Mississippi Books

I found this book to be a very interesting look at the conscience of a laywer as he wrestles with the dilemma of winning a case or doing the right thing. Adding to his problem is the discovery of his father's diary.

As entertaining as Grisham, but, without the political correctness

An excellent debut by an Assistant Attorney General who knows what "real" law is all about. Fraiser takes you through a "normal/everyday" murder and the "normal/everyday" process by which an attorney is appointed to defend the man. The attorney does a little lying. So what, it's all to serve his client--what an attorney does, right? Then "!!! BAM !!!" the attorney's life is turned upside down--not to mention he is probably going to be killed.. Do morals make a difference? His father thought so, but this is the 90's. And the suspense and the danger builds and builds and builds.

Published by one of the smaller presses, and therefore certain not to get the advertising dollars that the bigger publishers spend on their authors, this novel will be overlooked by some--much to their loss. A great story

This is a terrific book that I return to over and over. While the writing itself is not dramatic, it is filled with his love of the river and shantyboating. To paraphrase Wendell Barry, Hubbard makes practical what Thoreau made theoretical. Read it with Payne Hollow.

Shantyboat chronicles the adventures of Harlan and Anna Hubbard, who in the early 1950's, built a wooden houseboat (or shantyboat) out of a demolished house and drifted down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. Spanning several years, the book describes winters spent drifting freely with the current and summers foraging for or growing what was needed. Much more than a travelogue, the journey is an experiment in living just outside the confines of a newly emerging technological civillization, but still in a fully "civillized" way. Their lives were hardly lived in seclusion. Instead they preferred the richness of friends, good meals gathered from abandoned or empty lands, and art: Harlan was a painter, Anna a concert pianist. The story of their days drifting is often filled with anecdotes about weather, fishing, or dogs, and slowly draws the reader in with a steady seasonal rhythm. Their time on the river represents the last days of the shantyboater, a breed of free spirit that quickly dissappeared after the second world war. Industrial growth along the waterways, large new dams, and toxic pollutants ensured the end of a tradition of free living. Today, our world continues to grapple with issues of technology and its impact on what makes us human. "Shantyboat" offers an alternative, or perhaps a perspective on what is really important.

In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Congress mandated the desegregation of all public schools receiving Federal aid. Mississippi tried to "comply" with the law by a "Freedom of Choice" program which allowed students over a certain age and parents to designate the schools they wished to attend. While, perhaps, facially appealing, the "Freedom of Choice" program served as a means to intimidate blacks from attempting to register in what were at the time all-white schools. Those with the courage to do so faced danger to their livelihood, property, and persons. The "Freedom of Choice" program ultimately was invalidated through litigation.

Constance Curry's inspiring book "Silver Rights" (1995) tells the story of a family of black sharecroppers in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, Mae Bertha and Matthew Carter and seven of their thirteen children (all their children then of school age). The Carter's took the "Freedom of Choice" program at its word. In 1965, the seven children enrolled in the primary and secondary schools of Drew, Mississippi, a small town with a then-deserved reputation for violence and lawlessness. Ms. Curry worked as a field representative for the American Friends Service Committee from 1965-1975. She got to know the Carter family well and was instrumental in providing the assistance necessary to get them through their difficult times.

The book includes excellent pictures of life in the Mississippi Delta, for both white and black people, in the early to mid-twentieth century. The book shows a feel for the place, for sharecropping life on the farms and for life in the dusty towns, for the blues culture of the Delta, and for its history. The book offers substantial discussion of the notorious Emmett Till case and of other lynchings and of early attempts to organize civil rights activities in the Delta. Ms. Curry eloquently evokes the spirit of the Delta at the opening of her story:

"In trying to describe the Mississippi Delta, I seem to find only superlatives -- the flattest land, the blackest dirt, the hottest summers, the nicest people, the poorest people. In defining the delta's past and even its present, I am aware of these extremes and also of its incongruities: the violence and the peacefulness, the beauty and the ugliness, the stillness and the tension. It is a place complex almost beyond comprehension." (p. xxi)

In telling her story, Ms. Curry lets her protagonists do most of the talking. The opening chapters set the stage and explain the Carter's ambitions for an education, and an end to the hardships of sharecropping, for their children. The second section of the book explores the backround of Mae Bertha Carter and her mother Luvenia's early life as the wife of a Delta sharecropper. The book discusses throughout the experiences of the Carter family as they faced violence and shootings in the early stages following their enrollment in the formerly white schools. Throughout their period in the public schools the children endured harassment, name-calling and ostracism. The Carter family was forced off the plantation and Matthew Carter lost his job. The book shows the courage and perseverance of the family and the aid offered by the AFSC and other organizations.

The book includes interviews with each of the thirteen Carter children and discussions of the family members fared after their graduation from the public schools. There are some moving scenes when Ms. Curry reestablished contact with the Carter family in 1988, thirteen years after her work with the AFSC came to an end. Mae Bertha Carter remains determined and forceful and has received honors from institutions within the State of Mississippi that would have been unthinkable in the 1960s.

This book tells an important story of the silver rights movement. It is a work of both history and memory and describes beautifully the changes wrought with time.

Silver Right is a moving and telling story of my family struggle to achieve equality in America. This book does a very good job of relating the feeling, fear and turmoil that I felt during those four long years of being the only black family at an all white school in the Mississippi Delta in the sixites. Silver Rights goes beyond the actions of people during that time. It looks at the cilvil right movement on a personal level. This book will make you laugh, and it will also make your cry

This book is a fine addition to the history of the phonograph and other forms of recording technology. Erika Brady begins with a consideration of early recordings, focusing her analysis on relationships between perception and audio technology. She then winds her way through implications of how this relationship is relevant to developing ethnographic descriptions of folklore and other forms of expressive culture. The book will be useful to anyone interested in phenomenology, social history, intellectual history, and ethnographic description. Much of her work provides a strong basis for more nuanced readings of ways in which new forms of technology affect--and are affected by-- ethnographically-grounded research. Brady is an insightful writer and a fine stylist. Her subtle wit enfolds sharp commentary that reveals hidden nuances of history, and her arguments are always cogent, clear, and intriguing. The book is written from Brady's experience of working with hundreds of old recordings, and her practical experience of handling and listening to the recordings is clearly evident in her writing. The book is illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs that are well-chosen and provide rich context for the study.

For readers interested in how recording technology has influenced the way that history and culture is represented, this book is essential reading. Brady has personally handled thousands of hundred-year old recordings of stories, folktales, traditional music, and other performances. She writes from a great familiarity with both the early recording technology and the material on the records, and she insightfully uses a range of research techniques and academic insights to demonstrate convincingly that the ability to make audio recordings has significantly changed the practice of folkloristic and anthropological fieldwork. Among the big changes that she documents are greater emphasis on listening to indigenous voices and a concomitant sense of increased ethical responsibility to the societies whose cultural traditions are documented.

This is the only book I have been able to find on Black Hawk and the Spiritual Churches of New Orleans. The author takes you on a journey into the heart of New Orleans both with text and color photographs. The author really seems to know his stuff. I have enjoyed reading this book several times, each time learning something new. The author gives details of the spiritual church movement in New Orleans and throughout the African community. We read about the incorporation of Black Hawk, a powerful Inidan warrior is venerated and worked for the benefit of all, including usual shrines to the Black Hawk spirit. Highly reccomended!

This book portrays the Indian spirit Black Hawk as known to the Spiritualist Churches in New Orleans. Black Hawk is a 19th century Midwestern Indian warrior especially dear to the heart of African-American spiritual faith in the deep South. Black Hawk's following first blossomed in New Orleans sometime around the 1920s through the work of the spiritualist Leafy Anderson. The book has biographical material about both Black Hawk and Leafy Anderson and includes interesting material about several of the spiritualists who came after her and who still keep the tradition alive. The book tells of the way Black Hawk benefits the lives of those who call on him - "He'll fight your battles." - Jason Berry is a fine, sensitive writer. The photos are great, expecially the one of Big Chief Jolly of the Wild Tchoupitoulas taken at the time of Mardi Gras in 1979.

"Stealing Indian Women" is a remarkable piece of academic work. I didn't realize initially how strongly I felt about the book until after I began reading Shirley Christian's "Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus". Though Christian's book is well documented, it has been nothing but a slog. And despite the detail with which she has written about Auguste and others, I don't feel any particular attachment to their characters, nor do I feel like I understand their motivations. Which is entirely unlike the experience I had reading "Stealing Indian Women". Once I started it, I could hardly put it down. And the pictures of the community was so well composed, and enthusiastically presented, that I have to say that I was left caring about the people I was introduced to -- something that doesn't often happen with an academic book.

Structurally the book falls into two sections. The first lays out the background for the development of French relations with the Indian tribes of the Upper Louisiana Territory -- commonly called the Illinois Country. These discussions cover personal relationships, such as the many forms of 'marriage' that existed between French men and Indian women, as well as general politics. And there is also quite a bit of interesting material that pertains directly to the Indian notion of slavery and how the Indians worked over time to pressure and finagle the French to bend and accept the practice.

The second half of the book focuses on what the author calls "The Celadon Affair". Leaving behind all general discussions of the Illinois Country, Dr. Ekberg plunges the reader into the midst of one of Ste. Genevieve's few serious crimes. The story begins when a party of young people, some of whom are free and some of whom are slaves, cross the river to get drunk with some friends on the British side of the Mississippi. Celadon is amongst them. A metis, he's somewhat of a bold character, and one prone to thumb his nose at authority. In any case, at some point, he and and a young female slave get separated from the rest of their party, and somehow in a botched effort to escape with Celadon, or else return home, she is shot.

The question is was it accidental or deliberate? In most cases the historian would be left with only scanty evidence on which to surmise. But the records of Ste. Genevieve are hardly sparse and Dr. Ekberg is able to fit together a scenario based on the numerous depositions that were taken at that time.

Besides being entertaining, Ekberg deftly handles this material and uses it to draw together all the previous threads of discussion --slavery, gender relations, politics -- so that you are left with a vivid sense of how these factors affected the lives of ordinary people on the frontier.

SUMMARY :::
I had a marvelous time reading this book. Dr. Ekberg certainly turned quite a few of my historical notions on their head. It was absolutely fascinating to read about how the Indians worked to modifying French politics, as well how Indian/French slavery was very much different than that practiced in the American South.

For those who have read Ekberg's "Colonial Ste. Genevieve" and wonder what this new book has to offer, I would say that it provides a refinement on Ekberg's previous research. One thing that I noticed, for example, was that his population figures have been tweaked.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in the earliest European settlements/settlers along the Mississippi, especially if you are interested in a different sort of cultural interface between Europeans and Indians.

Pam T.

This fourth volume of Dr.Ekberg's series of books on Colonial Ste. Genevieve, the oldest settlement on the west bank of the Mississippi, is full of surprises. Indian slavery is not a topic with which many readers are familiar but Indian women slaves loomed large in pioneer Ste. Genevieve. They ranged from housekeepers to concubines and wives of colonists. Moreover, some Indian women slaves, either widows of French mates or free in their own right, had the same civil right as white women.
Another surprise is the amount of intercourse between the west bank and the east bank of the Mississippi recently occupied by the British victors of the French-Indian war. This is accented by Dr. Eckberg's assertion that "the preferred venue for a good debauch was on the east side of the Mississippi, the British side." Hence would be revelers from the French village braved the currents of the river by means of pirogues to reach the English settlement. Such a hedonistic venture led to the dramatic events of March, 1773, to which a large portion of Ecberg's book is devoted. What the author terms "the Celedon Affair" is sufficiently theatrical to provide a movie script. It involves kidnapping of an Indian slave woman from the British colony by a half-breed French woodsman, her subsequent death either by murder or accident, the futile search for the suspected killer, and climaxed by the fugitive's successful kidnapping of a second Indian woman slave. Amid all ths exciting narrative the author scores keen insights into the wide scope of French frontier culture and the easy social relations between classes and races, free and slave, officials and residents. This volume is based upon sound research of archival documents on two continents and backed by the author's record as a prize-winning historian. This opus more than lives up to its subtitle by covering the history of Indian slavery under French and Spanish regimes. Thanks to Ekberg;s supple style the book provides an unusual and interesting view of Colonian history and a good read.

A very good read for those interested in the Holocaust. This book is suited for teens through adults.

If you enjoy history and holocaust information, you will read this book cover to cover. Make a pot of coffee and read.

This book compellingly captures the life of a young woman, Charlee, who grows up in the 1960's and 1970's as the daughter of an alcoholic father. The key point to understand about this book is that Gay Walley's technique is not nearly as realistic as it might seem. It achieves its own psychological register by experiments in linguistic style and phrasing (i.e. unusually direct interior monologue, the narrative being alternately in first and third-person mode, also devices such as never referring to the father, Gerald, by name outside spoken dialogue). The novel can be appreciated more if it is seen in this frame and not in a social-realist one, nor as a diagnostic book about the problems of alcoholics, although it is not without relevance in this area. The story is told on two temporal levels: in the past, the father careens across the US-Canadian border and all around New England and Québec aimlessly in search of dreary pleasures; in the present, the daughter seeks to shrug off her father's legacy in relationships with men which end up only perpetuating childhood patterns. STRINGS ATTACHED is not a plot-centered book, but one about how people's states of mind are inhibited by the burden of the past.

Gay Walley's novel Strings Attached is driven by a narrative voice that draws us in and mesmerizes us with her tale of a young woman holding onto the best love she ever received while coming to terms with the damage it has done to her capacity for happiness. I was fascinated by the character of the father, Gerald, who, while horrifying me with his disfunctional parenting, captivated me with his charm. The sad story of his daughter Charlee develops gracefully from the scenes of her childhood with Gerald, in a way that feels inevitable and true. Her muted but significant triumphs -- giving up drinking and dealing with her father's death -- help sustain the overall triumph of the book, which is the author's ability to capture a difficult relationship in beautiful and evocative prose.

This is a good book because it covers the subject of "Southwest Louisiana Pop" music in great detail. Lots of names and quotes of the people who shaped the sound. The author did his homework and the reader gets a lot of info - a LOT. I have read this book several times because it is a great refresher course on the musicians, promoters, the night clubs, and what all.

Louisiana musicians have always gone their own way, fusing elements of various styles to create music of stunning beauty. One of the most creative and finely crafted forms is Swamp Pop, a fusion of Cajun, R & B, country, and pop styles. Shane Bernard has written a definative history of Swamp Pop based on extensive interviews with the makers of the sound. He discusses the diverse background of the music and its interracial origins. This book is essential for any collection of American music.

Super read. Thorough and acurate. I followed my great,great grandfather's foot steps in 1862. Awesome expirence! Great study of a MS Battalion in our Civil War.

What started off as a family history project, ended up being an extremely detailed and informative account of the 3rd Mississippi Battalion ("Hardcastle's Battalion"). Formed at the end of 1861, it was renamed the 45th Mississippi Regiment in December 1862 because another unit, commanded by D.W. Hurst, had the same identification. The book relates everything there is to know about the battalion/regiment, including minute explication of their battles and movements, who they faced on the field, what other actions were going on around them, and, through letters and diaries, the responses of the soldiers.

Initially with the Army of the Mississippi and then the Army of Tennessee, their first major engagement was at Shiloh; they also were at Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, Atlanta, Franklin, Nashville, and, finally, Bentonville, NC. Included as an appendix is the prison diary of Lt. Samuel Asbury, who was wounded and captured at Murfreesboro, TN, and spent a good part of 1864 at the Union prison at Fort Delaware. His diary indicates he had a pretty good time of it ("have been treated very well, had plenty to eat, & etc."). Also included is a complete annotated roster of everyone who served in the battalion, a major achievement in itself.

The book is a tremendous research source and covers a lot of ground in great detail; it also is entertaining (if accounts of men in war can ever truly be that) as Williamson quotes frequently from soldiers' letters and diaries relating the human touch ("Warm. Came out to Jim's for dinner, go back directly. Rec'd 4 letters from my Sallie.") An excellent regimental history.