Alabama Books

This is an excellent addition to the library of any serious student of Vonnegut's works. Broer's insightful examinations of Vonnegut's writings add a new dimension to the reader's comprehension

Another great book by Dr. McCormack! This time, the stories are centered around Christmas. Dr. McCormack's tales of his life as a country veterinarian in the rural south evoke nostalgia for life in the rural South. This is a great bedside book or gift book!

This guide, beautifully illustrated with color photographs and featuring clear and well-executed maps, covers Alabama roughly north of Montgomery. Trailheads, hike difficulty, natural features and facilities are described. Most of the destinations are natural features but there are a few historical artefacts (old furnaces, covered bridges, etc) included as well. The author has included a number of "scenic routes" for those not so inclined to walk or scramble.
I grew up in this region and managed to get a good look at a lot of things, on land public or private, before I left for other parts. Most of the places Mr. Schuffert describes I have visited myself, usually long ago, but there were a couple I didn't know about, and I hope to have a look at them some day. But the years are rolling down the mountainside. We'll see.

This is a comprehensive history of the development of Cape Coral, Florida, as well as the company that developed it, Gulf American Corporation. Highly recommended for anyone interested in Cape Coral's early years (1950s thru 1970s).

I bought this book to use it for some research and here is why. You can not find a lot of books on the Selma Marches, only bits and pieces in a whole lot of books. Selma, 1965: The March That Changed the South, is a great book. It has a whole lot of information in one place. It made it very easy for me to look up specific dates, marches, etc. This is a great book to use if you need information. I gave this book 5 stars becuase it is a great research tool and it tells the story of Selma in 1965 very well. I strongly recommend that children use this book as a research tool for a report.

By employing a non-traditional, storytelling technique making use of court records and transcriptions of taped interviews, Thomas Burton has told a documentary-like tale of people whose lives are as confusing and bizarre as any that Flannery O'Conner's fiction could have created. Glenn Summerford, a serpent-handling, Holiness preacher was accused of attempted murder, convicted, and sentenced to ninety-nine years in prison. His wife Darlene alleged that he forced her at gunpoint, while he was in a drunken rage, to put her hand into a box of poisonous snakes that Glenn kept at home for use in his church services. She was, according to medical attendants, bitten and hospitalized, but "the truth" of the matter is clouded from the outset. Some of those interviewed claim the whole court procedure was rigged in an attempt to rid Jackson County, Alabama, of Summerford and the practices of his congregation -- which church members sincerely believe is a way for them to show their obedience to the Word of God. Glenn's two wives, as well as his children by both women, all have differing accounts of what could have happened -- and for the motives of those involved.
No matter what the reality of the situation, Burton has tried to unravel, as Robert Browning did with his verse monologues in The Ring and the Book, the immensely complicated, and ultimately unfathomable mess that life can be for all of us, and the writer has done so in a highly entertaining and readable fashion.--Michael Davenport

Illene Thompson and her husband, the late Wilbur Thompson of Huntsville, Alabama, worked years researching Confederate soldiers who served in the 17th Alabama Infantry during the American Civil War, 1861-1865. The biographical sections on each soldier reflect extensive research in original sources and great attention to detail. Each soldier's entry may include alternate names and initials; dates and places of birth, death and burial; military service such as whether wounded, hospitalized, reported missing, captured, killed in action or death from other causes, and more. For anyone researching families in Butler, Lowndes and Montgomery counties and the surrounding south Alabama area who had men serving in the Confederacy, this is a great source book. For those of you interested in military history, the accounts of orders and deployments, leaders and soldiers, camps, marches, skirmishes and battles involving the 17th Alabama provide fascinating eye-witness history with quotes from original letters, diaries and other contemporary documents.

In this short book, Robinson does a fantastic job of telling the story of the CSS Alabama: the globetrotting privateer of the Confederacy that attacked U.S. shipping interests from Canada to France to Brazil to China. In a very readable style, he gives an overview of how the South chartered privateers and how the North reacted before delving into the construction and history of the Alabama. He also does a good analysis of the actual impact the ship and its comrades had on U.S. shipping interests around the world. All in all, a top-rate look at one of the most infamous ships of the Civil War.

Friedlander is an original critic, whose originality comes, paradoxically, from his bold willingness to imitate. His experiments in criticism consist of rewriting old, existing critical texts, changing them as little as possible while making them pertinent to new subjects. In his own words, the "somewhat scandalous methodology" involves "the creation of criticism through the strict recreation of an earlier critic's text (or, more precisely, through as strict a re-creation as the discrepancy between my source text and chosen topic would allow). Thus, my "Short History of Language Poetry" follows the arguments (and even wording) of Jean Wahl's A Short History of Existentialism, while "The Literati of San Francisco" takes Edgar Allan Poe's Literati of New York City as its template."

The interesting thing about this experimental method of criticism is this: it takes our usual ways of looking at these subjects and makes them new. Our familiar sense of the poets in question is changed when we see them through different lenses. In a way, Friedlander is only doing for criticism what so many intertextual poets, from Eliot through the Oulipo and beyond, have done for poetry. If you're up for some odd, provocative ideas, check this out. If you want to read more about Friedlander's method, check out Avant-Post, a book edited by Louis Armand. It appears in July of '06.

The Rachlin family were jewish and in the between the two worst ditators ever seen. 5 miles from their home in Lithuania, Nazi Germany and 100 miles to the East, Stalin Russia. Two days before the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, the Rachlins were deported to Siberia. The irony is that it saved their lives. None of their family in Lithuania survived the Holocaust. The story is not about the camps. This family was "only" deported. But for any family that would be a tremendous tragegy. The fact that it was worse for many other families could hardly be expected to give any comfort. They survived 16 years in deportation in different places in Eastern Siberia. But the true victory over the cruel system was, that they got out and not only that: Through all these years and the years after their escape, they continued being loving, caring and decent people. This in spite of the undecent state that almost crushed them. It is also the story of the so called "capitalist decadent West". Rachel was Danish and her Danish family tried to help her and her family out. The Danish Prime Minister used much time trying to get them out and in 1956 he succeeded. Kruschov became very angry: "Now we should negotiate about oil tankers, and all you can talk about is one single family! ". Then he said that he would look into it, and the family was freed. So this is also a story about a small country caring for even one single family on the very highest level. And one final thing: The family was very fond of Russia and her people. However, to the Stalinist and communist system they did not have much good to say. This is a story that could have been your own story if you were born in a wrong place like Yugoslavia, China and the like. This is why you should read it!