Alabama Books

Ken Brooks traces the history of the lowest of the low of the minor leagues in an interesting bit of cultural history which chronicles the Alabama-Florida League. The AFL (936-1962) consisted of cities which in some cases were hardly more than villages in southeast Alabama and northwest Florida. The league spanned the paradigm shifts of World War II and the development of all weather roads, antibiotics, airplane travel, and the disappearance of basefall as a central focus of small town life. The day of these boys of summer on fields of sometimes less than meticulous manicure, of sometimes dingy lights and of single cold shower dressing rooms, was the time of the $.20 cent hamburger, $.20 milk shake, $.20 loaf of bread and the $.20 gallon of gas, and of $250 as a pretty good paying job. It was a pre-TV, pre-air conditioning era when what happened on a summer's eve on a baseball diamond would be the stuff of the next day's conversation in the cafe's and service stations and of the winter's "Hot Stove League". What happened on local league diamonds could be the stuff of memorial comparisons that transcedened decades. It was a time when bicycles were safely left unattended in public places, and cars were routinely parked unlocked with windows down. It was a time when local teams, the leagues in which they played, and the comparitive statistics which accrued were matters of civic and communal consciousness. The viability of the low minors on the terms in which it then existed was a phenoemnon on its way out through displacement by paradigmatic cultural shifts even it reached its peak. There was no reason not to think at the time local baseball interest would not recover from temporary aberrant challenges and carry forth its continuity. The AFL initiated play with teams in places like Troy, Ozark, Enterprise, Dothan, Adalusia, and Union Springs, Al. and Panama City, Fl. From our present perspective, Brooks observes, it is easy to underestimate the importance of a Class D team to towns in the pre-TVA era. Brooks begins his historical portrait with Paul Hemphill's gripping and poignant experiential account of his one game with the Graceville, Fla. Oiliers (1954) Graceville, a village of circa 1,000 population, was the most tiny of all towns in professional baseball in the lowest of the lowest of classifications, but Hemphill's tears had salt which burns through the years with a sting with which those who have in some context similarly felt the devastating nature of undesirable finality can easily emphasize. Brooks follows with a focus on Panama City as a Class D case history. The author includes interviews with more than a dozen persons who lived portions of the league's history. He presents the the statistics, the stadia, the death of a batting star from a beaning which almost destroyed the league, the administrative controversies, the playoffs and the great moments and the peccantries. Class D baseball, even in the lowest league in the lowest of classifications, was important it its own right. It was an integral expression of communal affiliation and association. The players were men who, as Bill James has expressed it, who played baseball. They were playing baseball there and then, and what they did there and then had its own meaning. Team compositions were likely to be composed of minor leaguers on their way down (sometimes as player managers), minor league journeyman whose experienes might span decades and experience in the more exotic places of the high minors, augmented by local coaches, law enforcement personnel, service station operators and novice players from who knows where. While the major leaguers of the era might be reknowed and admired nationally, and the magical creatures who cavorted under the arc lights on the tapesty of green and brown of the picture postcard diamonds of green cathederals like Rickwood Field in Birmingham or Ponce De Leon Park in Atlanta of the prestiguous Southern Association of major deep South metro areas might be reknowned regionally, the Class D ballplayers were equally were the glory of their times locally. In Brook's cultural history we meet men integral to the AFL -- the characters like Bo Belinsky, Bobby Bragan, Lou Pinella; the greats like Virgil "Fire" Trucks, Neal Cobb, Spencer "Onion" Davis; the journemen like Bobby Dews, Wayne Terwilliger, Cal Ripkin, Sr.; the sometimes notables like Bobby Cox, Steve Barber, Steve Dalkowski, Travis Tidwell, or Dixie Howell of the famous Ala. Crimson Tide combination of Howell to Don Hudson. If the last 1940s was the heyday of minor league baseball, it becomes clear by hindsight that even then incipient signs of an irreversible mortality were making themselves apparent. Even in the best of times franchise survivability was an ever present challenge. With the demise of the Class B Southestern League in the early 1950's, larger population centers like Montgomery, Selma and Pensacola replaced the more bucolic AFL entries. Even so, Graceville, Fla. lasted through 1958. By the league's last season (1962), the AFL had outlasted the historic and prestigous "major league of Dixie" (the Southern Association). Of the AFL league entries that last year, Pensacola, Ft. Walton, Selma, Dothan, Montgomery and Adalusia, only the latter had been an original league entrant, and that affiliation had not been consistent. Baseball is a something of seamless web. Persons and events connect with persons and events with an interconectivity of intriguing synchronicity and fortuity that reverberates with indivildual and colelctive memory. There is a sense in which the AFL lives on with memorial viability simultaneously with such displacement as an integral aspect of communal awareness and epxerience that knowledge of the location of the fields on which the leagues teams played has in some instances been lost to memory. Brook's THE LAST REBEL YELL is a graceful portrait of a vanished America. Reading the book is sort of like a diversionary drive on a two lane highway with its horse-shoe motels and neon lighted pre-fast food franchise drive-ins from an era when the highways went through all the towns, wherein in passing through one could see, sense and feel what the countryside was like, and in retrospect can remember how place existed once on such a lost and humane scale.

Here's a fleet review of some of Susan Howe's poetic sequences. Rachel T. Back writes intelligently about the poems and affectionately. For some of the poems there is no best method of approach but Back offers some helpful paths. Items of Howe's own past are revealed, but most of this information exists elsewhere in "My Emily Dickinson" and "The Birth Mark". Howe's faithful readers and the curious will enjoy, however, and be enlightened by this thoughtful book.

One of the few reprints of work by Anne Royall, early journalist, newspaper editor, and writer. The biographical essay in the front is excellent. Unfortunately, the editor of this reprint chose NOT to include the appendixes commenting on members of the US Congress from that period that Anne Royall added before publishing her original work. Since I had hoped to view those, I was disappointed in this. However, the work itself, one of her earliest writings - a set of letters she wrote to a lawyer while traveling about in Alabama and the area in the 1820s is a good starting point for anyone researching the famous Mrs. Royall.

Many times, it's amazing how much "color" can be seen in a black & white photograph - the smile of a child peeking out from under a tattered hand-me-down hat, the knowing look from the eyes of a man who's lived a century and has seen more than he can bear. New Bern, NC born Bayard Wootten, captured this sort of color throughout the 1920s South, creating an artistic record that's both beautiful and many times heartbreaking.

In his book "Light and Air," Jerry Cotten, photographic archivist at the North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill, shares the story of Wootten, a determined and independent woman who illustrated local color in a variety of ways, all on black & white film.

Wootten was a trailblazer for women photographers and a true artist behind the lens. She excelled at portraits and landscapes, photographed gardens and architecture, but is best known for capturing the true soul of the 1930's south - the hard working people in the lower reaches of society whom other photographers of the day for the most part ignored.

To our advantage, Cotten stumbled upon two envelopes of Wootten's photography in an out-of-the-way cabinet when he first started working at the North Carolina Collection in 1972. He was, as many are when they first see a Wootten photograph, taken with the artistry of the photos, as well as the subject matter. Since that time he has researched and collected Wootten's work, and lucky for us has produced a book that not only tells about the pioneering lady photographer, but lets the reader see first hand the amazing ability and vision of one of NC's own.

In "Light and Air," Cotten details Wootten's personal and professional life, her early struggle for acceptance in a field dominated by men, as well as Wootten's later involvement in helping herself and other female photographers gain an equal footing in the profession. Many of his sources are family and friends of Wootten who provide personal insight and quotations that add a special touch to the work. But moreover, Cotten lends a great portion of his book to the photographs themselves - pictures that show the true beauty of black and white photography and the amazing ability of Wootten to create a work of art from a subject as simple as a man or woman sitting in a chair.

"Light and Air" features 190 illustrations, including 136 duotone reproductions of Wootten's photographs - many of which have never before been published. These images of Southerners in the lower reaches of society during the 1930s will many times tug at your heart, yet one will quickly notice the dignity and charm in their eyes that inspired Wootten to stop along the road or walk down a dirt path to photograph an otherwise unlikely subject.

"Wootten's artistic skills, her success as an early woman photographer, and a career spanning half a century," Cotten tells us, "have secured her place as a dominant figure in the photographic history of North Carolina."

For a look at the life and work of this talented photographer and independent and inspiring woman, "Light and Air" is a brilliant combination of written text and illustrations. Whether you call North Carolina or New York home, the photo collection alone will make this a book you'll want to own - there's something special and naturally beautiful about each image that will have you looking through the pages again and again.

This collection of essays honors the memory of anthropologist Charles Hudson who charted brilliantly the course of Hernando de Soto's exploration of the Southeast. Read Hudson if you're at all interested in Spanish explorers and the Indians they met. Most of the contributors of the 10 essays in this book seem to be young anthropologists who were students of Hudson.

These essays focus on Indians of the Southeastern United States in the proto and early-historic periods. As is usual with collections of this sort, some you find better, more interesting, and more important than others. This collection is wide ranging and probably of interest only to persons who already know quite a bit about the subject. Essays include: beavers and their role in SE folklore, migration myths, the Westo Indians, the Tsali affair among the Cherokees, Indian/White intermarriage, acculturation and adaptation, and others. If there is one subject that dominates the book it is the slave trade between Indian tribes and Whites as it was very important in the 17th Century Southeast.

I wouldn't call this essential reading, nor are any of the essays earth-shattering, but there are enough moments of interest and enlightenment to engage people interested in the subject. The authors are a bit quirky in places -- for example in talking about beavers -- but that also keeps the essays from being as dryasdust.

Smallchief

Organizations have strong tendencies not to change, but when they do, what are their limitations? Herbert Kaufman lays out the obstacles to and tendencies of change in organizations and addresses organizational survival and death. Kaufmans' argument is clear, change in organizations is a volatile and risky endeavor, because attempts such as reorganization, for example, can upset the informal system (53), and often `stimulates its own limiting forces (76).' Further, change can restrict other organizational features. For example, outside resources make organizations dependent on external forces. The way Kaufman describes change in organizations is almost like a rubics' cube. While trying to make one side one particular color, the other sides of the cube gets' disrupted. Unlike in his earlier book "The Forest Ranger" organizational forces no longer seem centrifugal, but more like a forest clean-up with trip wires. When the equilibrium of the organization is altered, it should be expected that something else is going to be affected. Luckily, all of the latter does not seem so vague in the book. Kaufman is able to guide the reader to what would predictively change when altering the organization, as well as strategies to help the organization cope with that change.
In this book, Kaufman separates the organizational system with the internal humanistic problems. Parralleling the logic of organizational theorist Robert Merton (1957)organizational systems and individuals are not mutually exclusive. However, in this book Kaufman does separate the two to a certain extent. Maybe this was a strategic approach to make the book easier to read.
Kaufmans' book is highly theoretical and stands on its own logic if the underlying theories by other organizational theorist presented are not known to the reader. Again, the way Kaufman describes change in organizations is almost like a rubics' cube. While trying to make one side one particular color, the three other sides of the cube gets' disrupted. But describing what a puzzle looks like is different than putting it together. Kaufman offers the strategies to do so through this book. Kaufman elaborates why organizational forces are not centrifugal. Overall, a good read.

I ENJOYED READING THIS BOOK. THE AUTHOR DID A GOOD JOB OF NOT COMING FROM ONE SPECIFIC RACIALLY MOTIVSTED POINT OF VIEW. HE TRIED TTO SHOW BOTH SIDES OF THE STORY BUT TO TELL MR. NORRI'S STORY AS WELL.

Mobile often gets short shrift because of its proximity to the singular New Orleans, but Mobile is unique and interesting in its own right. This book does a nice job of presenting the beautiful Mobile that which many are familiar. The book has interesting text and the images are crisp and clean. I really was not that familiar with Mobile so I found the book quite enlightening and frankly refreshing. Whether you buy this book because you love Mobile or because you appreciate well executed books, you will not be disappointed.

As someone who used to be an academic and is a magician, I thought I would pick this work up and see what Gunn had to offer, on the subject of the occult, from an academic perspective.

First let me tell you what he does right: He draws on some occult texts in his arguments and engages the material fairly well. He defines his terms and for the most part defends his arguments in a manner that is actually coherent and not overly reliant on academic jargon. He offers some useful insights on the textual end of occultism and the rhetorical devices used by occultists to establish authority. I particularly liked his treatment of Crowley's use of irony.

What he doesn't do: I find it odd that he focuses on intention and agency and yet doesn't explore how these concepts are used in occultism. I realize he is an academic, but intention is a fairly important word and rhetorical device in occultist writing. Also the texts he draws on, while occult, are dated. There is, as he points out a lot of work out there on the subject of magic, but while I think his decision to draw on some dated works was useful, I would have liked to have seen him draw on more recent works as wells. Also, occasionally he is guilty of being a little arrogant in how he engages his material. Finally, his epilogue provides a far too brief examination of the similarity of academic writing and occult writing. He makes a lot of assumptions about occult writing that can easily be applied to academic writing and communication as well.

Overall, I would recommend reading this book. Gunn has some interesting perspectives to offer, for both the academic and the magician.

Hynes, Doty, and the other authors in this collection do a pretty good job of negotiating a path through postmodern jargon in order to get to something to say. I especially like the distinction made (and blurred) between the trickster and the shaman--that while both trickster and shaman function as (un)reality instructors within a given group, each can address quite different fields of understanding. In an attempt not to present a unified monomyth but to address issues of divergence as well as commonality, the book's chapters cover a wide geographical and historical range: Native America to Africa, classical to contemporary lore. Well worth reading, this collection implies (as I believe its editors intend) a wealth of possibilities for future study.