIA story--less speculation, more analysis. Above all, Mary Rolinson does a powerful analysis of the symbolic politics of self-emancipation, self-respect and self-defense at the grassroots.


Komozi Woodard
Professor of History, Africana Studies & Public Policy
Sarah Lawrence College
Author of "A Nation Within a Nation."

Joutel's Journal, as printed here, is an abridgement of the original by the Sieur de Mitchel. Mitchel's preface, together with other explanatory remarks, a map, and a copy of Louis XIV's instructions of 1712 for the government of Louisiana, are included in this edition. Marion A. Habig, "The Franciscan Pere Marquette," Franciscan Studies (June, 1934), No. 13, pp270-271 provides additional information about the Journal.