North Carolina Books

John Vlach's book is a thorough study of the architecture of plantation slavery in the South. He primarily used resource materials from the 1930s Historic American Building Survey and WPA interviews with former slaves to develop a social history. The research is solid and comprehensive. Vlach demonstrates ways to interpret the buildings for information about the life of the people who worked and dwelled in them, and he backs up his conclusions with interview materials. It's a terrific way of studying architecture that merges folklife studies with architectural history. The conclusions expanded my understanding about history, and this book is an essential contribution to learning about black history.

This study of vernacular architecture is a great contribution to the social history of slavery. By looking at facets of design such as settlement patterns and the formal qualities of buildings, Vlach shows how patterns in material culture provide clues for understanding the patterns of history that one can read by examining the buildings. This remarkable book not only documents plantation architecture as an important contribution to the historical record, but it also provides a fascinating interpretation of the subject. It is an especially important study because of the dearth of written documents left by slaves.

Adults everywhere should have the wisdom Jason Summey displayed as a young teenager. High school dropouts are a terrible problem for society in general, but the perspective this young man presents in his little book is the unique view of a peer who sees and hears, first hand, the problems and difficulties that cause young people to make such a destructive decision. The way he describes the difficulties he encountered while trying to help is classmates is well worth the read. His compilation of reasons to stay in school that other students submitted, range from funny to serious to sad to just plain common sense. The value of this little book is evident by the fact that it is endorsed by everyone from Jason's principal, to his school superintendent, his congressman, the governor of his state and even President George Bush, Sr. It's a must read for anyone interested in education.

Knowing Jason Summey personally, i can tell you he is a great guy with a true passion for his work. I heard him give a speech on his program with his school and he is a truly amazing person. This book is the proof that there really is a spectacular reason to stay in school. Jason Summey has saved multiple pepole's careers, and this book is the proof. Thank you Jason Summey, you've helped me.

Harrrr... maties! As a huge pirate fan I love this book! Blackbeard Rules!!

Writing a whole book exclusively about Blackbeard would require a good deal more material than currently exists. The author does an excellent job of collecting together a good deal of the material available and organizing it in a chronological fashion. However, that is probably at most half of the book, the rest is rounded out with general pirate history from the period, as well as pictures and movie stills from the Blackbeard documentary. Ships sanded their decks before going into battle for the added traction it yielded; this book offers that added traction in the history of a notorious pirate.

The only fault I can find in the author's delivery, almost to the point of distraction, is the constant use of Thatch as Blackbeard's real name. Most author's that I have read over the past 10+ years favor the use of Teach as the preferred name. That aside, I found the story line well paced and easy to read. The added bits of pirate history, including the obligatory references to Anne Bonny and Mary Read, were well placed in the chronology to give the reader more of a reference to the time period.

The author has omitted an index, but does include a Sources and Further Reading page. The bottom line is that this is as good a biography of the pirate as I have found, and an enjoyable read to boot.
P-)

Very intriguing to me as I remember well the boarding house featured from my hometown, Lexington, NC, The Hege Inn, where my grandparents lived. Also this is the hometown of the author, Alice Evans
Sink, whose sister, Ann, was in my class. I spent many a Sunday afternoon eating lunch there and playing on those wide wraparound porches while the grownups rocked and visted.

The collaborative effort of Alice E. Sink (Associate Professor of English/Communications at High Point University, High Point, North Carolina) and North Carolina realtor Nickie Doyal, "Boarding House Reach: North Carolina's Entrepreneurial Women" provides a unique and informative perspective on North Carolina history as it chronicles the impressive achievements of hard working but hitherto obscure women that through such traumas as death, divorce, or abandonment turned their homes into boarding houses in order to financially support themselves. "Boarding House Reach" is an informed and fascinating history of boarding houses all across North Carolina along with their historical contexts. An impressive and original body of work, the authors conducted interviews and engaged in research over a period of several years. The result is seminal and thoroughly 'reader friendly' contribution to Women's Studies and American History reference collections and supplemental reading lists. A very highly recommended addition for academic and community library collections, "Boarding House Reach" could well serve as a template for similar studies for other states.

This is a very thoughfull and well researched book. Very Helpful in understanding what is happening in medicine and poverty in our world today.

I really enjoyed this book. If you're interested in Race,Class, and Gender studies within the context of Colonialism and it's impact on Western Medicine, this book is for you. It's original in the sense that the author uses well written and popular fiction books by famous women of color novelists. She looks at popular works such as Beloved, Bluest Eye, Salt Eater and Almanac of the Dead by analysing them within the context of the politics of medicine and history of oppression in Western Society. It's and engaging brilliant piece of work that I simply could not put down. Anyone who is a practitioner of Medicine (physicians as well as psychiatrists and pscyhoanalysts) who is sincerely interested in understanding the social impacts of institutionalized racism within Western Medical world will enjoy this work.

This book was reissued in a new edition by U. of Texas Press in 1999. In fact you used to list it regularly. Why is it not there now?

This is a superb introduction to the fiction of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges that should serve as a model for works of its type. All too often, studies of major authors degenerate into studies not of the writer in question but meta-studies on all manner of theoretical matters. The best criticism takes the reader not into the heart of a theory, but into the work of the writer being discussed, and Bell-Villada takes the reader deep into the heart of Borges?s strange and marvelous world.

The book is divided into three sections. The first part is largely biographical, hitting the highpoints of Borges?s life, as well as exploring some aspects of his personality. The author also discusses many of the relevant aspects of Argentine society and politics. This is done with considerable sympathy with Borges, despite the obvious sharp political differences between the author and Borges. In fact, one of the great appeals of the book as a whole is the fact that the author feels some distance from Borges at a number of points. All too often, critics turn into fans of writers, tending to see in them other versions of themselves, often becoming admirers because of a host of shared values. The author clearly finds Borges?s political positions late in life troubling, but hardly admires him as a creative writer any the less for that.

The bulk of the book consists of finely nuanced, detailed discussions of Borges?s major fictional works. For those unaware, Borges, while famed as one of the great writers of the past century, actually produced a rather minute body of work. His entire fictional output in English translation amounts to scarcely more than 500 pages. Of this output, much of that?mainly his first collection of stories and much of his later work?falls short of his best work. Most of his great work is contained in FICCIONES and EL ALEPH, an astonishingly small body of work for a writer of such stature. Bell-Villada discusses all of these stories with great insight, including such details surrounding their publication or context that are relevant. The final section of the book details with Borges?s final works, and includes an interesting discussion of some of the political questions connected with his work.

One thing that makes this book especially useful is that it can be equally useful both to specialists in the field of Latin American literature and readers encountering Borges?s work for the first time. And betraying my own bias, it never, ever gets bogged down in mere theorizing. The focus is always on Borges?s work itself, and not on considerations extraneous matters.

Larry Ivers has written a thoroughly documented volume covering every aspect of British military service in colonial Georgia, beginning while the area was still under the aegis of South Carolina. The building of fortifications, regulation of traders, diplomacy with the various Indian tribes, scouting by land and water, disease, death and boredom on a lonely frontier are all part of this highly entertaining read. Maps and illustrations are plentiful and most helpful. This book should be of value to anyone interested in Pre-Revolutionary Georgia, living historians, wargamers, and students of Native American studies.

British Drums on the Southern Frontier is the finest history of colonial British warfare on the Southern frontier, as well as a fantastic biography of James Edward Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony of Georgia. This is probably the most widely "bibliographied" book by modern writers of Georgia history and has, until now, only been available in libraries and as an expensive used book.

Prof. Christopher Dunn has written an impressive book about music and its role in the history and development of Brazilian Counterculture. "Brutality Garden: Tropicalia and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture" begins by covering the history of Brazilian intellectual modernism (modernismo), focusing on the contributions of Oswald de Andrade and Mario de Andrade, as well as the early development of a progressive political impulse in early to mid 20th century Brazil. Two elements emerge early: the growth of a 'orthodox' socialism in the arts and music, and a concern over the authenticity of Brasilian cultural production both for internal consumption and external export. Musically, this concern with authenticity focused on the dual phenomena of Carmen Miranda, and Bossa Nova, both of which carry either heavy non-Brazilian influences and uncomfortable racial stereotypes.

Meanwhile, the progressive impulse is subverted in a right-wing military coup (supported and encouraged by the United States) which profoundly affects the Brazilian arts and the public. Television and Opera maintain a certain degree of freedom from censorship at first, but revolutionary socialism seems unable to articulate an effective resistance.

Enter Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. In this matrix of poltical and nationalistic uncertainty, and through the use of pastiche, dissassociative imagery, irony, parody, and a concern with the everyday frustrations of Brazilians, they construct an insurgent music that gains a wide reach and audience, while mostly flying underneath the dictatorship's radar screen. Refusing the government's attempts to force a highly nationalistic concept of unity on the populace, Tropicalia uses deploys the benign imagery of tropical paradise, only to subvert them with references (sometimes overt, sometimes oblique by necessity) to social and political trauma. The more orthodox leftists, of course, criticize Tropicalia for not directly inciting the masses to act, and instead promoting escapism. Yet Tropicalia's moment in the sun is not only threaded in the past of Brazilian historical discourse on modernity, but serves to feed a growing countercultural movement in Brazilian culture throughout the late 1960s and 1970's. By foregrounding areas of Brazilian socio-economic underdevelopment, Afro-Brazilian religion (Macumba, Candomble), and the historical legacy of Portugese colonialism, Tropicalia stakes out a lasting ground, and a usable past for Brazilian counterculture.

The book is heavy on history, and light on the explicit citation of theory, although its playful and trickster hermeneutic (well suited to its subject matter) is everywhere. Also playing a prominant role in the book is Candomble. Candomble religion plays an imporant role in the history of Tropicalia, and in the larger history of Brazilian metaphor and music. Candomble practices and practitioners occur in artistic discourses concerning the nature and center of Brazilian modernismo. Such as the 1971 painting "Primeria missa no Brasili" by Glauco Rodrigues, the song "Batmacumba" on "Tropicalia , ou panis et circensis" and on Os Mutandes first recording , Veloso's "Triste Bahia," a 1970's pop revival with roots as early as the 1930's. but especially prescient with Gil Gilberto and Veloso, and Gal Costa's tour of "Doces Barbaros" in 1976. 1977 saw Veloso's album "Bicho" and Gilberto Gil's "Refavela," both intimately concerned with Black consciousness and Candomble. Even as 1997 Gil's album "Quanta" wove discourses of the Internet with Orisha worship.

A dense book that weaves from literary and painting analysis to economic development theory and musical hermeneutics--this is a carefully written and edited interdisciplinary work of Cultural History and American/Atlantic Studies.

The author recommends the CD "Tropicalia Essentials" for use with the book. It is available on Amazon.com

After reading the book , I would also suggest "Tropicalia, ou panis et circensis" -- the original release of which appears to have been a crystalizing moment in the Tropicalia movement.

An outstanding history of the late -1960s surrealist-hippie rock movement known as "tropicalia." Although tons has already been written about Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and the other heroes of the tropicalia scene in the Brazilian press and academia, it's been pretty slim pickings in the English-speaking world... up until now, that is! Christopher Dunn, who co-edited "Brazilian Popular Music & Globalization," skillfully combines hard academic research with a relatively light, conversational prose. This is dense yet captivating material, as Dunn deftly explores the historical and philosophical connections to tropicalia -- an art movement that was originally conceived as cross-genre and multi-media -- and previous Brazilian movements such as modernismo, which was Brazil's homegrown 1920s variant of the "futurist" philosophy that swept through Europe in the early 20th Century. Dunn also deftly tells the story of tropicalia's explosive growth as a subversive, psychedelic musical genre, and the harsh political repression it was met with by the dictatorship which held power from 1964 to 1985. This is a vital book, of interest to the many newfound fans of this wild musical style, or to art historians tracking the worldwide path of dada-ism and surrealist art. Highly recommended.

This text was very well written. To this reader who was also reared on Lamming and Naipaul and the rest, there is nothing more gratifying than a beautiful sentence, and Neptune gives us lots of those. Lovely. The spicy tale of the Yanks in the Windies is, as Neptune insists, sometimes glossed over as a Williams-inspired legacy floats on in our various discussions. But indeed, none of what happened during or after the Americans populated Chaguaramas en masse is as cut-and-dry as your average old-time calypso would have you believe. Neptune pieces together a refreshing new narrative that thrusts agency back into women's fingers, exposes the clandestine operations of white hegemony's champions and re-weaves the threads of Trinidadian nationalism. All the while, he delights us with clever, modern usage of the contemporary language rapport during the occupational shenanigans subtly and tastefully. It is a lovely read for anyone, and West Indians in particular will probably be quite tickled throughout. The "Coda" was quite a teaser, particularly the last couple of paragraphs. Neptune opens a world of conversational possibilities for his future books, which you'll be eagerly anticipating after putting this one down.

Peace!

I confess I've never been one to pick up an 'academic' history book in hopes of getting a pleasurable read, however this book breaks the scholarly mold. Though I find Neptune to be heady and thoroughly introspective, his writing lacks, and thankfully so, the jargon and esotericism that can keep me from connecting with a book. 'Caliban and the Yankees' brings up some great and interesting points about revolution and forced me to revisit my image of the revolutionist--here, the disenfranchised people finally get recognition for an often overlooked branch of intelligence that can not be studied in the universities or acquired through a privileged upbringing.
The US occupation in Trinidad, as told by Neptune, becomes a salacious tale of race and class relations, the construction of a national identity and the people who took it upon themselves to reshape and define the culture of its land for the history of its future.
Not only a solid read, but a good one.

The best book I've read on the lighthouse. Can't wait to buy the revised copy that includes the moving of the lighthouse. Mr. Carr is very knowledgeable on the history of this wonderful lighthouse. I've lived in North Carolina for many years and thought of the lighthouse as near the beach. Can't wait to visit it with all the knowledge I have now. Thank you Dawson Carr for a wonderful book. A double thumbs up to you.

I have been a resident of North Carolina all my life, but unfortunately never really had much of an education in the history of my state. I have taken it upon myself to become more knowledgeable in this genre. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse: Sentinel of the Shoals is an easy-to-read book which gives the entire history of the lighthouses. (Until I read the book I never knew there had been more than one Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.) This book describes in detail the importance of the lighthouse to mariners and those living on the NC coast. Considering the wealth of information and the length of this book, I find it a wonderful resource for NC History teachers to use in the classroom. It's also a wonderful book for those of us who do not teach history classes, but yearn for knowledge about the "Old North State." The next book I plan to read about North Carolina will be Dawson Carr's second book, Gray Phantoms of the Cape Fear, which describes the importance of the ships called blockade runners during the Civil War.