Alabama Books

This is a first-rate history of the Communist Party and its fellow-travelers in Alabama during the depression. It describes the Party during the "third period" and the popular front era. While it does not discuss the ulterior motives of the Party in any great detail, it does help to establish the positive role of the Communists in the prehistory of the civil rights movement. It also gives glimpses of the life in the Party in Alabama including Communist songs sung to the tune of spirituals, and African-American Young Pioneers. In addition, book discusses the courage of the Communists in resisting racism.

The attempt by radicals in the 1930's to change this country for the better has not found its rightful place in popular or high school history. This book helps to remedy that omission.

Kelley has produced a powerful and startling history of the deep south in the 1930s. He tackles a difficult subject both historically and ideologically (the relationship between poor black sharecroppers and the American Communist party). His tireless efforts at writing this book shine out of the pages unquestionably as does his deep, thoughtful intelligence. I would recommend this book for anyone interested in subversive U.S. history or just in a good read.

This book is great, it undermines the conventional treatments of afro-american history and although it is focused in the south it takes a genuine look at the struggle to free the shackles from Afro-americans and lift the blanket of opressions.

Mr. McDonald's book does an outstanding job of evoking the state of our small towns. With his sharp eye, he is a storyteller with a camera. His images of the vanishing south are poignent and powerful. Highly recommended.

Robin McDonald is continuing the work begun by William Eggleston: capturing the subtle beauty of small-town Southern life with clear-eyed, straight-on, unsentimental photographs "illustrated" by texts gleaned from Alabama writers. A lovely gift for any thoughtful Southerner.

This book combines an artist's eye with a photographer's skill to bring to life charming small towns throughout Alabama. We see them from an entirely new perspective and gain an intriguing glimpse into the Southern way of life. This is a book that will make a great gift for people with many different types of interests, from travel to architecture to antiques and more. The production quality of the book is outstanding.

IN THE REALM OF RIVERS is an exquisite production by New South Books. Its compelling prose and eloquent poetry by Sue Walker, Poet Laureate of the State of Alabama, and its magnificent photographs by Emmy-Winner Dennis Holt make this book on Alabama's Mobile-Tensaw Delta an invaluable contribution to stimulating our awareness of the significance of this ecosystem. This volume is a rich combination of history and place in stunningly beautiful words and photographs.

Having much experience with endangered wetlands, I found Sue Walkers' book to be excellantly educational and entertaining. It is now on my shelf as a life's treasure. The photograhy was equal to or better
than any National Geographic Publication I've read. I pray that we can look forward to more of these wonderful type of books.

W. Mims
Orlando, Fl,

When I first leafed through this book and admired the magnificent nature photos, I thought, "What a beautiful coffee table book to look at and read a little now and then."

But when I started reading, I couldn't put it down until I'd read it all, and pored over every stunning photograph.

"In the Realm of Rivers" is much more than a coffee table book. It's the story---natural history, botany, zoology, anthropology, sociology---of the Alabama Delta, three hundred thousand meandering acres of swampy wilderness, a magical place. The stunning photograph of the owls and the accompanying poem on pages 93-94 capture the soul of this lovely book:

Owl Eyes

From their perch where trees
revel in dancing,
on the bend and twist and lean
of subtle limbs, owls watch
as night squeezes
color from the fade and fall of day.

They repeat only one question:
who? who? who?
There may be a rustling
in the grass, perhaps
a responding hoot,
but without expectation
of an answer.

In breathless air
presence
lies gathered in congregations
of kite and mottled duck,
osprey and sparrow,
cottonwood and pondweed:
all together,
all in their accustomed place.
Let it be."

This book is a must-have for any Italian American who has roots in Alabama. My family is mentioned in the book and thereby will live on in loving memory. This book is not only important Alabama history, but will be a resource for history buffs across the board!

If you have family members that immigrated to the US and settled in the Ensley, AL and Bessemer, AL areas then this book is a wonderful addition to your home library and a big help with your family research. The families mentioned in the book were not mine but the other related discussion helped me understand more about my Italian heritage.

It is a good book, has good information,and has good pictures

I loved the raw honesty of Margaret Charles Smith's story. She tells about catching babies in a time when birth was not considered a medical crisis. As one of the last granny midwives, Margaret has much to tell us about how African-American midwifery was stamped out in particular, and how hospital birth gradually became the norm in this country. I devoured this book in a matter of hours, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of birth in the United States.

Once I started reading this book, I could hardly put it down. I was impressed by Margaret Charles Smith's honest way of telling her extremely interesting story. She is a courageous person and devoted her life to helping mothers; most of them so poor, that they couldn't have afforded to give birth in a hospital. But given the choice, surely they would've chosen her,anyway, as she cared so lovingly for the mothers and their babies, in a way hardly possible in a hospital. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading about midwives and births. There is also a lot that can be learned from it about the history of midwivery in the U.S.

The only thing I dislike about this book is that I did not write it myself. I grew up in South Alabama during the depression years, the daughter of a country doctor. I have been with my father to deliver babies in little houses that had no floors, no electricity, no plumbing. Often when he could not be two places at once, my father sent one of the midwives to do deliveries, and he had total faith in them. I can vouch for the authenticity of every word of this wonderful book, and the heroism and skill of these wonderful women.

Livin' In High Cotton is the collaboration of Sandra Poole and her daughter Jennifer Leigh Youngblood. The story is set in the Depression-era south and inspired by the real-life experiences of Sandra's grandmother. Times were hard in western Georgia and eastern Alabama when the cotton industry was failing and families had to bind tightly together in order to survive those bleak and uncertain years. Shelby Collins was mature for a fifteen-year-old girl. When Shelby's mother had to go off to Alabama to tend Shelby's ailing grandmother, the girl had to care for her younger brother and sister, while seeing to the needs of her father. One night her father came home drunk and tried to attack her. When a frightened Shelby flees the home, her father tracks her down and places her in a reform school in distant Birmingham. Emotionally scarred by her abuse, Shelby is sill able to make a new life for herself and learns that blessings can come in the most unexpected ways. Strongly recommended and superbly crafted reading, Livin' In High Cotton successfully and engagingly tackles such difficult themes as whether or not trust can be regained after betrayal, how can being kind-hearted succeed in a world populate by evil people, and is there a power higher than ourselves that can come into our hearts to foster forgiveness and release us from the emotional bondage of a blighted past?

I thoroughly enjoyed reading "Livin' in High Cotton". It includes all the elements for great fiction - romance, suspense and action. I highly recommend it!

This book is about the real south and about what happened to real people back in a time that was not only hard for people to survive but hard for the land to produce sizeable crops. Livin in High Cottons' Shelby is an example of how many women worked and lived in a time almost forgotten. I thank the authors for reminding me what a lot of women went through in the earlier years ao that we could have what we have today.

For your consideration, imagine a late nineteenth-century part-time farmer, mail carrier, and sometimes school teacher dwelling upon a plot of ground that runs down, quite literally, to the edge of the earth itself. Imagine him, further, as the most naive and most earnest man who ever lived and then, continuing in this vein, imagine a Paleolithic Alabama infested by active volcanoes where bands of wandering flagellants trespass by night, a time when the planets haven't yet settled into final form and forlorn men come to town fetching pigs to market at the end of a leash.
Now, stay one moment more as I explain that all this is seen through a fog of thought and memory and the best-cadenced prose we've seen in this country for a very long time.Fields of AsphodelLee

I loved this book. It just flows through geologic periods, through space and time with no limits. It's very dreamlike, with little realism. A young man, Ben, lives in Alabama with his father and ten brothers at the edge of the world among volcanoes and planets, measuring the world by the size of the family's property. Ben finally grows up, leaves the farm and ventures into the city to seek an education and get a job. He winds up running a dry goods store and has difficulty making money because he doesn't want to part with the merchandise he considers most beautiful. He marries a girl whose house has burned down, but who still has the land. Then he takes a test and winds up with a job as a mail carrier, able to support a family. This is a most unusual, imaginative and quite funny book. Fields of Asphodel

Like the fiction of William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, the poetic prose is what makes Perdue's book a great work of southern literature. The language is so beautiful as to render the plot of secondary importance. In his previous novels, Mr. Perdue's main character was Lee. His grandfather, Ben is the hero of Opportunities. Trying to earn his way in the post Civil War era, Ben leaves the family farm and turns his ability to spell to account by gaining a teaching position and a wife with acres of farmland, and later, a government job. Perdue's talent is that he paints the nobility and humor in this uniquely southern character with sensitive and lush verbal coloration. A beautiful book - but very unlike his early novels

This book is a series of papers initially presented at a symposium during the Southeastern Archaeological Conference. It summarizes what was known at that time (1993) about the Paleoindian and early Archaic periods in the Southeast; that is, the time when the first ancestors of later Native American cultures first settled in what is now southeastern North America.

The book covers the entire southeastern region, with site reports and syntheses from Florida out to Arkansas and north to Virginia. It presents a good picture of what we know of the first human settlers in this region, including their believed use of "staging areas" - that is, places the first settlers could learn about their new environments before moving outward into more marginal territory - as well as the environmental factors, such as stone outcrops and plant and animal communities, that would have affected patterns of human settlement.

My only complaint against the book, like so many others in archaeology, is that it does not address what is known or what could be known of the cultures themselves beyond the merely physical. That is, there is far too much attention paid to environmental and technological factors at the expense of attempts to understand what these first settlers may have been thinking, or what their cultural systems or worldviews may have been. However, this alone does not mar what otherwise is a well-written and comprehensive synthesis.

I enjoyed the book, and recommend it to anyone interested in Native American cultures and archaeology.

If you have ever wondered about your ancestors, whether or not you have Native blood, this is a worthy read. I have been hunting for and collecting American Indian artifacts for many years and studying the material discussed in this book. It not only informs but leads the reader to think. I also highly recommend another book: Walking the Trail by Cherokee author, Jerry Ellis. He was the first person in modern history to walk the 900 mile route of the Trail of Tears and the book was nominated for a Pulitzer and National Book Award.

Very useful collection of papers and summaries of papers on paleo and early archaic Americans in this region. The thought provoking theories on settlement and hunting practices that evolved along with the changing climate make this well worth reading. I keep my copy handy and refer back to it often.

even though I am 12 years old my dad still reads me his story. we got it as a gift and saved it because it is so bad it is funny. All the children look as if they have premature aging syndrome, and the characters are such a stereotype of "hillbillies" that it's offensive, but not too offensive to laugh at. The illustrator believes that "if you have fun with anything you do, the rest will take care of itself." This book proves his theroy wrong. I reccomend not to buy this book unless it is as a joke gift.

In Picker Mcclikker, four-year-old Picker encounters Big Louis, a 300-pound gypsy and master grape picker. The event is a world champion grape-picking contest. Picker is the youngest child of a poor but happy sharecropper family from Evergreen, Alabama. And Picker has a very special ability when it comes to what he's named for! Stephen Hanson's wonderfully colorful artwork perfectly showcases Allen Johnson's engaging, entertaining, and warm hearted story of a little boy with a big talent! Picker Mcclikker is energetically highly recommended addition to family, school, and community library picturebook collections for young readers.

This is the original Picker McClikker Story set in rural Evergreen, Alabama where we find out how this endearing little boy became a world famous picker.

When I purchased this book in 1993, I was fortunate to get my copy signed by illustrator Stephen Hanson. Originally the illustrations drew me to the book. Little Picker McClikker looked just like my two-year old son who was also quick with his hands and into everything. However, the story along with the beautiful pictures has made this one of our family's favorites.

This story has all the home spun excitement of the yarns my grandfather used to tell - full of clean, rural humor and the heartfelt warmth of a loving, hardworking family. This sweet little boy, nicknamed "Picker" because of his remarkable picking speed, goes a long way from his depression-era, share cropping farm all the way to Paris, France to become a world champion grape picker.

You'll love this book if you are from the South and love those stories your grandparents used to tell. The illustrations beautifully convey an earthy, homey feeling.

Everyone should purchase this book.

It is a chapter that contains information about the murder of my maternal grandfather, Walter Gunn.

Norrell's book gives a detailed story of the movement in Tuskegee, the home of Booker T. Washington. It clearly shows of the Macon County's progress away from the accommodationist views of Washington. For those who are not familiar with the movement outside the realms of Martin Luther King and others, Reaping the Whirlwind is a great source to fill your mind.

The struggle for civil rights was a long and argous process, and Robert Norrell's Reaping the Whirlwind, is an example of how the movement progressed, grew, and eventually was successful. In his book he traces the lines of leadership at Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama. As the novel progresses, society increasingly adapts to the ideals behind an integrated community. The struggle for equality was not won as easliy as the court battles suggested rather, true equality could never have existed due to the white exodus of the "model city." This is an excellent portrayal of the events in this small town, and this novel should be mandatory reading in any civcs or Civil Rights History class