Mississippi Books

The material came fairly quickly and were in the condition I expected from the description. I appreciate the honesty of the people involved in this transaction.Conversations With Isaac Asimov (Literary Conversations Series)

The idea of gathering together the major interviews Isaac Asimov gave in his lifetime is an excellent one. Asimov was one of the most knowledgeable people who ever walked this way. I also believe that he was quite a limited person in certain ways, and do not for instance, especially love the way he 'factualized' the study of Literature. I also do not think that his political views were the most astute and deep.
The world of knowledge is as he knew better than anyone else, vast and accelerating at a faster and faster rate. His great knowledge in the scientific and technical realms was not matched by a comparable knowledge in the humanistic or I would even dare to say 'human realms'.
However he was not simply a person who absorbed knowledge but rather someone who had original thoughts and ideas, perhaps the most famous of which are his 'Laws of Robotics'.
These interviews will help even those who knew his work best(And no one could possibly know it all) enhance their knowledge of a remarkable mind.

this collection of interviews is great for any fan of Cheever's work. it does get a bit repetitious, but there is so much about the man (and the author) in these interviews

Review of CONVERSATIONS WITH CHEEVER

For those admirers of Cheever who would have been elated at the chance to converse with him about his art this book is gratifying. Surely, in these twenty eight interviews, questions are asked to which an admirer yearns for an answer. Granted some questions are echoed throughout various interviews - how much of Cheever's fiction is autobiography, for instance - a tendency the book's compiler mentions, still a lot of information about the writer's life, opinions, and working habits is presented. (A similar book and a suitable companion piece to this one is CONVERSATIONS WITH UPDIKE, particularly since the two were friends. Amazon carries it.)

What follows is merely a smattering of information from this treasure trove. Cheever liked to select a different room in his house in which to write each story. Many of his short stories were drafted in three days. Usually, at the publication of one of his books, he fled to Europe to avoid interviews, a habit he discarded later in his career. He was fond of Labrador Retrievers and owned several of the breed. Anyone wishing to discover the intimate details about the renowned American's life would do well to own this source.

John Cheever kept a journal throughout much of his career. An admirer might hope to find in them (they have been published) a glimpse into the artist's methods as can be found in the notebooks of Henry James. He is apt to be disappointed. Much of Cheever's journals concentrates on his amorous peccadilloes. CONVERSATIONS WITH CHEEVER compensates for what the journals lack. A reader will find on every page a nugget either factual or insightful on this esteemed writer.

This is a great book for gaining insight into the writing of John Updike. Collected is a series of interviews over a thirty year period. Updike might bemoan being interviewed, but he usually provides a gem everytime. I would highly recommend this book.

This lively collection of short interviews, magazine and newspapers profiles gives us an even deeper picture into Updike's art. But more than peeking inside his head, we also watch him grow from a callow young novelist and short story writer to our nation's most senior man of letters.

Like his novels and stories, this interview collection is worth re-reading. Buy it now.

The interviews in this book illuminate the forces behind Morrison's scholarly theories about the role of race in American literature. Anyone who has read "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination" will immediately recognize key themes in many of these interviews, although the strongest distinctions can be found in the last two interviews, each given after publication of "Playing in the Dark." Taken chronilogically, the interviews are a thrillling opportunity to observe how Morrison has evolved as a writer and a scholar. To me, it is clear her novels are a carefully crafted attempt to mirror the racialized signifying she identifies in her scholarly critiques of white writer's work.

Toni Morrison was clearly ahead of her time -- look at her novels. Her interest in myth, history, a decentered narrator, racialized images of self, and aural language were well ahead of most critics and theorists, who are only now recognizing the full worth of her work. These collected interviews allow us to hear from the horse's mouth what her narrative project is. For Morrison fans, it is particularly interesting to see how the various white interviewers grapple with Morrison's insistence on writing about the culture she knows best -- black culture -- and not putting whites front and center. It is also interesting to see how Morrison herself switches positions throughout her career, from an insistence that she writes only for herself (early in her career) to writing for "the [black] tribe" (middle of her career)to writing for seemingly everybody (later career). A particular treat, for me, were references scattered throughout to how "prickly" Morrison can be and how catty she was about not being nominated for a National Book Award for SONG OF SOLOMON.

Who can't love a book in which WB tells all?

"Conversations With William S. Burroughs" might be more than most readers interested in the Beats might care to read. However, if you find the life of a writer as intriguing as his writings, you'll love this.

As a student of the Beat style (particularly how Kerouac merged poets into music), I was curious to learn more about the people of the movement.

"Conversations With William S. Burroughs" feeds into the pretensions of Burroughs' personality. There's the obvious cross-pollinating in here, showing how Corso, Ginsberg, Ferlingetti, Kerouac all fed each other compliments. Owning a lot of the pop-philosphy which eventually ruined the Beats... discussing issues he didn't care about in 'real life'. It is hard to tell what Burroughs finds interesting, and what he really believed in.

This isn't the best you'll read on Burroughs, but it is essential to get into the full look of the writer's pensive life. He seems more introspective than his counterparts, but just as politically-minded.

I recommend "Conversations With William S. Burroughs."

Anthony Trendl

Tom Bailey's novel Cotton Song is set in Hushpuckashaw County, Mississippi. It's a raw and visceral view of the relationships between blacks and whites in the south during World War II.

You are invited into the story just after Letitia Johnson, a black nanny, is lynched, tarred and burned for drowning Dorothy, the infant daughter of her employer, Sissy. The accused had raised Sissy from birth.

Letitia's 12-year-old daughter, Sally becomes a ward of the state and her case worker, Baby Allen is pregnant and estranged from her near-do-well, adulterous husband. Baby learns that Sally's life is in danger as the locals (the Klan) are determined to eek out further vengeance for baby Dorothy's death.

Baby is initially unable to find a foster home for Sally and shelters her in her own home. The Klan visits Baby's home one night, and after she shoots at her attackers, she realizes she must find a safe place for Sally. Jake Lemaster, the former one-armed college football hero (who is now second in command to his father, Boss Chief, head of Parchman Farm's-the local penitentiary) becomes involved with Baby and Sally.

Jake and Baby don't believe Letitia drowned Dorothy. Sally's father is serving time at Parchman and is a powder keg waiting to explode. Sissy and husband Clyde have something to hide, and the guards at Parchman are waiting for their chance to `pay back' Jake for interfering in their domain. On a hot Mississippi night in July, the lives of all that have been touched by Letitia's death, meet and violence prevails.

Bailey writes with such clarity and passion that one can actually smell the wet heat of the cotton fields, are assaulted with the acrid odor of blood and repelled by the torture and brutality of man, with nary a drop of justice in sight.

I loved this novel. It is breathtaking, even in its brutality. At times I had to remind myself to breathe, and when I had finished, I didn't want to believe that people could behave the way the characters in Cotton Song had behaved. Sadly, I knew that these things could have happened and I wanted to wash the depravity of humans from my skin. I couldn't.

Armchair Interviews says: A stunning novel. Warning: There is extreme brutality in this book.

I really enjoyed this book. The author knows his South even though it is not always pretty. The characters and the story stayed with me a long time after I finished reading, especially the ending. Read and enjoy.

Loved reading about my people and ancestors. Great research and insight on the People of Color in the Bayou Country

Creoles of color in the bayou country, by Karl Brasseaux, is a very informative piece of documented history. I am bias for this book because it hits closer to home, making reference to my grand father generations ago. I have always known a rich but loosely knitted and sometimes confusing history of my family. Karl have given me the tools to dig much deeper into my ancestry. Now I can piece together better my past. Merci vraiment Monsier Brasseaux de me presenter a mon grand pere, Zenon Rideau. Those who call creoles the lost people, are obviously lost themselves.

When I moved to the Mississippi Delta, where I lived for two years, I had no understanding of the rich history that confronted me from the start. The Delta is a magical place and because of Clyde Woods, I have perspective on the beauty and horror of this region. I lived near the small town of Drew (actually I lived on the grounds of Parchman) where evidence of early bluesmen and the modern civil rights movement still abound. The infamous Dockery Plantation (once home to some of the greatest blues musicians) is nearby and people who were part of the Movement are still alive and willing to talk about their experiences. Woods obviously spent much time in the Delta to craft his timely book. It is truly the best book I've read about Mississipi Delta history and it certainly gave me a much stronger understanding of where I had come to live.

Music is a slippery thing to define. Many associate it with a sound object of some kind, but as many have pointed out, the perceptual filters and hermeneutic webs wound into the reception of sound objects have brought many, especially in the cultural studies tradition, to conclude that no separation between the two is possible, necessary, or even desirable. The most straightforward example of this conception of music among these authors can be found within "Development Arrested." While the word "blues" is often used to describe a genre of music historically originating in African-American communities, or a label applied to the collective identity of African-Americans ("Blues People") Woods instead contends that Blues is best understood as a way of understand the collective and accumulated historical consciousness and responses to continuing economic and political exploitation. Incorporating the optimistic aesthetic arguments of Albert Murray (Stomping the Blues), Woods finds a dialectic of both critique and affirmation in the blues. In doing so, Woods wishes to bridge the gap separating the blues as an aesthetic form and the blues as a theory of socio-economic development. Primarily Woods seeks this bridge in drawing new types of boundaries around blues discourse.


This `Blues Epistemology' (B.E.) is a lens of viewing and understanding the world that can take the form of a deliberately constructed sound object, or a book on the legacy of plantation power in the Delta. This epistemology has, according to Woods, several major distinguishing features. It is oppositional, concerned with social relations, socially realistic in its analysis, and demystifying. In addition, cultural productions of this epistemology are affirmative, and confessional, class-based, and enact/maintain an imagined community among African-Americans. In Woods' specific case, he uses B.E. to write a history of power relations in the Delta from the Plantation Revolution from inception to present-day.

`Sound objects' are powerful product and exemplars of this epistemology, but only one of its many modes of expression. For as ephemeral and marginalized groups come into and out of daily life, their ideas, once embedded in their lives, are now embedded in their cultural production, live on. For example, Woods specifically links the Delta Blues to a working-class consciousness that seeks genuine participatory democracy. This African-American working class then becomes a major factor in the creation of African-American studies, which should be seen as reproducing this structure of understanding. Overall, what is central to understanding Woods' conception of the "Blues" is that it seeks to uncover (or recover) the organic connection between the lived experience of African-Americans and their intellectual production. At the same time, it challenges and defies a Euro-American understanding of `history' and `hermeneutic' as separate entities, and argues forcefully for `re-membering' each as part of the other.


This then becomes the basis for re-reading the history of slavery and underdevelopment. Using Marx's critique of chattel slavery and Eric Williams "Capitalism and Slavery," Woods finds that the blues (understood widely) develop their staunch oppositionality out of the need to resist the totalizing structures of white plantation owners after slave trade ended in the early 1800's. As local economic structures during reconstruction first failed to develop along different social patterns (the gang system was still used on some sharecropping areas) than before, this contributed to the ongoing concern with social realism. African-Americans took the situation into their own hands, with strikes, rights demanded, and attempts to reintroduce the Black Codes failed. For Woods, the Delta was the post-war center of African-American political thought, it became necessary for white institutions to, ove the next 100 years, portray its Black residents as "passive, criminal, and ignorant." When of course, nothing could be further from the truth.

Still, massive violence and its symbolic equvalents, such as the Lost Cause, were deployed to disenfranchise black Americans, such as in the election of 1875, and during the subsequent years of Mississippi as a one-party Democratic state. At the same time, the blues (the name of which Woods traces to the Southern fear of black men in Union military garb--"The Black and Blues") gains its ascension. Even through planter-dominated Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Act of the 1930's and the Enclosure movement, Big Bill Broonzy, Federal eugenics and sterilization, and Gunnar Myrdal's liberal racism of the 1940's. Woods includes excellent pictures and captions linking Blues epistemology with Black survival and resistance in the South. In addition, his analysis includes the role of the Blues music and Blues ideology in the 1950's and 1960's civil rights movement, with emphasis on Junior Wells and Muddy Waters, but noting the growth of such artists as Junior Kimbrough, and R.L. Burnside. Woods finishes by focusing on other moments of resistance and autonomy in the Delta, including the Tunica incident in 1985 and the Delta Pride strike of 1990, with a scathing point by point condemnation of the Lower Mississippi Delta Development Commission, and the work done under its then-chairman Bill Clinton.

Woods' book is an ambitious work of regional history in American Studies--told through the interpretive framework of Blues epistemology. It is a detailed blow by blow account of the local history in terms of race and economic underdevelopment, valorizing indigenous wisdom from a left populist perspective, and making the case that racism is a *structure*--not a failure to dispel lower-class fear (as the liberals would have it) or a failure to adhere to indivdualist ethics (as conservatives would have it. Instead racism is exposed as the deep structure of a slavery that existed originally to make class (as in Eric William's "Capitalism and Slavery"), but ended up making race in the process (Berlin's "Many Thousands Gone"), and continues to this day through the systematic and planned reproduction of oppression and inequality, secured in part, "by ethnic warfare."

Highly entertaining stories about gambling
in the mid 1800's on the Mississippi River.
The life of George Devol as gambler,fighter
& con artist & his insights into the men &
their character is also an insight into the
man himself. He was a master at
manipulating mens greed & vanity.The
accounts of his bare knuckle fights were
truly amazing

Loved the book, understand why the author has such a big ego- He lived in an awsome time and was at the top. Historic details filled in alot of gaps to my understanding of the mid 1800's. learned many things about the lives of people living in the Steamboat Era and was grandly entertained. laughed outloud.

_Freedom Summer_ is a richly detailed account of a young white woman who participated in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's summer project in Mississippi in 1964. The text covers one incredibly intense summer from the basic training session in June to the Democratic Convention in August. I will assign this text in my Civil Rights Autobiography course next semester because, aside from being a clearly-written account of a chaotic time, it will answer some of the questions I know my students will have, such as: what was it like to be a Civil Rights worker? what was it like to be arrested and thrown in a Mississippi jail? what were the day to day activities of people working in the Movement? how were the workers received by the black and white communities? or how do you decide go enter Mississippi after you've just learned that three summer project workers have disappeared and are presumed dead?

This past June, the State of Mississippi successfully prosecuted and convicted Edgar Ray Killen for his involvement in the murder of three civil rights workers during the summer of 1964. Judging by the national attention paid to this forty year old case, the psychic wounds from America's civil rights battles refuse to scar over.

The murdered youths - Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner - were part of The Summer Project, which was a desperate call for help from SNCC, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. SNCC leaders understood that few Americans cared enough about the routine beating and jailing of blacks to force Mississippi to change its lawless ways. But if white college students were treated like Mississippi's blacks, outrage, and perhaps federal intervention, would follow. SNCC (working through COFO, an umbrella civil rights group) put out a call for white volunteers who would plug into education and voter registration projects throughout the state and about a thousand volunteers responded. These young men and women, most of them students from elite colleges, were in many ways the best of their generation: compassionate, accomplished, idealistic. One of the volunteers, Sally Belfrage, wrote this beautifully observed account of her two turbulent months in Mississippi.

Belfrage was assigned to Greenwood, a Delta town mired in the old-time cotton economy and the racial exploitation required to run it. Greenwood also happened to be SNCC's state headquarters and to have Stokely Carmichael as its local SNCC project director. Greenwood, SNCC,and the Summer Project made for a volatile mix. The white volunteers boarded in black homes, and both they and their hosts were continually harassed, beaten and jailed for minor or imaginary infractions of local laws. (Belfrage herself spent several days in the local jail after being arrested at a protest march.) She is especially good at analyzing and describing her own emotional states, honestly portraying the fear, exhaustion and exhilaration of fighting on the front lines during the active combat phase of America's race wars. The prose in which she paints Greenwood and the daily struggles of its African-American residents is detailed, insightful and often poetic. The last part of the book, which describes the rifts in the black community between the non-violent and direct action advocates is particularly riveting, and foreshadows the subsequent struggles in the civil rights movement.

Freedom Summer provides a vivid snapshot of one Mississippi town during that long, hot summer, and one white woman's acute observations about what occurred there. What's missing is any effort to place the summer's struggles within the historical context of the civil rights movement. In particular, black SNCC field workers displayed almost unimaginable courage during the two years prior to the Summer Project as they ventured alone and unarmed in into brutal racist enclaves. The physical and psychological toll from those years must be understood to make sense of SNCC's tactics in 1964 and the organization's subsequent rejection of the white helping hand. Belfrage could have provided this context because she had travelled in the South during 1963 to write articles about the Civil Rights movement.

She doesn't mention this fact, or much else about why she went to Mississippi, or what she did before she got there. A little research reveals that Belfrage was born in America to British parents and had been living in England and Russia before returing to American in the early sixties. She was 28 in 1964, older than the typical volunteer and had already published a book about her experiences living and working in Moscow. Freedom Summer was published in 1965, and in 1968 she moved to London which remained her lifelong base while she pursued her career as a journalist/social activist. (She died of cancer in 1994.) Her biography helps explain the curiously unmoored feeling of "Freedom Summer." Belfrage wasn't the typical volunteer. She was at the same time more sophisticated and less rooted in the particular dilemmas of being American at that time. She's able to maintain clarity and objectivity, which are valuable assets to a reporter who was effectively operating in a war zone. But even though she was an active participant, and often in harm's way during the summer, we don't get a sense of what she has invested or what she has to lose, which is why this is a very good memoir about an important historical moment, but not a great one.

What the more typical Summer Project volunteer went through can be found in Letters from Mississippi, which was reissued by Zephyr Press in 2002. This book collects the raw insights and feelings of the volunteers through the letters they wrote to family and friends. Their bravery, and idealism and dismay at the poverty and lawlessness they encountered shine through. The biggest shock to most of the volunteers was discovering that racial oppression was propped up by the Southern courts and particularly by the police, who operated as a law unto themselves. The cowardly refusal of the FBI to intervene in the mayhem being perpetrated on civil rights workers also opened many volunteer eyes to fundamental flaws in the federal government. Many who came down to Mississippi as idealistic liberals believing that government was the solution went home believing that government was the problem. The death throes of FDR's New Deal began at the business end of a policeman's billy club thunking off white liberal skulls in 1964.

The disillusionment with government that began on the dusty roads of Mississippi was reinforced by the urban riots of the sixties, the political assassinations of King and Bobby Kennedy, the moral horrors of Vietnam, and the cynical machinations of the Nixon administration. That rift has never been repaired. Today, Baby Boomers on both the left and the right have little faith in the government's ability to solve our problems. The tragedy of this view is that we're being led by default to a harsher, less egalitarian society. The TV images of poor blacks fleeing Hurricane Katrina's devastation with just the clothes on their backs while the federal government did nothing to help them makes one wonder, despite the fact the Southern courts now convict the Edgar Ray Killens for their crimes against humanity, just how far we've actually come since 1964.