Tennessee Books

Wonderful essays about Advent and Christmas.
Mrs. Tickle writes beautifully. In other hands these stories could be overly sentimental, but she puts just the right touch to make them touching without being maudlin.
I re-read it every year to put myself into the real Christmas spirit.

In 1976, Publishers Weekly religion editor Phyllis Tickle and her husband Sam decided to abandon city life and move their family back to their rural roots in western Tennessee. What the Land Already Knows is Tickle's account of winters spent on their farm in the small community of Lucy - "about four thousand citizens if, as we used to say in town meetings, one counted the tractors as well as the cows and people."

This small book is beautifully written, often funny, always touching, and nearly impossible to put down. I devoured it in one sitting, then went back to reread each chapter separately, slowly, savoring the sweetness, the sadness, and Tickle's remarkable insights on family, winter, isolation, and faith.

Following an unhurried path from Advent through the children's return to school in January, Tickle introduces her family - human and animal. Husband Sam is a doctor and passionate grape vine tender. Their seven children, the oldest married before the family moves to the farm, thrive in a world defined by chores, farm animals, and family traditions. Her mother, whose yearly frenzy of pecan cooking the author first tries to escape, then comes to cherish. Silly Sally, Mary, Saint, and Oscar, the cows whose lives, calvings, and deaths bring humor, blessing, and meat to the family's life.

By the time you turn the last of the 114 pages, you feel you might recognize Tickle's family on the streets of Lucy, Tennessee, or any other small farm town.

From her agonizing ambivalence over finding the right gifts for her children to her unabashed pleasure in returning the house to order after the holiday frenzy, Tickle's honesty, always spoken gently, is disarming, beguiling, and sometimes startling.

Perhaps the finest chapter is a reflection on names. Musing on her children's delight in the naming of farm animals, of which there were scores, she notes that the named and the namer create together the identity of each, ending with this beautiful reflection: "What is New Year's Day for the world at large is also the Feast of the Holy name for the church. . . . [B]efore the day is done, I still walk out by myself to Mary's Hill for a little while and think about what it means to know the name of God and to be yourself called by it."

Small enough to fit into a stocking, this is a nearly perfect book for reading and rereading during the long, dark nights of winter.

By the fact of being close to my own age, I am totally impressed by Phyllis Tickle's creativity in picturing Epiphany moments out of her large family in Lucy, Tenn. My one regret is growing-up in East Tenn. I was not privileged to live nearby to Lucy, close to Memphis. While I identify being a member of the little country village of Hall's Cross Roads in East Tenn, it was very nearly the same sort of community that gave all small farmers a closely-knit, feeling of belonging! My sense from Phyllis' neat chapters on "Noel, Holy Mother, The Joseph Candle, Christmas Eve Gift, Silly Sally's Gift, and Name This Child" all create their closely-knit Family in activity reflecting the Christmas Story!

Once I got into the chapter on the "Days of Thomas the Doubter" I noted her carefully portrayed choice of gifts for Laura, "one of the older, newly-wed children...just starting a home." By St Thomas Day, "as my mother used to call it, the Day of the Old Doubter Himself"... She struck a familiar chord in my own sense of describing one of our favorite pastoral characters! In fact, my own point in reading and writing about this unique collection of essays is that it becomes a great model for blending family antidotes into Reflections upon Holy-days and Epi-phanies that people our fondest memories of Christmas.

If I only picture a couple of more impressive spots, they would lie in the chapter, Christmas Eve Gift: "Appalachians conserve everything in order to survive a geography that has no intention of allowing them...or anything else to survive." No pecans are indigenous to Appalachian mountains...just like East Tenn! I was smitten with Ms Tickle's creative pictures of her environment. In particular the family cracking and shelling nuts for nursing stations at Sam's hospital; also the informal relaxed manner of attire when the family sat around the kitchen on the Feast of St Stephen! "We ate and drank and looked for all the world like a Norman Rockwell come to life." Where else could I find a clear reality pictured in beautifully homespun words of real-life?

I am now a Fan of anything written by Phyllis Tickle, regardless if it is "The Graces We Remember or Wisdom In the Waiting!" Let me just soak it up for my writer's hunger and thirst for reality. Retired Chap. Fred W. Hood

I love this book. It is very accurate and descriptive. It gives all the information needed to hike these trails. The trailhead descriptions are easy to locate and the trail directions are easy to follow. It was on one of these trails that I had my first up-close encounter with a black bear and her cub. No problems. Whew...

I recently had the pleasure of meeting the author of this book on a trail in the Smokies. He was taking notes of changes since the last edition of his 100 Hikes in The Great Smoky Mountains National Park book. This tells me that he keeps up to date of changes.


I enjoy this book enough to also own another of Russ Manning's books. 40 Hikes in Tennessee's South Cumberland which is a book I highly reccommend also.

This is a natural. These two states are often confused and lumped together. It is good that we have a book to deepen our understanding of this neck of the woods.

The Frews know travel. They were raised around the Huntsville area and know the area like the backs of their hands. I know the family and they are wonderful folks who enjoy sharing places and activities with people. 52 weekends in the Tennessee Valley shows the many adventures you can have in Alabama and Tennessee. The photographs are stunning, and they take you into the action. A really good book that shows the variety the area can offer.

Though I currently live in Atlanta, I grew up near Huntsville, which is in the heart of the Tennessee Valley. This guide, which I received as a gift, took me back to my childhood roots, as well as showed me some new sights that I didn't even know existed. This book disproves the theory that there's nothing to do in Alabama/Tennessee. From the stereotypical Civil War reenactments and bluegrass festivals to exploring Huntsville's Space and Rocket Center, this book has a wide variety of activities. Scenic photos are supported by colorful descriptions for all 52 events. I highly recommend this book for anyone who just moved to Huntsville, Madison, Athens, Nashville, Chattanooga, or anywhere in the area, or to anyone traveling through the Tennessee Valley looking to explore.

SCRAPS OF TIME 1960: ABBY TAKES A STAND is the first of a series of juvenile novels by Patricia McKissack. A group of kids help their grandmother explore the contents of her attic and find scraps of memories. As each scrap is found, the grandmother, Gee, tells a story from her childhood and from the childhoods of other family members that exposes how differently today's world is from the one she grew up in.

McKissack is the author of several novels for young readers. Besides chapter books, she's also written several picture books. Her subject matter ranges from serious to humorous, from realistic to historical to fantasy.

This first book of the three-book series is on the 2008 Children's Sequoyah Masterlist. The story details the sit-ins the black community had to stage in Nashville, Tennessee to end segregation in the city. Although the story is deliberately kept small, I read the story to my son and he had no problem seeing the bigger picture as well as all the problems the black families faced while striving for equality.

McKissack's language is simple, direct, easy-to-read, and emotional. Through just a handful of family members, the fear and outrage is quickly and efficiently shown to the reader.

Abby's story is compelling to any parent or child. When she mistakenly ends up in a WHITES ONLY restaurant called the Monkey Bar, she's treated horribly by the white people there. Parents can easily know what it must have felt like by imagining how their child would have felt under similar circumstances. And kids can instantly identify with Abby at being left out of something and told she wasn't allowed to do something.

The book is only 100 pages long, with big print and illustrations by Gordon James that are equally emotional. We read it in a couple sittings without straining ourselves. I grew up in this time period in Southern Oklahoma, so a lot of what McKissack writes about was familiar to me. It's amazing to think how much things have changed in that time period, and that our children will never really know what those times were like.

"Abby Takes A Stand" provides a wonderful way to bring the civil rights movement to life for intermediate grade elementary school children. The novel begins in the present day with Abby in the attic with her grandchildren. One of children discovers an old menu from The Monkey Bar, which sets up the main story.
Abby is ten years old and lives in Nashville, Tennessee. On a trip to a local department store with her mother, Abby explores the store on her own for a few minutes and is given a flyer advertising a new restaurant, The Monkey Bar, by a man dressed in a monkey costume (who has just arrived from NJ and is unaware of the segregation that plagues the area at this time). Abby decides to visit the Monkey Bar, only to be confronted with cruelty from the patrons and customers when she tries to enter.
This event sparks Abby's interest making a difference by joining the Flyer Brigade to support the local nonviolent protest of the injustice she has surfaced first hand. Her college-aged cousin, his girlfriend, and his friends are involved the protest in a more active way which is illustrated toward the end of the novel.
The novel ends with Abby's grandchildren understanding the deep significance of the Monkey Bar menu and the importance of the fight her grandmother took for equal rights for all Americans.
This book has vocabulary and concepts appropriate for grades 4-6, and is printed with larger font size to allow easier reading for emergent novel readers. It is "fleshed out" with short historical sections: "Remembering How It Was" and "The Rules For Nashville Sit-ins". I plan to read it to my fourth grade class in preparation for the upcoming MLK holiday. Highly recommended.


From School Library Journal
Grade 3-4-Grandmother's attic is full of family mementoes that, as Gee tells young cousins Mattie Rae, Aggie, and Trey, are all "scraps of time." A menu from the Monkey Bar restaurant is the basis for this story, which begins with 10-year-old Abby (Gee) in Nashville, TN, in 1960. One day, she wanders around a downtown store as her mother makes an exchange. Someone hands her a flyer advertising a new restaurant with a merry-go-round ride in it, and she decides to go see it. Unfortunately, Abby causes quite a stir when she arrives there. "And you know we don't serve Negroes in here. Have you forgotten your place?" snaps the manager. Abby becomes a civil rights activist as a member of the Flyer Brigade, handing out flyers about nonviolent protest. The story ends with the return to present time and the cousins and Gee looking at other keepsakes, which is the perfect set-up for the next book in the series. Sections entitled "Remembering How It Was" and "The Rules for the Nashville Sit-ins" round off the book. This easy chapter book, with simple sentences, plenty of white space, and a liberal sprinkling of Gordon's expressive black-and-white drawings, is an appealing and welcome title.-Mary N. Oluonye, Shaker Heights Public Library, OH
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Gr. 2-4. The Scraps of Time series uses family keepsakes as an entre to one black family's past. In this book, Grandma Gee (Abby) has saved a menu from the Monkey Bar Grill in Nashville, and her granddaughters settle in for the story. The action moves back to 1960, when Abby was 10. Although some strides had been made in civil rights, Abby still can't eat at the new circus-themed restaurant in Harvey's Department Store. McKissack does a particularly good job portraying Abby's humiliation and anger when she is ordered to leave the restaurant--after being handed a flyer inviting her in by an unknowing northern white teenager who was working at the store. Those turbulent emotions find a positive channel as she helps an older cousin who is involved with lunch counter sit-ins and demonstrations. Although short and simply told, the book gives readers a kid's-eye view of important happenings and reminds them that history is something that is always in the making. Fine black-and-white art adds to the ambience of the time. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Publisher's Book Description
Why has their grandmother bothered keeping a menu from a restaurant that closed years ago, a restaurant that never served very good food in the first place? Three cousins listen to Gee's own story, set in the early days of lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, a time when a black child could sit up front in a city bus but still could not get a milkshake at a downtown restaurant. Through the eyes of ten-year-old Abby, young readers see what it was like to live through those days and they'll come to understand that, like a menu, freedom is about having choices. Each book in the series tells the story behind a different `scrap of time;' together they form a patchwork quilt of one black family's past that stretches back for generations.

There's a lot written about war and, increasingly, about the lingering effects of war, fighting, and fear on the psyche. Battle trauma and post-traumatic stress syndrome have been increasingly well documented. It's not only male writers who've tackled the subject. Pat Barker's painfully luminous novels about the First World War come to mind, and Susan Griffin wrote an outstanding and unclassifiable book, A Chorus of Stones about public and private wars in her family. But Betsy Howell's brave and beautiful memoir of two important American wars through the eyes, words, and memories of her great-great-grandfather, a Union soldier in the Civil War, and her father, a paratrooper in Normandy in WWII, is something special. Not content to just read through her great-great-grandfather's war diary, she donned a uniform herself and became a Civil War re-enactor, toting a musket and even wearing a fake beard for a few battles. These passages of the memoir are hilarious at times; but the book ultimately has a deeply serious task--to come to terms with how war may have affected her father, James Howell, and contributed to his alcoholism. Howell's relationship with her delightful but damaged father as a child and as a young adult are touchingly told. I admired the research that went into backgrounding and shaping this story, and even more admired how Howell isn't afraid to mine her past for the truth about her family. She obviously loves the place she grew up--the Northwest--the Civil War, and her parents, and all that love and curiosity enriches and balances a story about soldiers and what happens to them and their loved ones. I really recommend it.

This is an amazing work of narrative non-fiction. I was riveted from the first page. Ms Howells' prose is elegant without being prosaic; tender without being sappy, and literary without talking above the reader. The most exciting thing about this work is the way she links three different time periods together so seemlessly that you are spirited into each world without hesitation. I have never read a book that captures the impact of war on men, on women and on families in such a personal way. It is a journey anyone who has been impacted by any war should take. Truly hearthbreaking while also breathing hope into the simple experience of memory. A joy on every level.

As a former Seventh-day Adventist and current "card-carrying member of the ACLU" I have long pondered many of the themes dealt with by this very interesting book. I think Morgan and Marty deal with the subject-matter in a very unique and fairly non-offensive way and get quite a bit about Adventism right, although there are some errors. You guys know Adventist is pronounced with an emphasis on the first syllable and not the second, right? As in AD-vent-ist, not Ad-VENT-ist.

I think some of the more educated, liberal, and objective Adventists I know (especially ones secure in their faith) would enjoy this book. People interested in the intersection of religion and politics in general would definitely find it an easy, entertaining read.

I plan on passing it on.

"Faith-based organizations?" The odd term had not yet entered the media lexicon. American politicians had only seen a glimmer of the power offered by open alliances with conservative religious groups. But, in this adventurous probe of the odd-couple pairing of Seventh-day Adventism, a quintessentially American institution, and the Republican party, Dr. Morgan opens a clear panoramic view of one church's struggle with these reformation-esque issues.

Separation of Church and State? Money to do "good" things? Where do well-meaning people draw the lines? How do they decide? What goes on behind closed doors - in the cloistered halls of power on Capitol Hill and in the hushed offices of ecclesiastical politics?

Doug Morgan's "Adventism and the American Republic" is a scrupulously documented look at one church's awkward lurching toward civic engagement. The view ranges from sweet to painful and back again. But Doug's description carries the reader through the arc with a sense of being there -- in the rooms, reading the letters and watching the frustrating twists, embarrassing turns, and occasional successes in this theological/political pretzel.

If you've every wondered what "Faith Based" means for the future of American social or religious institutions, this book is a must read. If you don't care about church and state, but like a curious American tale, it's even better.

Somebody should make the movie!

My mother and I both really enjoyed this book. The gardens pictures reminded us both of my grandmother's garden. The book doesn't just show garden pictures though. It explains why Black gardens tend to look the way they do. I always thought my grandmother kept a dirt front yard because nothing would grow there. The book explained that this practice was a common method of controlling the bug population. I'd reccomend this book to anyone who loves gardens or has an interest in anthropology.

Richare Westmacott writes this book with love. Not a native of Georgia, you wouldn't know it from his wonderful depth of knowledge about the history of plants and gardening in the state. This book is good for gardeners, good for those who love Georgia and the south, and good for anyone who enjoys a well written book. Informative and entertaining and the perfect book to read in a hammock in the garden!

As a creative nonfiction student, I have read a number of memoirs and have found few to be as honest in its search for truth as Karen Spears Zacharias' "After the Flag has been Folded." Zacharias is a natural storyteller. Her style captivates the reader as she attempts to unravel the events of her life and to understand how the tragedy of losing her father to war impacted her family. The reader is left laughing one minute and crying the next as she glimpses into Zacharias' journey from loss to redemption. This book is a must read, especially for students of creative nonfiction. Its honesty is a refreshing contrast to the many poorly written memoirs that sensationalize on lifes hearbreaks and struggles.

Very informative book. Not only does it help to understand the perspective of being a child of a KIA (Gold Star), but also, other Gold Star family members, since it focuses on all their lives. Furthermore, it is telling a life story, with plot, so it's not just "this is how a person would feel" from a clinical perspective, but rather, how it really is.

excellent reference for the tennessee antique business and interest. can be used to date early furniture and also its' orgin.

This is a splendid book, originally published by the Tennessee Historical Society, and sold at the Tennessee State Museum. Photographs and descriptions are excellent, as are the examples. The book is not engaged in "price guessing" and the like. Rather, it is designed for the person who is familiar with the construction of period furniture and who is cognizant of the terminology. It is highly recommended for collectors, dealers and anyone else interested in ways and furnishings of the past.

I bought this for my husband at Christmas. He loves it! Very cool book..super old. Heck, even if you don't read it, would make a good coffee table book for a conversation starter.

Make no mistake, this one is the small, "red book" that all other books refer to. If you want the real deal this is it. Evidently it is still printed in small volume, as several buisnesses in Adams sell it. The Adams museum, and the Bell Cave, both have it in stock in "new" condition. Both of these places have relatives there, who were a part of the mystery.Also these 2 places are extremely near the main haunting area! Most all of the current residents do not want to discuss it though. It seems that two schools of thought prevail there, one is that it never really left, and another is that since it missed its last return date, refering to it may cause it's return.