Tennessee Books

My son (11) and I have realy enjoyed O'Steel's book. My husband read alot of these books as a child and I can see why! Fast paced, action, adventure, wonderfully descrpitive....made me wish I was a kid again!

I also read this school, but grade school, and then read every other Wm. O. Steele book I could get my hands on. It was a great intro to the genre of historical fiction and good for girls and boys.

To everyone, I wanted to take a moment to tell you how wonderful this book is. I first read it in Junior High School, I fell in love with it. I mustve read it 3 or 4 times since. Its a wonderful story, like all Steele books it leaves the reader spellbound at the end. The description says ages 9-12 but you can be MUCH MUCH older to enjoy this book. It is really a book for anyone with a sense of adventure and an imagination. :)

Have went on several of the floats in the book, most were on creeks I didn't even know existed. The details for put-ins and take-outs, water mileage, etc. have been very accurate. She speaks in the book of possibly doing another edition later on and I sure hope she does ..

AS AN AVID CANOEIST AND CANOE BUILDER, I FOUND SHERWIN'S BOOK TO CONTAIN MORE THAN ANY CANOEIST NEEDS TO HAVE A FUN AND SAFE FLOAT TRIP. HER INFO ABOUT THE STREAMS IS CORRECT, COULD ONLY COME FROM HAVING BEEN THERE. THIS IS "MUST" BOOK FOR STREAM ANGLERS TOO.

Canoeing in Tennessee is a great resource for canoers of all levels. The maps of rivers and how to find them are detailed and accurate; the author also highlights the local flora and fauna and historic aspects of each segment of water she illustrates. There are lots of books on whitewater canoeing in Tennessee, but this is the only current one I've found on "quiet water" paddling. I highly recommend it for all levels of canoers

I enjoyed this book very much. My Confederate ancestors, of whom I'm very proud, served in West Tennessee regiments during the War for Southern Independence.

The Ninth Tennessee Infantry was also a West Tennessee regiment. In fact, three of my ancestors served in the 6th Tennessee Infantry which was brigaded with the 9th from very early in the war, and was later, Dec 1862, consolidated with the 9th to form the 6th/9th Tennessee Infantry.

Reading this book allowed me to learn & understand what my ancestors may have seen & went through during the struggle.

Another excellent book is Sam Watkins' "Company Aytch". Watkins served in the 1st Tennessee Infantry which was brigaded with the 6th/9th & consolidated with the 27th Tennessee infantry for much of the war.

Another must read is "Tennessee's Forgotten Warriors", " Frank Cheatham and His Confederate Division".

"The Confederate Ninth Tennessee Infantry" is a book that I will re-read many times.

The Confederate Ninth Tennessee Infantry by James R. Fleming (winner of the Jefferson Davis medal for excellence in preservation and research of Civil War history by the United Daughters of the Confederacy) is an in-depth 344-page study of what is known as the "Southern Confederates" who were among the most educated, religious, and prestigious collections of troops to have been involved in the American Civil War. Introducing the reader to documentation consisting of letters, memoirs, war records and obituaries from individuals of the group, The Confederate Ninth Tennessee Infantry enlightens the readers to an little known aspects of the American civil war. The Confederate Ninth Tennessee Infantry is very strongly recommended to Civil War buffs for its new perspective of the American civil war in general, and battles such as Columbus, Perryville, and Atlanta.

The Confederate Ninth Tennessee Infantry by James R. Fleming (winner of the Jefferson Davis medal for excellence in preservation and research of Civil War history by the United Daughters of the Confederacy) is an in-depth 344-page study of what is known as the "Southern Confederates" who were among the most educated, religious, and prestigious collections of troops to have been involved in the American Civil War. Introducing the reader to documentation consisting of letters, memoirs, war records and obituaries from individuals of the group, The Confederate Ninth Tennessee Infantry enlightens the readers to an little known aspects of the American civil war. The Confederate Ninth Tennessee Infantry is very strongly recommended to Civil War buffs for its new perspective of the American civil war in general, and battles such as Columbus, Perryville, and Atlanta.

This was a chapter book for my [...] grandson. We read a chapter each night and it kept him interested and curious about davey's life for weeks... It was a fun book and really sparked his imagination.

Remember The Alamo
Davy Crockett Aileen Wells Parks
The book Davy Crockett is about one of the most famous men in the history of America. It tells about how he became a great hunter with Daniel Boone. One of my favorite parts is where he defended the Alamoe for his country. The book is great if I had a choice from 1to 10 I wold give it a flat 10 all because of its description and its pictures. This is the kind of book that I would conceders to people that love to learn about history.
The author is Aileen Wells Parks. If you ask me I think she writes good books for all ages. I think she should write more and more books for men, women, and children. I encourage her to write more.
The date this book was published was 1986.
A brief discription is when he goes to hunt for his first time he dosen't bring anything home. But the next week when he goes to hunt he finds a new friend named Danile Boone.

As a kid, Davy wanted to be just like Daniel Boone. He hunted the wilderness, protected people from indians, and even joined the government. Soon, he fought in the Alamo, and became a Texan HERO!

If you've been to Graceland, this book will bring back wonderful memories. It's what Graceland's all about: Elvis fans communing with Elvis. I've been to Graceland, I've written on the wall, and I've read the wall. It's funny, touching, slightly goofy, in loving memory graffiti, and this book captures that spirit. It's a great little addition to any Elvis collection.

This brought back so many great memories of our last trip to Graceland. What a clever book!

If you've been to Graceland, then you've probably written on the wall, and this wonderful book brings back all those good memories! I laughed and cried at the graffiti Wright has collected.

Dorie is the history of every woman in East Tennessee who's family comes from "the mountains". A "must read" for any person seeking a peek back in time to what lives were like for those before us and the roots of where we come from.

Dorie:Woman of the Mountains is an excellent book. Very well written - you feel as if you are talking with Dorie herself as she chronicles her life in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. This book is so entertaining you want to read it in one sitting. I would highly recommend this book to everyone. It is a most enjoyable trip back in time.

DORIE: WOMAN OF THE MOUNTAINS is an excellent example of new history-making, literature in which one person's story is representative of an era and its people. Dorie's narration of her life in the Great Smoky Mountains during the earliest years of the twentieth century evokes memories of our own old folks and their storytelling. Her account of the often hardscrabble existence she and her family endured in the mountains of East Tennessee is not a depressing one, but a testimony of the pioneer spirit that helped build this nation. Dorie's life straddled the fence between the old ways and the modern age, a time when many people still worked to produce everything their families needed even as other people discovered all the things that money could purchase at the local store or through the Sears or Montgomery Ward catalogues. Education was not always as easily obtained. Jobs became increasingly hard to find as the area was developed into a national park and with the onset of the Great Depression. Through Dorie's story, we get an inside glimpse of life in an isolated but beautiful mountain wilderness, and the ways in which modernity simultaneously improved financial situations and contributed to the destruction of a uniquely American way of life.

Mira lived to tell the tale of the holocaust. She's carried the message of strength and forgiveness, of working through the horrors she's lived by bringing the message to all who will listen. This is a strange and different book: on the one hand, so repulsive, so unbelievable, yet, on the other hand, compelling. Several questions ran through my mind: how does a person continue to live with any humanity at all after such an experience; why does one person live, while all the rest die; what kind of magnetism did Mira have that encouraged people to help her?
I've met Mira; she lives here in my home town of Oak Ridge. She will speak before my class. Perhaps my questons will be answered, and I will know who Mira is after all.

From a priveleged upbringing in pre-war Gdansk, the author and her family are deported first to Warsaw then to other ghettos and camps. The book is written in a frank, no-nonsense fashion and she really states the facts about what happened to her and her family. An amazing book and one that everyone should read.

Echoes from the Holocaust by Mira Ryczke Kimmelman is a riveting memoir that recounts her life as a child in Danzig to her life in the United States after World War II. Mira describes how the innocence, effulgence, and peace of her youth are shattered once the Nazi troops force her family to leave their home in Poland in October 1939. Embracing her Jewish heritage, Mira tells of how she strives to preserve her identity and pride as a Jew alive by receiving secret Hebrew lessons, attending prohibited Jewish gatherings, and becoming a member of the Zionist movement. Kimmelman refuses to let herself become discouraged when she learns that more than twenty of her family members and friends are killed by the SS officers.

Infused with aspirations, Mira does whatever she can to cope with the persecution she and others receive at the ghettos and concentration camps. After suffering from typhoid, physical torture, starvation, horrendous living conditions, and simple dehumanization, Mira continues to be a burning flame among all the melted candles. All her struggles and lucky moments become learning experiences.

Mira is able to move on with her life, after the end of the war in 1945. She marries Max Kimmelman, another Holocaust survivor, and has several children and grandchildren after. She gives them the names of her relatives and close companions so that her memories of them will live on. Although life in the United States becomes a bit of a struggle, Mira manages to carve out a content life with her husband and family. She continues to encompass her traditions and tell her story of survival.

The memoir is written simplistically, but with very powerful imagery and episodes, that capture Mira's moments effectively. Metaphors, similes, or hyperboles are not necessary to make this memoir memorable. The book is divided into several short chapters that make it an easy read. With cliffhangers at the end of every chapter, this book becomes a real page-turner. An atmosphere of hope surrounds the events Kimmelman depicts and reiterates the idea that Mira has survived for a purpose. No history book can tell a story such as this one. To capture the meaning and depth of the Holocaust, one must go out and read Mira Kimmelman's account.

Agressively researched, beautifully written, and wisely presented, this is one of the best books of any kind I've ever read. History, particularly history of such a narrow scope, has seldom been presented in such a moving pageant. It is also fair, treating Native Americans and blacks, Catholics and Protestants with equal fairness and compassion. A truly great work.

I think there should be one of these for every state - a history book of how a state ends up with its religious mix. Luckily, I live in Tennessee and have this little gem of a book to reference. The authors present historic regional tidbits that elementary textbooks often leave out (all properly footnoted and indexed.) But the book doesn't get so far into religion as to forget history by sketching the role of the Indians, the wars and other key political events. And it doesn't get so far into Tennessee history as to overlook what's going on spiritually in the rest of the nation by including the likes of Wesley and Whitefield.

This is a state side version of Marshall's epic "The Light and the Glory." It's a quick read but perhaps goes too quickly through coverage of the last few decades leaving the reader wanting more (perhaps a sequel). Overall, a must read for the history buff and teacher or those wanting to spiritually map the state they're in.

This book is an inspiring account of the history of religion in Tennessee. Chapters like "Paths of Hope, Trails of Tragedy," will help the reader to understand the passions that forged a land---the passion of what people believed that drove them to make the history that is written about in this book. I highly recommend this book, especially for anyone with interest in Tennessee, but also for those from anywhere who love to see how history can be shaped from what people will live and die for.

So much of the critical reaction to the work of Tennessee Williams was colored by the prevailing social attitudes toward homosexuality. Michael Pallers GENTLEMEN CALLERS: TENNESSEE WILLIAMS, HOMOSEXUALITY, AND MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY DRAMA provides a fascinating critical study of Williamss work in the context of his sexual orientation and the particular time in which he lived. In the 50s he was criticized for being too gay. By the 1970s, he was criticized for being not gay enough and was labeled as a self-loather. Mr. Pallers book puts the arguments into perspective and provides a calm, well-documented argument that Williams never denied that he was gay and never wrote male characters disguised as females. He presented the American theatre of the 1950s only unapologetically gay character in CAMINO REAL. While the unsavory homosexual character in his grim 1970 play SMALL CRAFT WARNINGS was such a smoking gun for the scathing criticism of Williams from gay critics, Paller convincingly argues that the heterosexual characters in that play fare no better.

Parts of the book I consider brilliant, especially the section analyzing Williams's neglected one-act "Something Unspoken," which portrays a power struggle between two latent lesbians. (Now I want to see this play performed!) This section alone makes the book essential reading for any serious scholar of Williams's work, but the whole book offers one eye-opening passage after another. I would highly recommend this book to any theatre artist planning to direct or act in a Williams play as well as to lovers of Williams's work in general. Five stars.

Gentlemen Callers is a penetrating look at the work of Tennessee Williams in the context of his homosexuality and the pervasive homophobia in the midst of which he grew up and created some of the most moving and significant works of drama in the English language. Gentlemen Callers describes in all its chilling reality the emergence of intense homophobia in the mid-20th century, intentionally fostered by government agencies, and discusses how this homophobia impacted his life and his work. Author Paller makes a particular effort to point out the wrongmidedness of latter day gay liberationist critics who pilloried Williams for supposedly creating characters from an internalized homophobia, criticism which failed to appreciate the process of artistic creation and the characters themselves in their dramatic settings. Paller analyzes a number of the most developmentally significant of Williams' plays in the light of the homosexuality that was such an important motif in his oeuvre. Gentlemen Callers is an engaging study, and the most substantial examination of this writer in the context of the homosexuality that so signficantly informed his work.

This book is kind of a mixture. Partly it's a biographical sketch of Tennesee Williams, partly it's a review of the struggles gay and lesbian people had during the 1940's and '50's, partly it's an analysis of the homosexuality in Williams plays, partly it's an analysis of the critics writing about his plays. And all of that is a lot to put in one rather small book.

Strangely enough, even with all that in the book, Mr. Paller pulls it off quite well. He is able to describe the gay-bashing of the time, and the tremendous internal struggles that this created in Williams. His descriptions of the critics analysis of the plays tells us a lot about the critics themselves, more about them than the plays.

It's too much to say that this is a book that you can't put down. Instead I found it's a book that you read for a while, and then you want to think about what you've read before you go on.

Tennessee Williams is probably America's foremost playwright. Some like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire and more are still among the best plays ever done. The anguish in the writer in facing first his own discovery of his homosexuality and then finding it in the opressive eyes of the time make for quite a story.

Going Down Jericho Road is an excellent history of the sanitation workers' strike in Memphis and Martin Luther King's involvement in the spreading of the social gospel among America's poor. Michael Honey uses a lot of first-person recollections to bring this story to life and to unearth the racism and classism that defined so much of the nation, not just Memphis, in the 1960s. Behind this excellent tale are ongoing nagging questions. How would we react to the same situation today? Which side would we have supported in 1968? Have things really changed that much in forty years?

In Memphis, we now have a very visible middle class African American community with a black mayor and most public offices held by African Americans. Does this serve to mask the injustices which still plague the poor in this and many other communities? Has the rise of the middle class made the working poor and unemployed even more invisible? Is there any more community now between the white and black communities than there was in 1968?

I don't pretend to have definitive answers to these questions. However, just asking the questions and considering them in light of Michael Honey's historic journal makes one look twice at the comforts we enjoy in this world. If all books could get the reader thinking along these lines, this would be a much better world.

This might be the finest book written on Martin Luther King: it certainly is the best one that I have read about him. Honey is a splendid writer, with a style that I find more accessible than Taylor Branch's. No doubt that Branch has written the seminal history of King and his times, but his writing can become tedious due to too much detail and meandering sentences.

Honey is an award-winning historian who has written two previous excellent books that demonstrate his skill as an oral historian. The outstanding feature of this book is the numerous interviews he conducted with important figures, which keep the book always absorbing.

King receives much attention, but Honey shows that the Memphis strike was led by local workers and union officials who were fighting to escape the living hell of dangerous working conditions (the strike grew out of the deaths of two sanitation workers who were mangled in a malfunctioning garbage truck when they sought shelter from a rainstorm).

In addition to the stories about the local workers and organizers, King is portrayed as an important influence who was struggling with internal fighting among black civil rights groups, includng the NAACP, the Urban League, SCLC, and SNCC, the FBI, Lyndon Johnson, who was angered by King's anti-war proclamations, and most whites who thought King was moving too fast. Any reader who questions King's leadership and selflessness, needs to read this book to have those views dispelled.

Ultimately, the Memphis strike paved the way for labor improvements throughout the South.

This superb book should be considered for all major book prizes. For King scholars, it is essential and for all other informed readers, it is an excellent narrative of King and his times.

As one who lived through the history recalled in this book,I found it excellent.It is great to read a book in which you personally knew all the people written about and recall all the events.Michael Honey has done an excelllent job.I highly recommend this book to all students of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King jr. Especially I recommend it to all residents of Memphis and Tennessee.May we never allow this history to repeat itself