Louisiana Books

Crist for the Mill explores the origin, development and leadership of the Louisiana State Rice Milling Company and its successor Riviana Foods over eighty-eight year period. In the context of a single business enterprise; it answers the basic question: What in the American past gave businessmen opportunity or created need for them to change what they were doing or the way they were doing it?
It examines not only the effects of changes upon the company itself but also the company's contributions to changes within the rice milling industry. Previous studies have focused primarily upon rice growers and their problems. To the extent that these works examined rice milling and marketing, they made broad generalizations due to lack of primary materials and of specific studies. This detailed scholarly study rests entirely upon primary sources and focuses on one major enterprise that grew from mill to multinational .

Avey Craven's Growth of Southern Nationalism covers the specific events of 1848-1861 that produce a sense of a southern nation. It is not light reading, weighing in at over 400pp. The Chapter breakdown is:
Publisher's Preface
Author's Preface
I. The Conscious section
II. Realignment of sections
III Prelude to Crisis
IV The first crisis--1850
V Compromise and the South
VI The Aftermath
VII Compromise on Trial
VIII The Center Shifts
IX Sowing the Wind
X the Harvest
XI Kansas, Douglas, and John Brown
XII The Campaign of 1860
XIII Secession
XIV Some Generalizations
Critical essay on authorities
Index

Taken in combination with the other published volumes of "A History of the South," Craven's work provides an essential piece of the Tapestry that is Southern History. I particularly enjoy this volume (and the series in general) because Craven often highlights important cultural and literary events that occur between 1848 and 1861, making the book useful not only to the scholar of history, but to all students of Southern history, literature, and culture.

We are blessed on Cape Cod with a disproportionate number of truly great artists, and Brendan Galvin is as good as it gets, even in such heady company as Robert Pinsky, Alan Dugan, Mary Olver, Mark Doty, Keith Althaus, Stanley Kunitz, Gail Mazur -- on and on it goes. All of them live on the Cape off and on during the year, and Galvin is a year rounder. As a naturalist poet, Galvin's observations always seem newly turned. No matter how many times you read verse about a dune, a coyote, or a gold sweep of marsh grass, Galvin makes it seem different. And his sense of humor is, at times, wildly funny. Perhaps it's something about the water in Truro because the late Alan Dugan had that sense of humor that would just stop you in your tracks. Galvin was a finalist for the National Book Award this year for "Habitat," and it's a wonderful retrospective of his work, along with his newest efforts. If you aren't familiar with Galvin's work, do yourself a favor and spring for the price of this book. It's almost as good as a trip to Cape Cod itself and, when you consider who your guide is, perhaps even better.

With the economy of a haiku and a magnanimity only the bravest can approach, Mary O'Reilley has thrown a rope ladder all the way down to the nethermost part of us that for so long we tried to pretend wasn't there. This gorgeous, prize-winning, indispensible collection features spare but generous trips into the natural and human world that offer means for our battered, humiliated spirit to catch a toe hold.

TAKE A LOOK AT THE OLD SOUTH FROM THE ANGLE OF THE COLLEGE MAN. AS A GRADUATE OF A COLLEGE IN THE DEEP SOUTH, I SAW SO MANY PARALLELS BETWEEN TODAY'S COLLEGE EXPERIENCE AND THE ONES I READ ABOUT IN HALLS OF HONOR. BY CONTRAST, THE VAST DIFFERENCES AND IDIOSYNCRACIES OF COLLEGE LIFE IN THE ANTEBELLUM ERA WERE FASCINATING. FOR ME, AS A STUDENT OF THE PRE-WAR DECADES, HALLS OF HONOR WAS A DELIGHT TO READ.

This is an absolutely fabulous book that should be in every library (just like all of Choate's books). Of course, I am the proud son of the lead author, so what do you expect me to say.

To read Hans Morgenthau is to meet his sharp and fearless mind seeking `to speak truth to power'. During most of his carrier, his main public cause was to call forth responsibility from North-American policy-makers. His days were the days in which mankind finally found itself face to face with the prospect of the end; here was the setting of a unique era, superior in danger and complexity to all other previous ones; and Morgenthau was one of the few-too-few authors who could see its political problems.

At the end of his life, he wrote the following words: "While I may be best known for my contributions to foreign policy and more particularly to American foreign policy, it is a paradox that my major intellectual interest from the very outset of my academic career has not been foreign policy or even politics in general but philosophy. After WWII, I made a conscious choice in concentrating my efforts on foreign policy because I realized that the existence of the United States and even of mankind depended on a sound foreign policy. What good was it to speculate on philosophic topics if in a couple of years or decades the world would be reduced to a radioactive rubble? So ever since, for more than twenty years, I have been caught in this self-imposed public service which by no means coincides with my real intellectual interests".

Morgenthau died in 1980, shortly before the Cold War itself was over. His political thought will outlast not only the competition of superpowers, but also what was then taken as states and nations; as well as Aristotle survived the disappearance of the Greek polis and Machiavelli, the unification of Italy. These are political thinkers who make it through the surface of their objects and share a glimpse of the very essence of politics. In so doing, they expose truths about the human condition which remain, among the problems of the day, recognizable to eyes which may be very distant.

Of course, almost every man is a son of his era and expresses reality in terms hopefully understandable by his contemporaries. Thus, to point out the rediscovery of those recognizably human and tragically recurrent facts among one's present configurations is a most fortunate task in a biographical work. This is why Morgenthau's Intellectual Biography, written by Swiss professor Christoph Frei, is a special work for those who wish to understand the process of putting together the pieces of his line of reasoning which, in the early 1930's, started being dubbed 'political realism', but only effectively reached public in the late 1940's.

Before the Biography, those who went through Morgenthau's work in English had never had a contact with his early papers, which contain all the seeds of his later intellectual developments. Dr. Frei was the first to study these papers, along with other never seen documents, diaries and letters. Having conducted a trilingual research in English, German and French, he provides us with a reconstruction of the first decades of Morgenthau's life, points out to the first time when theory-relevant thoughts were put to paper and presents a lively account of the difficult context in which these thoughts began to flourish.

The book has two parts. The first part deals with Morgenthau's life story, his studies in different cities in Germany, his acquaintance and perceptions of its several ongoing schools of social sciences, and the beginning of his professional career. As the specter of totalitarianism approached the old continent with its somber colors, we watch his difficulties first in Europe as a Jew, as he tried to emigrate to America, and later on in America as a German and a Jew, struggling first for survival and next to retake his intellectual projects. This first part leads up to the success he achieved with the publication of Politics Among Nations in 1948 and deals, in smaller detail, with the second half of his life as a successful political scientist, trying to contribute to the North-American experience during the Cold War.

As the second part of the book unfolds, we go back to the early decades of the twentieth century and embark in a philosophical trip side by side with a young man's experience of disillusionment: his meditation of civilized life in a time of decay. Here we see the formation of Morgenthau's Weltanschauung and approach the central core of his view of man and society. Frei lets him speak out some of his frankest thoughts about the limits of science, the political sphere, the place and implications of power among human beings. Frei also strikes us with the clever insight of turning Immanuel Kant's four philosophical questions: "What is man?; What am I allowed to know? What should I expect?; and What should I do??" into the skeleton of his investigation. At its end, the book concludes that Morgenthau's realism is in fact a sober type of idealism; as it puts, "transcendent idealism".

The two greatest contributions of this biography are the following: firstly, it unveils Morgenthau's central formative reference in a surprising and unprecedented way: the chapter about his existential dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche is, without a doubt, the most fascinating of all. Secondly, it swims against the epistemological and quantitative tides of contemporary political science so as to concentrate its work in Morgenthau's philosophical side - which is, when all is said and done, what truly matters for those who are attempting to think politics with their own heads.

Vivian Shipley, editor of Connecticut Review, twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of numerous poetry prizes such as the Hart Crane Poetry Prize, has produced another worthy addition to her canon of bare-bone honest poetry. Shipley's word choice within "Hardboot" is impeccable; the poems inherent raw power of truth draws the reader in like a black hole, but there is a glimmer of light as one inhales this new collection of poems that ache like a bruised heart.

Rereading ought to be par for the course in order to truly appreciate the richness of details and feel the deep emotional effects that occur upon the closer second and even third read.

"Our eyes close,
last night's six o'clock news, twisted lips intrude.

In a day or two, when we pause, we probably won't think
of that mouth, of the mother in New Haven with
no son, no morning bacon to fry for him to smell."
("Action News, Channel Eight")

Thankfully humor does roam freely through many of the poems. Shipley is not afraid to take jabs at her own foibles or the creative writing universe in which she inhabits. The poet's use of deadpan humor in "The Answer: A Winning Number" strips away the notion of an answer being readily available to writer's block. A writer's workshop held in Prague

"is the answer
to your writer's block. Just imagine
lying on your back in a long stretch
of green, a glass of Merlot or-if
you prefer-Perrier cooling at your side."
("The Answer: A Winning Number")

"Hardboot" could have easily been weighed down by the numerous darker issues tackled: illness; being Adolph Hitler's sister; the under-achievers of New Haven, Connecticut; and the relatives Shipley left behind in the mountains of Kentucky.

"Like ham
curing on a hook, my heart still swings from

Connecticut to Kentucky. Writing poems about barns
holding wood shavings from my father's knife,
stains of tobacco he spit on the floor will be like
spitting cherry stones out to breadcrumb my way
home to hills of Howe Valley."
("Why An Aging Poet Signs Up For Yet Another Summer Poetry Workshop")

But in the end one is filled with a redemptive joy for having taken this arduous journey with Shipley. Bitterness among this collection is absent; "Hardboot" will kick the most hardened of hearts alive to the beauty of forgiveness and love.

Bohdan Kot

Ed Bearss is both one of the most knowledgeable Civil War historians of the present day AND one of the men who found the gunboat Cairo. "Hardluck Ironclad" is both Civil War history and modern archaeology... it details the history of the first warship in the world to be sunk by a mine and the story of the people who worked to raise her and display her at Vicksburg. Outstanding.

Chris Tusa is a true artist, allowing us into the strongholds of what he sees as Haunted Bones. At times there are themes of Gothic, Realism and Dark Humor, we are never ok, plagued by what haunts us: facets of fear, cancer, Alzheimer's, betrayal, fantasy, sickness (inside and out), our personalized gifts from previous generations. This is poetry that Generations X and Y can relate to; waiting for a pill such as, Prozac that can numb what haunts our bones, "the way you dissolve on my tongue, like a peppermint, like a host- the way you bury my grief". In The Disappearing Act, Tusa recalls our nostalgia for innocence, in a trend of the broken family, he paints us memories like a photo album before dad (the magician) leaves the pictures, "...the final secret trick none of us knew tucked up his shiny tuxedo sleeve". On a lighter note, the poem Habit lets us reminisce about what we gave up along with smoking, "...the slow drag of conversation, the cold November evenings... fireflies blinking in the trees like thousands of lit cigarettes." What's haunting your mind, paralyzing parts of your life or your bones? Chris Tusa's poetry in Haunted Bones is a gem.