North Carolina Books

Tom Fowler's Carolina Journeys: Exploring The Trails Of The Carolinas Both Real And Imagined is an engaging and rather unique compilation of commentaries on locations and landmarks of the Carolinas as observed by a Carolina expert with years of little-known knowledge enhancing the book as a greater map of the Carolinas then any other standard travel guide. Carolina Journeys informs the reader of such occurrences and places as the tales of Tom Dooley, Hernando de Soto, the shad fish, the Great Indian Trading Path, and grand old trees and rock carvings that still dot the Carolina landscape. Carolina Journeys is very strongly recommended to all visitors, residents, natives and aspiring visitors of the Carolina area, as it is a fun and eclectic collection of Carolinas' most intriguing stories and locations. If you are traveling the Carolina's for fun or business, don't leave home without your own personal copy of Carolina Journeys!

While compiling a listing of North Carolina wineries, I stumbled across Pamela Watson's book in a local library. With the wealth of history on grapes and winemaking in the Tarheel State, I bought an autographed copy for my personal library. I found it perfect for the day tripper, as this paperback fits nicely in a picnic basket or the door map pocket of my van. Extensive interviews with winery owners, lots of history, precise driving directions, wine listings, food pairings, and other sites of interest near each winery (including chambers of commerce, lodging information, and recommendations for local eateries). Well researched and complete for both North and South Carolina and their burgeoning wine industry. Contains telephone numbers, web sites (if available), and suggested winery groupings for day tours. Would that all winery guides be this complete!

"... Porgy was quite as stout as Sancho - a shade stouter perhaps, as his own height was not inconsiderable, yet showed him corpulent still. At a glance you saw he was a jovial philosopher - one who enjoyed his bottle with his humours, and did not suffer the one to be soured by the other. It was clear that he loved all the good things of this life, ans some possibly that we may not call good with sufficient reason. His abdomen and brain seemed to work together. He thought of eating perpetually and while he ate, still thought. But he was not a mere eater. He rather amused himself with a hobby when he made food his topic, as Falstaff dicoursed of his own cowardice without feeling it. He was a wag, and exercised his wit with whomsoever he travelled." Thus did William Gilmore Simms describe Porgy, certainly his most interesting and noteworthy creation....

Unfortunately, Porgy's exploits have been buried in six large novels, all but one of which are out of print. Now Mr. Hetherington has done for Porgy what Allan Nevis did in The Leatherstocking Saga for Cooper's Natty Bumppo. He has extracted the Porgy portions from the novels and set them in chronological sequence of the events they describe. All of the passages depicting or concerning Porgy are given in toto, with the exception of those in Woodcraft, which is currently available. Only the best Woodcraft passages are given complete; the remaining ones are summarized. Mr. Hetherington has also provided as illuminative introduction and transitions between episodes. The reader can therefore become acquainted with the fabulous Porgy and yet avoid the rather formidable task of getting through the six sometimes prolix novels.
--- excerpts from books dustjacket

Although I haven't read all of this book, the contribution of Robert Krick, entitled "The Smoothbore Volley that Doomed the Confederacy" is such that it alone, at least to me, makes this an invalualbe book for students of both Jackson and Chancellorsville. For anyone who has been fascinated with the precise reconstruction of a historical event taking place at a defined place, Krick's writing will prove fascinating. No biography of Jackson that I have encountered, even Robertson's, provides as much detail on the circumstances surrounding this tragic occurence. As he points out and is generally known, the monument at Chancellorsville which purports to mark the spot where Jackson was shot on that May, 1863 moonless night is incorreclty placed. Read and take this book with you when visiting the area as the map included will prove of great help.

Dr. McLaughlin presents a wonderfully constructed portrait of the modern woman. As we are launched into the information age, the role of women throughout society is going to change dramatically. McLaughlin captures the beginning of this wonderful change. This is a book I will keep on my shelves for years and years.

In a critical writing course I taught in Spring 2002, I used Channels of Discourse, Reassembled as the core text for the course readings. The many chapters within are written by the best of the best in the fields of media studies and cultural studies, and the methodologies are presented in an easy-to-read manner which is informative and full of examples and case studies. This is an excellent book for media studies students, as its chapters lay out the basic information they should know about many of the methodologies often used in media criticism.

Greg Fielden continues his outstanding work as one of the premier historians of Nascar Stock Car Racing. As with his earlier efforts; "Forty Years of Stock Car Racing - Volumes 1-5" and "Real Racers" ... Fielden's writing makes you feel as if you experienced some of the events he describes. I have visited many race tracks over the years, but never Charlotte ... 15 minutes of reading made me go check the race schedule for the upcoming season so I can witness some of the adventure that fills this book. If you're a Nascar fan, owning this book is a must ... if you are just generally a race fan (be it Champ Car, IRL, Stock Car or F1 as I am) you can't go wrong owning a copy.

If you're serious about navigating the crazy streets of Charlotte and the rest of the Great State of Mecklenburg, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book. It is EXTREMELY detailed and very up-to-date. The indexing system makes life simple, and there are several pages with blown-up maps of important landmarks (like Douglas International Airport). Paramedics and EMTs use this book exclusively - we like it so much that our dispatchers send us the page number and grid square for emergency calls! It'll serve you well.

This collection of nine essays, edited by Thad W. Tate and David L. Ammerman, examine various aspects of the development of Anglo-American culture in the Chesapeake colonies, Maryland and Virginia. The studies provide a detailed and informative consideration of life in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake.

The scholars writing in this volume have published various works on the colonial Chesapeake. James Horn, who authored the essay on servant emigration to the Chesapeake, has written Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake. Lorena S. Walsh, who herein examines marriage and family life in colonial Maryland, has written From Calabar to Carter's Grove: The History of a Virginia Slave Community. Darrett B. and Anita H. Rutman provide a startling and compelling portrait of family fragmentation and reformation due to early parental death and successive remarriage. The two also cowrote the study, A Place in Time: Middlesex County, Virginia, 1650-1750, a detailed reconstruction of life in a Virginia county, for masters and farmers and servants and slaves.

The emergence of an American-born elite is considered in Virginia by Carole Shammas, author of Inheritance in America, and in Maryland by David W. Jordan, author of Foundations of Representative Government in Maryland, 1632-1715. Carville V. Earle, author of Evolution of a Tidewater Settlement System, presents a study of disease and death rates in early Virginia. Kevin P. Kelly studies the dispersed settlement patterns in Surry County, Virginia. Kelly authored The Economic and Social Development of Seventeenth-Century Surry County, Virginia. Lois Green Carr and Russell R. Menard, who have authrored and edited a number of studies on the Chesapeake, present in this book a study of the economic opportunities of freed indentured servants in Maryland.

The essays presented in this work should interest anyone researching Chesapeake history or Southern genealogy.

Africans and African-Americans were present in Virginia from early in the seventeenth century, but the essays herein concentrate on the early Anglo-American presence. The book by Rutman and Rutman, as well as the work by Walsh, should be consulted for African-American life in the early Chesapeake. See also Wesley Frank Craven, White, Red, and Black: The Seventeenth-Century Virginian. White, Red, and Black is a tremendous but succinct study of the white, Indian and African presence in early colonial Virginia. Gerald Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia, as well as works by Mechal Sobel, illuminate black colonial experience in a later period.

From its opening pages, Chicago's New Negroes delivers a knockout punch. Baldwin opens his monograph with a retelling of Jack Johnson's 1910 heavyweight victory and its impact on Black Chicago, and thus only begins to weave an epic and compelling tapestry that demonstrates how Black people "acted" rather than were "acted upon." He resituates ideas once limited to discussions of the Harlem Renaissance and moves them geographically to Great Migration-era Chicago. There, dots are connected to demonstrate the very tangible relationship between consumer culture and intellectual life.

To the reader's delight, Baldwin resists the tendency to provide a straightforward "history" of African Americans in Chicago in the early twentieth century. While the text does follow the stories and innovations of such major players as Madame CJ Walker, Thomas A. Dorsey, Oscar Micheaux and baseball's Rube Foster, it also provides a much needed space in which we get to hear the thoughts and words of everyday people, those who sat in beauty parlors, enjoyed the early years of cinema, attended sporting events, and made a way despite the racial, social and economic limitations. We soon determine that southern migrants to Chicago brought with them not country ways, but entirely new, entirely modern, ways of thinking.

For authors, allowing everyday people to speak for themselves is sometimes difficult. Yet, Baldwin manages to make these voices heard and it is a credit to his writing style. His presentation is especially adept in the sports chapter. Here, Baldwin takes the reader on a tour of Black Chicago's various "playgrounds." We have no problem envisioning the juking, the fakes, the fast forwards, the trucking, the passing and dribbling and their possible meanings for building a better world.

Through chapters devoted to the "mapping" of the Black Metropolis, beauty culture, film exhibition and filmmaking, the rise of gospel music and the sporting life, Baldwin allows a glimpse into a world of possibility, a world where popular culture is just as, if not more, worthy of study as so-called arts and letters. He forces a new understanding of even the Harlem Renaissance, an ambitious project for sure. While the book is a scholarly monograph, Baldwin's forays into social and cultural theory are so nuanced as to make the book accessible to a wider audience. And for that we should be thankful. Even though the urgent and triumphant stories within Chicago's New Negroes take place seventy five or a hundred years ago, the lessons we learn from them and the hope we take with us when we close the book are timeless. And are even more so in an era when Black culture is appropriated, diffused, and often taken for granted.