Arkansas Books

Subdued but strong, and quietly unsettling, the nine stories in Pat Carr's "The Death of a Confederate Colonel: Civil War Stories and a Novella" leave long echoes in the mind, as well as an occasional chill on the spine.

The time and place are the Civil War in Arkansas, but there are no great battle scenes, none of the stereotypical bravado or self-righteousness often found in Civil War fiction. This is the home front, the mothers and daughters left behind, the plantations and servants, the farms and farm animals. Here are people trying to endure the hardships, the outright scariness of a war outside their doors. All are trying to carry on while the menfolk are off fighting in distant places.

There is the gravely wounded Yankee soldier who stumbles onto a woman's front porch asking for water. There's the mistress of a plantation struggling to save a feverish, and favorite, slave child. There is the proper young lady's journal entries as she awaits the jarring return of her fiancé, who finally arrives home missing both his arms. And there is the volunteer nurse who finds a Confederate colonel's life literally in her hands, as she pinches closed the broken, pulsating artery in his thigh.

Nothing in these stories happens in the expected way. The protagonists are not all heroic, although there are some of those here, too. But just as often the characters are petty and duplicitous, even cruel and coldly calculating as they fight for survival against weather, disease, hunger, and lawlessness. No one is immune from the brutal onslaught of the war, and not everyone makes it out alive.

Carr's writing is compelling and understated. "His skin was cold, but yielding somehow, like day-old mush turned out of a pan. It felt almost moist, as if it had broken out in a sweat one last time."

Civil War buffs will find no missteps here. Yet Carr's research has been woven so seamlessly through the stories that it goes by almost unnoticed. I especially admired her economy with words. Sometimes I got the feeling that each description, each bit of dialogue, had been pared raw, until only the most necessary, the most heart-wrenching words were left to tell her stories. The result is a powerful collection, flush with memorable characters, with tragedy, suspense and narrow escapes. "The Death of a Confederate Colonel: Civil War Stories and a Novela" is just plain good quality literature.

Pat Carr is the kind of writer who doesn't waste words. Her precise prose tugs at your heart and invites you to feel the emotions along with her beautifully painted characters. You won't regret opening this book and being pulled into history.

This fun mystery opens with Caron, Claire Malloy's teenaged terror, being selected Miss Thunder Thighs by the Farberville Highschool sophomore football team Naturally, she immediately decides that it is time for her and her best friend Inez to go on a crash diet. So, being Caron and Inez, the duo proceeds to run the gauntlet of every known bizarre fad diet know to man, woman and kook. And they all manage to end up with a pizza chaser.

While the dieting is running its course, Claire's downstairs neighbor volunteers her to become a weight loss mentor to Maribeth, the somewhat overweigh heiress of the Thurber-Farber fortune. This is all very well and good, except Claire just happens to be dedicated to salvation through chocolate and also to avoiding aerobic exercise at all costs.

Before long, Claire is in the middle of some very strange and highly humorous goings on including murder. Joan Hess is at her best spearing fitness centers, fad diets and instant weight loss elixirs. You know from the beginning how everything will turn out in the end, (with Claire solving the mystery despite her boy friend, Peter Rosen) but all the twists and turns and kooky characters are half the fun of a Hess mystery. Without a doubt she is one of the best writers of comic mystery fiction today!

Joan Hess once again takes us on a funny yet exciting adventure through the town of Farberville. A new weight loss center opens up in town and appears to be doing wonders for it's clients. Claire Malloy gets sucked in to provide rides and moral support to a friend of a friend who is a client. Naturally Claire's natural curiosity causes her to sense that there's a lot more going on at the weight loss center than is being advertised. Her digging into the facts leads to much excitement as well as danger to her own welfare. Suspenseful and witty all the way through with the usual characters such as melodratic daughter Caron and boyfriend/police detective Peter Rosen well rounding out the cast of characters.

Jo McDougallýs poems are heart-stopping and heartbreakingýthe embodiment of what Stanley Kunitz calls "an art so transparent that you can look through and see the world." I tried to portion them out to myself, a few each day, and found myself devouring the whole because I wanted to know how she did it-ýhow she painted these spare, lucid scenes of life in the South without melodrama or flashy metaphors. This is the perfect book for readers who wonder why so much contemporary poetry these days leaves them feeling unmoved. After reading McDougall's poems you'll sit there for a moment, wondering what just brushed by and raised the hairs on your arm.

The poetry of Jo McDougall is simple, yet vast. Her spare and subtle language weaves a series of poems that explore themes of grief and loss, longing and memory, and flow from images of childhood through old age. These poems find depth in their silence as much as their speech, being born often of situations and images which tend to demand a certain stillness unto themselves, such as burying a daughter, or the sudden, snapshot-like recollection of a childhood memory. McDougall's poetry remains honest to the stillness and silence of these moments, never failing to acknowledge the precarious territory that it explores between poetic description and those things the true significance of which words can often fail to portray. "As the coffin lid closes / over the body..." she writes in Dirt, in a poem entitled Metaphor,

...the silence
is sometimes described as noise.
it is not.
it is silence... (11)

By breaking down this metaphor and turning it on its back, McDougall exposes the ineffable underbelly of this scene. Paradoxically, we are brought to understand that the silence here should not be thought of as a "loud" silence; rather, it is the very wordlessness itself - the silence of the silence - that gives the situation its power.
Both Dirt and McDougall's latest book, Satisfied With Havoc, are comprehensive and approachable in style, the ordinary, yet crisp language lending a lucidity and a clarity of focus to the poems. In this quiet, understated voice, even the simple act of naming a bird or flower comes to feel sacred. Dirt concerns itself largely with character and with images of people going about their everyday lives. Farmers, widows and widowers, circus performers in their off-hours, and new, old, and estranged lovers all find their way into McDougall's observant glance. Satisfied With Havoc takes on a first-person view more consistently, lighting on many of the same themes as Dirt, but through a more intimate perspective. Both books are deeply personal, however, and both retain a keen and witty insight into the silent workings of the world.

I write as a blues fan of forty years standing in order to assure folks that this French fellow knows his stuff. When I first heard about this Encyclopedia 8 years ago, I was concerned that it would be another effete European effort to convince Americans that they have no taste.

Au contraire! This is the first survey-type of blues review which does justice to disparate blues streams such as blues shouters (barely touched on in Cohn's book) and boogie woogie, as well as Delta blues and obscure East Texas singers of the Twenties.

The Encyclopedia is well-organized, with fine summary essays on various blues streams so that the reader can follow developments on different fronts without having to turn back and forth between essays on individuals. There is a generous serving of individual biographical sketches as well, and Gerard does us the favor of pointing out when certain blues artists are following in the footsteps of others.

He also does a good job of including glancing references to less well-known blues artists who are worth investigating later in yours blues journey.

All in all an excellent reference work with plenty to interest the casual blues fan.

I have the hard-to-find first edition of Gérard Herzhaft's Encyclopedia Of The Blues, the one printed in 1996. It is worth finding if you can. If not, this edition (which I am trying to decide whether to buy or not) may well be as good or better than the first. The first edition has over 500 pages, but fewer photos I think. Gérard Herzhaft's Encyclopedia Of The Blues is the most accurate, in-depth, and comprehensive collection of Blues musician information I have been able to find anywhere in the past 6 years of being an active Blues fan. I wish Gérard would know how much his great work is appreciated by all of us Blues music fans in the USA and the world. Thank you Gérard.

This is the finest collection of poems since Philip Larkin's HIGH WINDOWS. (Although I've gotta admit that I'm not much of a reader of poetry. Come to think of it, I'm not much of an admirer of poetry. Take a look in those yearly anthologies and you'll see what I mean.)

Almost all of Trowbridge's poems are prose-poems. With none of that corny rhyme-&-meter horsecrap. And my only complaint is that maybe some of these poems should've been formatted in a prose format instead of with the corny line-breaks. Or maybe not. Or maybe Andrew Motion should be thrown off a goddam bridge and replaced by Trowbridge as Poet Laureate of Limeyland. Anything to get Trowbridge more publicity.

One of the things I love about Trowbridge is his empathy. His willingness to impersonate other people. My favorite thing in here is probably WALKING HOME. Where an older-than-dirt Trowbridge is walking around the block in his hometown. And time has rendered him a stranger to his old neighborhood.

I must be honest here, and say that I know Bill Trowbridge. I have known him for six or so years. I consider him one of my closest friends. It's not a crime that I'm writing here about his book, is it? Aren't a few of these five star reviews on Amazon from friends and relatives? This is an honest review, or I wouldn't be writing it. I wouldn't be, I'm not making this stuff up. If you love beautiful poetry, if you love irony, if you detest sentimentality, if you want to see into the dark worlds of the disappointed, the fearful, the furious, the patient, a spirit of hope and determination, if you want to recall your own childhood and adolescence, if you want sarcasm and tenderness in the same breath, if you want to smile, if you you love landscape (especially of the Midwest), if you want to know grace and loss as Trowbridge sees it, as you might yourself see it, you should read this book. Especially the Kong poems, especially "The Madness of Kong." It goes like this: I think I see it now: they chase me/because I'm mad, and I'm mad because/they chase me. So said the doctor/when I told him I was kidnapped/from my secret island by movie men/and a tiny blonde in love with screaming,/that I was God and may still be,/that I'm immune to bombs and bullets./He said it would be years before/I'm cured, that Mother is behind it all./When I pinched his head, it made/alittle squeak. Sometimes it's good/to be mad, if you think about it.

Don't you love it?

If you like WWII history, you'll love this book. A must buy

The stories in this book will take you on an emotional roller coaster. Some stories are achingly brief because several young men depicted were not married and had no children, and not much is known about how they lived. Other stories are amazing in their depth and breadth, and will make you laugh and cry. Excellent job!!

In short, this is a good way to find a fish you have picked up
while you have been fishing. Or it is a nice view of the variety
of Fish in AR.
It functions well as a text book or a coffee table book.
Plus, It is an especially good ice breaker if you have taken
classes which the author taught at Southern Arkansas University.

Even as the Clinton presidency draws to a close, Arkansas remains the undiscovered state. Fishes of Arkansas is a visual treat--a species by species documentation of the incredible diversity of freshwater fish found in that state's streams and waterways. Arkansas is an inland state, so one might imagine that a fish survey would document only a narrow array of green and brown game fish, of little interest to those outside the bait and hook hobbies. Fishes of Arkansas demonstrates instead the incredible biodiversity found in the numerous fish species located in Arkansas. Here are pictures of gorgeous fish, large and small, including many of intense beauty and tremendous color. The darter section of the book, featuring many species endemic not only to Arkansas but in many cases to a single river in Arkansas, shows the reader spectacular, unforgettable fish. The narrative is simple and straightforward--each entry is a separate species, usually with a picture. The grouping is organized by family, and the authors provide judicious use of light explanatory and summation material to tie the individual entries together. If you need something on your coffee table or shelves which is light, pleasant picture-filled reading but not fluff, try Fishes of Arkansas.

Very clearly presents the organization of the Confederate armies and sorts out a lot of the confusion regarding regimental consolidations and duplicate naming. A great tool for genealogists and Civil War researchers

Mr. Sifakis has done an excellent job chronicling the Arkansas and Florida Confederate Armies, citing dates of organization, battles, commanders, mergers, and dispositions. I would highly recommend this book to any serious researcher.

This is a fine first book, top rate poetry. The poems will haunt you with their compassionate, wry insights into the ways humans love, work, dream, and suffer loss.Some go the edge of danger, some to the bounty of joy, but all are penetrating, sharply ironic, and memorable. You won't soon forget a poem like "Questions for Joe" or "The Interview."

Jo McDougall's poems are often terse distillations of life miraculously captured in just a few lines. Sometimes she can turn a small moment upsidedown in a way that leaves you breathless. Her poems look out on life with an unflinching honesty and the apparent simplicity of her language belies the depth of her vision. From Darkening Porches is a poetic gem.

I just finished this book, and it is outstanding. Jim McGhee covers every Missouri unit that organized for Confederate service. Units of all three branches of service are covered here, from regiments all the way down to independent companies. The book is limited to Confederate units; see Sterling Price's Lieutenants for information on State Guard units. The book is organized by branch of service (all artillery units in one section, then cavalry and infantry).

There are many strengths to this book. I liked the format. Each unit has a narrative section, covering unit organization and service. There is also a listing of field officers, and a listing of commanders of each company and county of primary origin, when known. I knew quite a bit about the reorganizations of the regiments in the 1st and 2nd Missouri Brigades, but there were numerous renumberings and reorganizations/consolidations of many other Missouri units, and McGhee makes sense of it all. In addition, a bibliography is provided for each unit, plus a bibliography of more general sources at the end.

Bottom line: if you have a serious interest in the Trans-Mississippi Theatre, the Western Theatre, and/or the contributions of Missouri units to the Confederacy, this excellent reference should be on your shelf.

Well, Jim's done it. Not only has he produced a research tool so many of us have needed and wanted - he's also provided a volume that's fun to pick up and just wander through. It flows so well that you might forget it's a guidebook.

The unit histories are just dandy, each with its own bibliography, and the weaving of units together through reorganizations amidst the chaos of war is done seamlessly, artfully. An unexpected bonus was the collection of Missouri Confederate images, including a couple I'd never seen.

This work is a real accomplishment, but we've come to expect that from this author.