Georgia Books

This is an excelent piece of litterature. It delves deep into the persecution of the african-american population during the Jim-Crow south. This is an excelent piece of litterature. Do not hestitate to purchase this fine book.

This is a powerful book, much more than a story of one city. It's an AMERICAN story. Highly recommended for anyone interested in race relations in the USA.

Ron Marlar (a retired USAF officer, college professor, school teacher, living currently in Florida)

Composed with love, knowledge and talent by James Barfield, Conie Mac Darnell, Sterling Everett, Julie Lange, Chuck Leavell, Jennifer Shermer Pack, Karen Di Prima and others the Macon Sketchbook is a beautiful, poetic and moving work of history.

I am a son of the South. I have passed through often, stayed in before, and visited recently in Macon, Ga. On the most recent visit I took the time to tour many of the historical sites. I understand and appreciate the excellent artwork, words, photography of, at least behind, the Macon Sketchbook. I grasp the love, knowledge, talent and care that those named above and many others put into this book.

Produced especially by those of the South who worked on the book and published by a publishing house based in Macon, the Sketchbook captures a part of the South that may have been lost if not for this book. That the book publisher is in Macon recommends the book to aficionados of such a book as described by me and others, the others on some sites listing this book being community or company reviewers.

The Macon Sketchbook is most affordable at the lower end but expensive at the top range of the prices. It is well worth the money for one who appreciates excellence in artwork, history of the South and the US, poetry that actually rhymes, and valued material from other good to great works.

Out of print now but available in limited copies, new and used, through reputable booksellers like those that Amazon.com lists, I consider the Macon Sketchbook a rare find for collectors of fine books. I would like to see all remaining copies of the Macon Sketchbook bought and gracing the homes of those who appreciate such excellent work. The Macon Sketchbook is a treasure to be shared with future generations of children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Only one thing troubles me about the listings of the book but not enough to deter me from recommending it highly. In some listings an editor is credited as author of the book. That certainly is not the case given all the others who worked on this book, the truly talented historians, artists, illustrators, writers, photographers and publisher.

One must wonder really what exactly would an editor have to do with, for, in or on a book given all the roles of the many others credited for this book? I am thinking of the editor only in a sort of continuity role, like one in a movie production who insures consistency from one scene to the next so the cowboy always rides either a paint or some solid-colored horse.

Such confusion, obfuscation, contradiction and claims to fame that defy easy verification or verification at all are not unusual for work in which the editor is involved. Please see my review of Buckhead: Atlanta's First Address, another book by Indigo Custom Publishing and also available through Amazon.com. See especially the Comments section, all 12 posts as of Nov. 29, 2007, following the only review of that book as of the date of my review, Oct. 1, 2007. Please see also my review of Relics in the Closet since it connects to the editor as revealed in the Buckhead review.

Apparently I am the only independent, reader reviewer of the Macon Sketchbook. I do so even at this late date because I recommend the Macon Sketchbook so highly. I do not recommend the other books - Buckhead or Relics in the Closet.

Actually, I wrote the book! The last I heard Windsor Press has gone out of business and there were 10 copies left at that time. I believe copies are still available at the Middle Georgia Historical Society on High Street in Macon, GA, and maybe at The Golden Bough, a specialty bookstore in Macon, GA. K. Simm

This is real macho poetry by a gifted poet and Montana resident who happens to have the heart and mind of a rough stock rider and outdoorsman. Zarzyski writes of hunting, fishing, rodeo, castrating horses, going to mountain oyster feeds, all with a kind of enthusiasm that also embraces the sentiments that go with appreciating the turns of seasons, toboggan riding at night, the picking of huckleberries, the sound of a shovel ringing in winter wheat, the ache of a good friend's injury, and the ironies of Minuteman missile silos. There are 31 poems in this collection, each written with the hard, tough-minded, and generous edge of a man in boots and Wranglers, who seems shot straight from the heart of the West.

I can't say enough good things about this book. Howes, the author, has written an easy to understand and easy to follow book that includes all types of decorative screens.

First, Howes describes the basic instructions for each type of screen. Howes shows how to create frame screens and solid panel screens. Then, she gives instructions and materials for particular projects, as well as how long it should typically take to finish each project. Howes includes various design styles for each type of screen. Plus, you can easily make your own projects using the author's basic instructions. She also includes patterns you can blow up to create the unique shape of each screen.

Some sample projects are a country style frame screen made with gingham and chicken wire, an upholstered solid panel screen, a music score solid panel screen, which has the shape of an old music stand and is painted and decoupaged.

I have been looking for a while for a book like this one on making decorative screens. Let me save you the trouble. Buy this book!

I read this autobiography in college, and it took my breath away. White, who was executive secretary of the NAACP until his death in the mid 1950s, writes candidly of his work and life in the fight for civil rights. The book title is a play on his last name and the fact that his mixed ancestry left him with light skin, blonde hair and blue eyes. He used his appearance to help him get evidence in lynching investigations, and was successful because the lynchers thought he was white (being born and raised in Atlanta didn't hurt either!) The man was no saint (ditched his wife to marry another woman, a practice I don't endorse) but you cannot read this book without having some kind of change in your thinking on race relations--then or now.

This tour de force historical perspective of nature leads the reader into a provocative search for understanding the human role on Earth. Not for the narrow-minded and/or Jerry Falwell.

Offers a description of the arrangement of O'Connor's manuscripts in the Flannery O'Connor Collection in the Ina D. Russell Library at Georgia College & State University and notes that they illustrate how she "often produced dozens of variants of single episodes."

Discusses in particular the large number of drafts that exist for her last two stories -- "Parker's Back" and "Judgement Day" -- and indicates that they "suggest the amount of rewriting that O'Connor normally did [for her stories] and, consequently, how many of the drafts for her other fiction are missing."

Entries in the catalog "describe the physical appearance of the manuscripts in the folders and files, and the plot, characters and stylistic and formal characteristics of their contents." Details the arrangement of the 905 folders in 297 files and how they are cross-referenced to other related files. Provides an index which "shows the order of the files and folders...[and] how [Driggers'] file numbers differ from Dunn's. Also included is a timneline indicating dates O'Connor is believed to have worked on each piece of fiction.

R. Neil Scott / Middle Tennessee State University

While Ricky Jay has long been considered one of the world's great sleight-of-hand artists, his career is further distinguished by the remarkable variety of his accomplishments as an author, actor, historian, and consultant.

His one man show Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants was directed by David Mamet and garnered for Mr. Jay the Lucille Lortel and Obie Awards for Outstanding Achievement. Subsequent productions were staged at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theater, the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles, The Spoletto Festival in Charleston and the Old Vic in London. His most recent show, Ricky Jay: On the Stem, also directed by Mr. Mamet, just closed a seven-month critically acclaimed run in New York City.

As an actor, Mr. Jay debuted in the Joseph Papp production of Midsummer Night's Dream at the New York Shakespeare Festival. He has appeared in David Mamet's films: House of Games, Homicide, Things Change, Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, and Heist. He can be seen in many other films including Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and the James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. He also starred in the heralded episode of the X-Files, "The Great Maleeni."

A serious student of his art, he has been elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society for whom he authored Many Mysteries Unraveled: Conjuring Literature in America 1786-1874. He is a contributor to The Cambridge Guide to American Theater and has defined the terms of his art for the Encyclopædia Britannica. Mr. Jay's book, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women was published to critical and popular acclaim and was voted one of the outstanding books of the year by the Theater Library Association and one of the "Notable Books of the Year" by The New York Times Book Review, which hailed his work in a rave front page review.

As a writer and speaker on subjects as varied as conjuring literature, con games, sense perception and unusual entertainments, Jay has authored numerous articles and has delivered many lecture/ demonstrations. Among his presentations are:

"Hocus Pocus in Perfection: Four Hundred Years of Conjuring and Conjuring Literature," the Harold Smith Memorial Lecture at Brown University;

"Splendors of Decaying Celluloid" with Errol Morris, Rosamond Purcell and Bill Morrison at the New York Institute for the Humanities.

"The Origins of the Confidence Game",for the conference of Police Against Confidence Crime;

"Chirosophi: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Conjuring Literature," at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California;

"Fast and Loose: The Techniques and Literature of Cheating" at the William Andrew Clark Memorial Library, UCLA;

"The Mystery of Fasting Impostors," and "The Avant Garde Art of Armless Calligraphers" at Amherst College;

"Sense, Perception, & Nonsense" at the University of Rhode Island Festival of the Arts;

and the keynote address at the International Design Conference in Aspen on "Illusion as Truth."

He has spoken on "Prose & Cons: The Early Literature of Cheating" in the Pforzheimer Lecture Series on the book arts at the New York Public Library and at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and on "Magic & Science" for the T.E.D. Conference (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) in Monterey, California.

Mr. Jay is a founder of the biennial Conference on Magic History and is the former curator of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts. He is the author and co-designer of The Magic Magic Book, an illustrated history of the earliest trick conjuring books, published in the Writers and Artists Series of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His book Jay's Journal of Anomalies, based on his fine press periodical of the same name, was recently named one of the "Notable Books of the Year" by the New York Times and one of the "Best Books of the Year" by the Los Angeles Times. His most recent book, with photographs by Rosamond Purcell, is Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck.

Mr. Jay's consulting firm Deceptive Practices has provided expertise on projects as diverse as the film Forrest Gump and the Broadway production of Angels in America: Perestroika. He was a consultant on the Devices of Wonder exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and was the guest curator for an exhibition on conjuring at the Harvard Theatre Collection.

He has written and hosted his own television specials for CBS, HBO, and the BBC, and was the host and narrator of the first documentary mini- series on conjuring, "The Story of Magic," for the A&E network. He presented of a series of films on con games for Turner Classic Movies and in March of 2003 he debuted as a weekly essayist on the National Public Radio station, KCRW, in Los Angeles.