North Carolina Books

These books are an excellent source for information about North Carolina troops and units during the Civil War. The records are taken from the official state records kept by the units and available through the North Carolina State Archives.

I was lucky to find and purchase volumes I - XIII, which are all out of print. I have also purchased Volumes XIV and XV. All of these books are excellent resources to acquire information on soldiers who served from North Carolina. There are only 1400 copies of each volume printed, and most complete sets are only found in North Carolina libraries. For the genealogist, historian, etc., I would highly recommend these books.

Peter J. Robinson has written an excellent book on the diverse
and often extreme weather and climate of my beautiful state of
North Carolina.
Complete with maps,photos,and tables,the author does a fine
job in his coverage of our weather.
Robinson is careful not to omit some worthy regard to the
greatest of Tar Heel storms,including hurricanes Hazel,Fran,
and Floyd.The devastating tornadoes of 1984 and the white Christmas of 1989 are also given justice.
Most of the book is provided in a generalized form of writing,
yet it is done in a very interesting and professional manner.And
what could not be interesting about our weather? With temperatures that have ranged anywhere from -34 to as high as
110 degrees.We have suffered through several major hurricanes,
extreme heat waves and drought,as well as devastating floods.And
we lay claim to one of the widest tornadoes in history-2.5 miles!
Greg Fishel delivers a most intriguing foreward to this book.
This book is a great educational tool for anyone interested in our state`s weather and climate.Also,it serves as a nice keepsake for any weather enthusiasts who are native to our great state.

I bought this for my daughter who is 5 and she loved it. We were able to match many flowers in the book to her delight! I was so sorry when I can in here to see it was out of print! What a great book for a child in any location. PLease reprint this book!

Having just moved to the Mountains of North Carolina and an amatuer nature photobrapher, I needed to know where to go for hikes that had great displays of wildflowers. This book appears to be excellant. It isn't spring yet so only time will tell, but I am very hopeful.

All true Carolina fans should buy this book and read over the games that players such as Sean May, Raymond Felton, and Rashad McCants won to get us to the top of the college basketball world! This book discusses every single game of the 05-06 season in very good detail! It also has player profiles of the players that played at Carolina during that season including Sean May, Raymond Felton, Rashad McCants, and Jawad Williams!

Any Carolina fan should buy this book to read and for great memories of our 5th Championship season at UNC! I hope my review was helpful to you!

Alyce Pickelsimer Nadeau lives atop a Blue Ride in Ashe County, North Carolina, surrounded by a natural splendor. There she feeds wild animals, reads, writes, gardens and observes. Her poems showcased in Observations Of An Uppity Woman offer keen insights based on her blended roles and experiences as wife, mother, teacher, counselor, musician, herbalist, nature lover, and student of philosophy. Warning: She sits in my lap/wee girl, seed of my seed,/because the Snow White video/has a scary part./How can I explain to her/at thirty months of age/that the/"happily ever after,"/"someday my prince will come,"/notions/hold more inherent adversity/than one jealous queen/before a mirror?/That giving your self away/is truly the scary part?

Every place as special as Ocracoke should have a writer like Pat Garber to bring it to life.

Pat Garber has spent years getting to know Ocracoke, its beaches, marshes, seas, seashells, seasons, storms, and wildlife, and in this book and its companion book, Ocracoke Odyssey, she tells Ocracoke's story with knowledge and with heart. Each chapter stars a different character, maybe a dolphin, a pelican, a turtle, a bear, a storm, a comet. Garber tells their stories through accurate natural history, through personal encounters, and through a deep sense of wonder. She loves the beauty in nature, but she also feels the pain of an injured bird and the terrible power of a hurricane. She sees great dramas in the smallest things. She sees with the eyes of a poet. She quietly teaches the value of a life immersed in nature.

She encourages us to wander and to wonder and to find ourselves in a seashell or a flower: "It is slowing down, allowing not only the feet but the mind as well to wander where they will; to turn down new paths with no specific destinations in mind. It is a way of opening the soils of our minds so that new thoughts, new ideas, new dreams can take seed and flower; not the ones we deliberately plant, but those that may float in on a wisp of seaform or a moonbeam."

"Ocracokers" describes the people, the village, and the island of Okracoke on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It's about as isolated a place as can be found in the eastern United States, still reachable only by ferry. Traditionally, a few hundred people eked out a living on the island by fishing, piloting vessels, and salvaging wrecked vessels -- of which there were plenty in the treacherous waters off Cape Hatteras. Blackbeard the pirate raided in these waters. In recent decades, Ocracoke has become a tourist destination, but it's still relatively unspoiled by the standards of ticky-tacky beach resorts. Most of the island is now a National Park

The author, a high school teacher, is a descendant of the early residents of Ocracoke and he interlaces stories of his own experiences with interviews of old-timers, historical accounts, and descriptions of present day (1980s) trends and issues. His chapter-long account of his mullet fishing expedition with a pair of old time fishermen is superb. He has chapters on hunting, churches, the school (94 students from K to 12), hurricanes, and history including World War II and the growth of tourism. He also devotes a full chapter to a bittersweet interview with the matriarch of the only African-American family on the island.

"Ocracokers" is a complete and authoritative account of life in a small unique community. The text is enhanced by black and white photographs, mostly of people, and maps of the village and island, although a better map showing places mentioned in the text would be welcome. It's worth your time to read the book and to visit Ocracoke.

Smallchief

This is makes for good browsing OR handy reference. You can discover the meaning of an unfamiliar word or the origin of a word you know. For that matter, you can find new terms with which to jazz up your own sentences.

It's particularly interesting for us Americans to learn about British slang along with our own. Did you know a "bath-dodger" is, in British-speak, "an unwashed or habitually dirty individual"? Some of these are worth adopting!

It's easy on the eyes and easy to find what you want (plenty of white space, and main entries in bold type).

Definitions are written in clear ordinary language, and examples are given where useful.

There's everything from the graphically sexual to the criminal to the eminently printable like "mugwump" and "penguin suit". There are ones you never heard of and there are vocabulary staples ("cool", "OK"). This was published in 1990, so anything newer won't be here, but that's not saying much.