Louisiana Books

This book is an accurate portrayal of N.O. Jazz Funerals. It is a must- read for anyone who has ever seen a tradtional Jazz Funeral, anyone who has ever read about them or anyone who plans a visit to New Orleans. Photographer Leo Touchet captures the emotions of all aspects of the Funeral, in his subjects' faces and body language. One feels "present" and "on the scene" at the various moments of the Funeral. The text is truly a love poem to New Orleans heritage. Even all of the writers' statements add to the beauty of this book. This book is a must-have for lovers of photography! And what a team! Great Photographer, Touchet; Great Playwrite, Bagneris, and Great Musician: Marsellis. Who could ask for anything more!!

The history of early activists who connected civil rights and labor rights is a compelling story. This book offers the reader an extremely personal view of the struggle of an early civil rights leader who made the connection between fair labor practices and basic human rights. The story is told through the voice of Mr. Clark who made incredible sacrifices to bring to the forefront the exploitation of sharecroppers and tenant farmers in rural Louisiana. His story awakens the reader to the conditions of the poor in Louisiana and asserts the rights of African-Americans as they struggled to make a living in the rural south prior to the depression and during the Roosevelt New Deal Era. Mr. Clark's narrative is a story that has value to those who are interested in exploring the historical significance of labor and civil rights as well as for those who wish to read and understand narratives of early leaders in their own words. The authors do an outstanding job of placing Mr. Clark's story in context of the historical period and provide excellent documentation to substantiate the era. For those who love history and enjoy reading about individuals who have given so much to help others overcome obstacles, this book is a must read. I highly recommend this book and encourage the exploration of a truly remarkable period in our history. The relevance of the struggle to organize small farmers is particularly important as the decline of African-American farmers continues to present a blight on the history of this country. I highly applaud the editors, Davey and Clark, for bringing Mr. Clark's manuscript to a larger audience and for highlighting the book with exceptionally well documented sources that assist the reader with placing the story in its historical context. Mr. Clark's story has universal appeal and truly demonstrates the resiliency of the individual and the strength of close family relationships. This is a must read for those interested in the evolution of agrarian structures in the south, the strength of families, the development of labor, the impact of educational opportunities on groups of people, the importance of the narratives of individuals participating in historical events, and the rights of the poor. Victoria Cofield-Aber, Educator and Clinical Social Worker

I found this book of great help for my exegetical paper for my second year of Greek. The author parse every word in the NT. Gives the relation of the words to their antecedent. Also the author labels the tense of every verb. Gives what kind of case for nouns. I will highly recommend this book for people who wants to go deep in their study of the word of God. The author is conservative, from a baptist denomination. follow A. T. Robertson Grammar book.

Faith is unilaterally said to be a comfort; submission is thought to be the fruit of oppression. Faith has become an act of the torpid, it is common to hear "I take it on faith" to mean -and perhaps has always meant- "I take it without consideration", whereas submission has been relegated to a barbaric age of oppression, but what Geri Doran has done, and that rather courageously, is to return us to the wild faith of the primeval era, to the radical nature of submission, and to remind us of the true dread of religion. The fainthearted have already logged their complaints about this book and its tendency to "God-talk", but the mistake comes in thinking that faith is purely the act of the weak willed, those at wit's end, when true faith is dangerous and true gods undomesticated.

That religion is careful and easy is early and often challenged. In the second poem, where the first has set the landscape as the soul, the dimness of Israel's sight (quoting Genesis 48:10) becomes our model for faith as he calls himself a daylily nearing dusk. A daylily's breathlike glory is perfectly emblematic of man's life, here used for the recklessness of faith, for faith, says St. Paul, "is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" and as G. K. Chesterton understands these Christian virtues, "Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless." And this is necessary "or it is no virtue at all". Israel in the poem looks at the world and says: "Pigsty, lilyfield -what difference/ to an old man losing sight?"

The fourth poem, "Hurry the Iowa Cornfields", reminds us that faith is not a series of answers, but a pattern for finding answers, a questing. "Twice now in the declining light/ I've carried my prayer to the field." This prayer midpoem is refused, but in the silence which follows a response is made:

I come at dusk to stand in the rows

rummaging in the inadequate light
for gold silk turned to brown,
for ripeness, answering.

The answer comes out of the abundance of the earth, though it is not the sort of answer that would satisfy "the calculous of logic", as Ms. Doran elsewhere calls it. This imprecise impression is repeated in "Dusk in the Palm of the Lord" where she says: "God in the presence or absence of love./ I forget which grace is." and her prayer is repeated "Do not forget me at dusk."

This terrain is full of wilderness, darkness, and fire, but it is not resigned solipsism, as she says "we passed/ from knowing to unknowing and back" (The Cedar of Lebanon). Neither is it all tension; truth comes in epiphanies, blue plums, potatoes, and the "persuasive hue" of Madrona trees.

She speaks carelessly about her god, he is floundering, the "Dirty One", the wild, silent, and uncontrollable. As daring as she is in her belief it is no wonder, in our temerity, that we shy from this sort of faith, gravitating to beliefs that suit us, that placate us. Rather than faith we prefer the satisfaction of reason, something attainable, civilized, something devoid of any darkness -this is the noonday religion of the timid. Whenever beliefs are determined by what won't embarrass us, what speaks to our inner sensibilities, what makes us feel most proud to be us then we have fallen into the isolation of know-it-alls and numbskulls.

The book, which is divided into four sections each taking a line (sometimes tinkered with) from the final poem, has a particular movement from exploratory doubt to resolute love and submission. The book's penultimate poem "Reveal, in the Country Moonlight, Your Steadfast Means" ends with, "Trace on me the map of Your will." or consider the title "Lord, Yours Is the Hour of Conquest, Mine to Submit". Obedience so intent on revelation can hardly be called blind.

Her lines have the deliberation of a prayerbook, language that is seeking transformation. Consider the lines:

What carried us from year to year was yield,
potatoes in, potatoes out, like rowing.

Note how the lines start with rough sounds, "carried", "potatoes", and soften toward the end with "year to year was yield" and "like rowing". The next line overloads us with stresses before quieting: "Fist-sized, firm, rich tasting, and abundant-" yet the downbeat at the end is not the rest we're looking for, we are pushed beyond, thrust past the dash, moving from knowing to unknowing and back. Her lines embody her purpose and often with shimmer and surprise:

There's a chirr in the pond, the rustle
of water spangles amove with turtle;

In places she slows incrementally, like a pointillistic didact forcing us to note every single dot of color.

In each room, a woman or man
wakes to the radiant skin
of a lover, a flesh-ghost
caught in the act: sleeping
receding. Or is it just one room
one man asleep,

one wife unsettled by a moon,

In the title poem some father/farmer figure is quoted calling the weather "Predictable as an Indian". I cannot help but think that the title is a pun: resin/re-sin. Just as the weather turns so too do we turn. Belief is a difficult task and we must ever labor to try and "slough the dirt stains off."

Along with this sense of dirt and darkness there is something shockingly ordinary to Ms. Doran's handling of the Divine. What, from the heading of the second section, is the "unnameable holy" appears in the final poem as: "Most Heaven, you bring to the door/ the unnameable homely." It is a God who conspires with the window-blinds, whose love is seen "in seed potatoes planted/ with a grunt".

This is not a religion of the catechumen reciting the guarded poetry of patent answers. The irreligious typically return to the predictable, to the homogenous, to the safety of subjective feelings, but these are the poems of the man in the Gospel of Mark who said: "Lord I believe, help my unbelief" and poems that reflect Don Pedro in Much Ado when he said, "My love is thine to teach: teach it but how". Geri Doran's writing is a mixture of humility and the courage of someone hanging from a cliff: tenacity born of a desperate situation and her book is a return to the twilight, to the witching hour of faith, to a God greater than doubt.

Vandal covers the grim post-Civil War era with clarity and depth. I was drawn to his subject matter while researching an historical novel set in Louisiana and have found Rethinking Southern Violence a valuable resource.

Brad lives down the street from me, so I got to see some of these sketches as he was doing them, in a cafe in the Marigny, during the year after the storm. What struck me immediately was that the scenes he depicted--surreal images of debris and destruction in a world populated by panic-stricken, one-armed birds--was closer to the real experience of surviving Katrina than any documentary could get. The book Revacuation retains all the impulsiveness of those early sketches, and it is still the best example in print of what it means to live in New Orleans after Katrina.

In this brilliant and thoroughly researched book, Caryn Cosse Bell manages to shed new light on the unique history of New Orleans' free people of color. She answers the questions about how the gens de couleur libres were able to develop into such a politically minded, intelligent, and powerful force throughout Louisiana's history. She dispells common myths often attached to the Creoles of Color, such as their racism and marginality in society. Starting with the founding of New Orleans in 1718, she shows the development of a strong, assertive class of people interested in full equality for all people, regardless of race or color. Their rights often came under fire under the rule of the American government, but they persevered. The battles over Reconstruction are the climax of this account, and she ends with the Creoles of Color's greatest victory--the Reconstruction Constitution of Louisiana in 1868. This book was wonderful, intelligent, and well researched. It should be read by anyone interested in Louisiana History, Black History, or American History.

In this thorough and readable study, Daniel C. Littlefield examines the African heritage of rice cultivation in colonial South Carolina. Littlefield discusses the choices rice planters made in securing workers from certain African regions; he also discusses the knowledge these Africans brought to the plantation economy. Littlefield argues that expertise in rice cultivation mostly came to South Carolina from Africa. Rice was grown by the Malagasy, the people of Madagascar, and by many peoples of Upper Guinea (a region encompassing the modern nations of Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia). South Carolina planters, in fact, paid the highest prices for workers from Senegambia (the environs of the Senegal and Gambia rivers), a major center of rice cultivation in Africa. Littlefield argues that, throughout the era of the slave trade, South Carolina merchants and planters showed an increasingly sophisticated knowledge of African regions and ethnic groups. He also asserts that not only African labor, but African expertise helped generate the wealth of the opulent Carolina Lowcountry. This work should prove interesting to those interested in African-American history, Southern history, and colonial American demography. Particularly intriguing is Littlefield's research based on the newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves in South Carolina. That portion of the work includes a list of different African ethnic groups present in South Carolina.

Enjoyed learning more about southern authors, especially since I'm from the south.

Profusely illustrated with color photography, "Hillside Letters A to Z: A Guide To hometown Landmarks" by Evelyn Corning is a visual travel guide and history of sixty iconic images associated with selected villages, towns, and cities across fourteen western states. From those giant letters on a mountain slope above a town, to iconic memorials honoring historical incidents in American history, the reader is treated to a tour that is as entertaining as it is informative about those curious letters that are carved and/or painted above their associated communities. Very highly recommended for curious travelers making their way through America by car or plane, and enhanced with a list of more than four hundred other known U.S. hillside letters and a map showing letter sites nationwide, "Hillside Letters A to Z" is as informative as it is entertaining as it explores the origins, customs and controversies associated with those sometimes mysterious but always fascinating community icons representing their schools and towns.