Georgia Books

I found this book fascinating. It provides a splendid view of a career in the Foreign Service and an inside look at some of the policy-making process for dealing with foreign policy problems. It is particularly strong on the crises with the Soviets over Berlin and on US-West German relations during the Cold War.

Stories and authentic recipes from the south's most legendary tea room/restaurant (1928 - 1962). My favorites were the Hot Turkey on Egg Bread sandwich, Baked Macaroni and Cheese and the Chicken Salad with Tomato Aspic Ring. With easy to follow directions, I had no trouble making them. The Tea Room Notes at the end of each recipe helped me to understand why the spot was such a popular place with the southern ladies to have lunch after a morning of shopping in downtown Atlanta. I could easily see them heading for the elevator wearing hats and gloves. I would recommend the purchase of this cookbook with its lovely stories to anyone looking for that special gift for Mom, Grandmom, special friend.

Thurmond's book (recipeint of the Georgia Historical Society's Lilla Hawes Award, and listed by the Georgia Center for the Book as one of "The 25 Books All Georgians Should Read") argues that Georgia was founded on high moral principle, although all practical arguments for a slave free Georgia, including its role as buffer for Carolina plantations, were used by its founder, Oglethorpe, to "sell" his idea.

Against the assumption that only a slave economy could succeed in the South, Thurmond describes Darien and Ebenezer, successful settlements without slaves. Their residents, unlike those of Savannah (the clamorous malcontents), supported Oglethorpe in his resistance to the change in charter.

"Oglethorpe took particular exception to an assertion by David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, that dark skinned people were genetically inferior to white Europeans and incapable of civilized behavior. `What a historian!' he exclaimed, `He must never have heard of Shishak, the great Sesostris, of Hannibal, or of Tirhaka, king of Ethiopia, whose very name frightened the mighty Assyrian monarch.' "Oglethorpe was certain that if Hume had studied the matter, he would have discovered `that Africa had produced a race of heroes.'", page 41.

Oglethorpe predicted that if slaves were allowed in Georgia, that institution would one day destroy Georgia. He was right, and we've been rebuilding ever since 1865.

"The knowledge of letters even in the lowest degree, is too often supposed to carry with it a sort of qualification for an easy life, and an exemption from a laborious one and the latter being the Negroes lot, they might perhaps bear it with more unwillingness, or seek some desperate means of ridding themselves of it." Henry Melchoir Muhlenger, a Georgia colonist, page 35.

Thurmond goes on to recount the history of education of blacks in Georgia, the statutes on manumission (Slave owners who, in deference to the concept of jubilee in Biblical slavery, or to the fact that often the slaves in question were their own children and the mothers of their children, wished to free their slaves on their death beds were, ultimately, forbidden by state law from doing so, just as slaves were ultimately forbidden to buy their own freedom.), and the history of black soldiers in the Revolution, Spanish Florida, Seminole country, and the Civil War. "If you wish to know hell before your time, go to St. Simons and be hunted ten days by n*****s." A soldier in a Confederate landing party, page 197.

Regarding the question of whether the War Between the States was fought to preserve the union, over states rights, or over slavery, Thurmond quotes a Confederate Colonel "...after slavery was dead, the Confederacy clung to its putrid body and expired with it" Colonel William Oates, page 253. Had white Southerners, in other words, allied with their black brothers, the Confederacy could have been preserved at the expense of slavery; but too many despised negroes more than they loved independence.

Michael Thurmond's Freedom would make an excellent high school and college Georgia history text; there is certainly nothing like it now.

Also recommended: The Clamorous Malcontents, Children of Pride

I eat tons of vegetables, that's why I'm so healthy, and this cookbook is one of my two all time favorites. I loved it enough to buy one for my daughter and her fiance because they are members of a small local farm co-op. The book contains not only recipes but also useful advice and info about nearly all everyday fresh vegetables. Like what to look for when picking them out, best times to buy/grow/harvest, how to store, etc. Not too much info though, just enough without going overboard. It is not a vegetarian cookbook, some of the recipes have meat in them but I just leave out the meat and it still turns out great (better). This book is invaluable when someone gives you a bunch of something from their garden or produce department cast-offs. Just find the veggies in the book and you will see ways to cook them. There are several recipes where you simply have to use a certain measurement of ANY vegetable!!!

Being a professional artist for almost 30 years, from time to time ,
I myself, will go through a collage stage and this book hit a homerun for me.
I am a colorist and when I find a book with color...as with this book,
it is a true plus. The book also allows readers into the private life of
the artist. He loved poetry, which shows up in the collages. There are
29 full color plates showing us his journey to perfection. He also
loved artists and you can see that influence in his collages, which have
more clarity than his paintings.I would recommend this book to anyone
working with clarity of color. 4 star.

If you enjoy seeing Georgia in old photographs, you'll love this collection of postcard photos. Just about every place is represented here, from the big cities to the tiniest hamlets. Buy it, you'll find yourself looking at it again and again, especially after visiting some of the places depicted. -Marianna

I do not know how Jacques Barzun did it. He takes us through five hundred years of Western cultural history, lards the book with the most esoteric and complex information, and yet somehow manages to make this book a breathless "page-turner." His sure-footed erudition grounds him so securely that he can make forays into the outré, the weird, the seemingly trivial, and then come back to relate it to a baseline of solid historical narrative. One sees connections never noticed, or even imagined, before. One learns of important figures who somehow have avoided the glare of modern scrutiny. I had the feeling I was in the presence of the best college professor I could ever hope to have, and was never intimidated; I just didn't want to miss the next class. [Maybe that's because I knew there was no final exam!]

One appreciates Barzun's decidedly conservative notion that old values matter. He gives political correctness a clop in the chops. He defends some currently dismissed figures like Columbus. And even though he is not terribly sanguine about current cultural trends, he is basically optimistic about the future.

Oh, to have Professor Barzun and me sitting on the two ends of a log, talking, talking. Wait: that's what we have here. Lucky me. Lucky us.

In this volume, Joseph Reidy traces the development of Central Georgia from the period of its earliest settlement following the Revolutionary War through Reconstruction, focusing on economic, political, and social changes. Prior to 1830, most Georgians were yeoman farmers seeking self-sufficiency, owning only a few slaves with whom they lived and worked in a familiar manner. During the cotton boom of the 1830s, large planters moved into the area, establishing the plantation system, large numbers of slaves, and the ganging method of production. The depression of the 1840s allowed the planters to make gains at the expense of yeomen, as they bought up land and slaves at low prices from debt-burdened farmers. The process of planter consolidation and domination continued into the 1850s when cotton prices rose. Reidy argues that to respond to increased demand, rather than practicing scientific agriculture to increase output, planters in central Georgia simply increased the workload of their slaves, hiring additional overseers from the newly dispossessed white lower class. The increased tensions between planters, struggling yeomen, overburdened slaves, and the new landless poor whites played out in the Secession crisis and period of Reconstruction.

Despite their claims that a slave republic was the only form of government capable of producing harmonious social relations, planters were aware that the growing poverty in the region undermined this argument and threatened to turn the yeomanry and poor whites against them. Evidence of this division could be seen in the growth of party politics, with planters, town dwellers, and immigrants preferring the Democratic Party, and yeomen and poor whites turning to the Know-Nothings. Planters hoped to alleviate social tensions by funding poor relief, public education, and internal improvements that would bring new jobs, but the yeomanry, while approving in theory of public works, rejected them out of opposition to the higher taxes such projects would entail. Once the Civil War broke out, planter actions only furthered the destruction of the social and economic relations they had hoped to save, as planters refused to devote all resources to winning the war at the expense of current profits. They continued to plant cotton when grain was needed to supply troops and would not contract out their slaves to war materiel producers at low prices, resulting in rising prices for yeomen families who could not maintain self-sufficiency with their household heads away fighting the war and decreasing purchasing power for white laborers. Planters were unable to feed or protect their slaves from Union troops, destroying slaves' faith in paternalism and forcing them to take care of themselves, which prepared them for independence following emancipation.

Following the war, planters hoped to exercise the same control over free blacks as they had over slaves, but with the help of the Freedman's Bureau and Radical Republicans, free blacks negotiated for more control over working conditions, their families, religious institutions, and rights as citizens. While facing legal discrimination at every turn, they were in many cases able to negotiate contracts as sharecroppers, educate their children, exercise their right to vote (though not to hold office), and establish their own churches and political movements. Yeomen also benefited somewhat in that they now had unprecedented ability to hire black laborers, but were harmed by new laws limiting hunting and fishing on unenclosed lands, which diminished their ability to subsist as much as it did that of freedmen. Both black and white non-planters increasingly turned to wage labor, marking central Georgia's transition to a capitalist economic system. Planters lost a good deal of their political and economic dominance, but maintained as much of their social power as they could under the newly bourgeois order.

Raw Deal

Once in a while you read a book chock full of information you didn't know that you didn't know, or more importantly that you didn't know you needed to know. "The Fruits of Their Labor," by Cindy Hahamovitch, is such a book. The subtitle - Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 - only hints at the breadth of the subject matter, which stretches to include an economic and social history of agriculture in states from Maine to Florida and the Deep South. Though the author traces the changes in farming and truck-gardening that resulted from the partial mechanization of the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the focus of the book is on the conversion of traditional year-round farm-hands into seasonal laborers, and thus to the lowest-on-the-totem-pole migrants whose welfare was of minimal interest to ever-larger farm businessmen. More than half of the book deals with the twelve years of the New Deal and the Second World War, revealing how ineffective the "reformers" were in the face of opposition from racists and conservatives of both parties. It's no surprise to learn that FDR threw farm labor to the wolves, excluding it from the benefits of collective bargaining. Likewise, it's hardly shocking to realize how little understanding of rural realities the urban reformers of the era were, in their hopes that paternalism and a little health education would restore the agrarian paradise envisioned by Tom Jefferson. The value of this book comes from observing the mechanisms of interest groups - owners, to be blunt - in turning the efforts of government at all levels to the service of their selfish interests. It's also quite astonishing to observe how capitalistic farm-owners and government at all levels colluded, first in the callous exploitation of recent immigrants from Italy and then in the cultivation of the harvest of easily manipulated "undocumented" workers from Mexico, the Caribbean, and Asia, which the same people are still hypocritically ranting against. And finally, at the broadest level, this text is a study of the malfunctional interaction of federal and state governments at cross purposes, with the worst outcomes invariably befalling the humblest citizens.

I know something about the history of agriculture in the Far West, from the days of the Southern Pacific "Octopus" to the heroic struggles of Cesar Chavez and the UFW. I know it academically, but also personally. During my high school summers in California in the late 1950s, I was a "fruit picker" - trailer court white trash - with most of my earnings going to feed my family while my father blew his paychecks on another recent-model car. I picked string beans, hops, tomatoes, and prunes. It was filthy, fatiguing, and unhealthy work, and a source of shame when my classmates heard of it. The idea that bringing in the harvest is healthful and noble was and is cow flop; breathing dust and pesticides in the hot sun for ten or twelve hours a day is not a pleasant interlude. I finally looked old enough to get a job picking apples from a ladder, the cleanest and most profitable sort of field work, if not the safest. At age eighteen, I was legally old enough to work in the cannery. It was still back-breaking; as the freshest face, my task was to lift boxes of apple sauce from a conveyor belt to a palette, and I estimate that I handled as much as thirty thousand pounds of apple sauce a night. But it was a union cannery! For work that was if anything less skilled than picking, I got paid an hourly wage that was eight times higher than I ever earned on the ladder. It was the Teamsters' Union, by the way. I kept my membership all through my four years at Harvard College, where two of my classmates were Richard Darman, Bush I's budget director, and Boyden Gray, the Bush Family legal counsel.

The history of farm labor and thwarted unionization east of the Mississippi is, if anything, even more dastardly than that of the West Coast. It's not a story that makes for pleasant reading, though Ms. Hahamovitch writes clearly and unpretentiously. Perhaps the best way to capture your interest will be to offer a few snippets.

Page 165 - Discussing the market-place economics of farmer labor, she writes: If labor prices are taken as a measure of farm labor supply , then it is difficult to explain why truck farmers complained of labor shortages when they were apparently well supplied with labor. [This was in the years just before WW2.] However, the notion of a "labor market" that operates according to rules of supply and demand ignores the impact of custom and culture, of deeply held assumptions about what labor is "worth." [The assumptions she refers to are the racial and class prejudices which have shadowed every aspect of labor history in the Land of Equality.]
Page 178 - Discussing the WW2 importation of workers from the Caribbean and Mexico, managed by the federal government, she writes: The WFA was reluctant to include Puerto Ricans in the program because, as U.S, citizens, they could not be "repatriated" at the end of a contracted period. The solution...was to withhold a portion of each worker's pay and deposit in a Puerto Rican bank. The workers.... could not withdraw these funds until they returned home....
On the next page, she describes the use of POWs to oversupply the labor pool in order to keep workers from successfully demanding higher piece rates: POWs represented a particular challenge to federal authorities, because although enlisted men could be forced to work...they could hardly be fired or deported. They were in some ways in a position analogous to that of slaves, but unlike slaves they could neither be whipped nor sold.

Pow! Did you know that the USA used forced labor during WW2? Actually, that's not nearly as shocking as the laws passed in several Southern states that required men to work in the fields or be immediately drafted, and women to work in agriculture or be jailed. Black men and women, of course. There were also laws during both World Wars that required agricultural workers to remain in specific counties, and those laws were enforced by local authorities even when various federal agencies tried to recruit workers to save crops in truly labor-short areas.

To recount all of Ms. Hahamovitch's amazing revelations, I'd need to quote the whole book. One further thought: States' Rights was born as a tactic to defend slavery, and States' Rights has remained inextricable from racism ever since. If that thesis seems unpalatable to you, then you are one of those who don't yet know what you don't know, and you'd better start informing yourself by reading "The Fruits of Their Labor" before you denounce me as a spawn of liberalism.

"This tiny candlelit dining room has no menu - instead, choose from raw ingredients brought directly to your table then cooked to order. Offerings change daily, but the heavenly results - succulent lobster with spicy Parmesan sauce, Chinese noodles with smoked fish in a saffron-mastic infusion - have made it a perennial favorite. Service is impeccably personal and the check arrives in an antique music box."

Of all the guides I've seen for Athens, this one has some very unique and cozy recommendations for restaurants. If you are going to Athens as much for the food as the architecture, this guide will gives you "the draw," "the scene," and a "hot tip" for each restaurant. Reading through the downtown attractions, you feel you are truly there because the descriptions are so detailed.

The main sections include information on art spaces, beaches, seasonal highlights, cafes, candlelit bars, classic dining, hotels, places by the sea, clubs, rooms with views, shows under the stars and tables with a view. Four sections about the Athens Experience presents opportunity for either a Classic Athens tour, Hot-and-Cool Itinerary, Downtown Athens visit, By-the-Water Athens escape.

Delphi, Napflion, Olympia, Thessaloniki and the Wineries of Attica are also featured. The Ilands: Hydra, Mykonos, Rhodes, Santorini and Skiathos are briefly discussed and given a few pages each.

This book contains some of the best food/travel writing I've seen in a long time. The Fun Seeker's Athens is worth buying for the writing style and cozy suggestions! Reading this guide will make you wonder why you are still at home! They make Athens sound like the place to be, so romantic.

~The Rebecca Review