North Carolina Books

This is a beautiful book you can trust to provide solid guidance on growing not only perennials, but companion annuals and vines that tolerate hot, humid conditions. Sullivan also presents lots of ideas for creating beautiful gardens in a range of sites, such as deep shade or at the beach. One of my favorite sections is called "Don't even think of growing these plants here," in which she shares wisdom on plants that are doomed in this climate. Every coastal gardener should have this book.

I knew nothing of Michael Miley before I found this book in a library. The title hinted that Lee's photographer may have been a Southern counterpart of Mathew Brady, but no, Miley became a photographer after the Civil War and made portraits of Lee in Lexington, VA. His most famous was of Lee on his horse Traveller, made in 1868.

Miley was also a pioneer in color photography. The book features a few color prints, as well as many black and white photos taken in the Lexington area. Portraits of Lee, Lee's wife, two of his daughters, his three sons (in 1885), Lee's office, the Lee Chapel, and four pictures taken on the day of Lee's funeral (1870) are included. Miley believed Lee to be the greatest man of his time, and even made photographic copies of early pictures that the Lee family brought him, of which the book shows a few including a portrait of Mrs. Lee's mother (granddaughter of Martha Washington) and an 1845 picture of Robert E. Lee with his son Rooney, then eight.

Miley had been a Confederate soldier during the war, serving in the Stonewall Brigade. He made sketches of the countryside but the book does not indicate if any of them survived the war. Miley was captured at Chancellorsville and spent the rest of the war at Fort Delaware.

Miley was born in Rockingham County and settled in Lexington after the war. Eventually his son joined him in the photography business. In 1907 many of their images were destroyed in a fire but the older negatives survived. In 1940 the Rockefeller Foundation provided funds to purchase the extensive collection of negatives made by Michael Miley and his son Henry, and approximately 15,000 negatives were movied to the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond.

This book is out of print but it is a rich source of historical images relating to Lee and the Lexington area.

A highly technical, comprehensive review of the geology of the Carolinas, this book is not an easy read, nor should one expect it to be. Prepare by having a good glossary available, and perhaps a good basic text in geology as well. Then brace yourself - the geology is extraordinarily complex. These authors provide good insight.

Always a treat instruction wise,this one offers totally new ideas.. great color reproductions and an overall theme to follow.

The German Colonial Empire was a short lived phenomenon but one that played an important role in the domestic poltics of the German Reich prior to WWI. Smith shows the interplay of domestic politics and colonial policy. The development of two modes of thought about the colonies in Germany- settlement colonialism and economic colonialsim are presented as compteting ideas. He is also excellent at showing the evolutionary nature of the German colonial adminstration and how it responded to major challenges (like the Maji Maji revolt). On the whole Smith emphasizes that the German Empire was a work in progress and one that was not (Allied propoganda efforts aside) dramatically different than those of the French and English. In particular, it was, in some was reforming itself at a faster rate than older colonial powers like the English from whihc the German initially borrowed many of their adminsitarive techniques. None of this should imply that Smith glosses over the very real abuses of the German colonial adminsitration (particularly in its earliest phases when colonial compnaies control the colonies). The book is a fascinating read and well written. It is a must for any student of the German Empire before WWI.

The book also informs on Smith's later work The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism.

Lorena Eaker has outdone herself this time. This book provides an incredible gold mine of information about German settlers in early North Carolina and is well researched. Documentation of research is much more reliable than average books of this genre. I eagerly await the upcoming supplement.

Letters from German immigrants who fought in the American Civil War, estimated at 200,000, are rare, so this book is a welcome addition to Civil War literature and shows that Germans were not a monolithic group but held various political, religious and other views. It also gives battle descriptions and descriptions of the hardships of being a Civil War soldier. Germans' pride and prejudices are clearly revealed. A terrific and much needed volume on a much neglectected group in the nation's greatest conflict.

Gray's book does a masterful job of elucidating a key part of the Cold War. In looking at the Cold War in Europe, historians, both academic and popular/armchair, often overlook what America's allies were doing as they fought their own fronts in the larger Cold War. While NATO allies like Britain, Germany, and Italy were loyal supporters of the U.S., and they played a role in Washington's strategy, they also had their own agendas. Nowhere was this more important than in West Germany.

Unlike other American allies in Europe, West Germany had its own "personal" Cold War to fight (against East Germany). In doing so, however, its decisions could impact the larger global conflict between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Additionally, West Germany was locked in a struggle with its own countrymen, in a sense. The "enemy" were fellow Germans.

Using a tremendous array of archival evidence, Gray demonstrates the origins, nuance, and development of West Germany's own Cold War strategy. His bibliography is very impressive. At one point, Amazon recommended buying this book together with Mary Sarotte's "Dealing with the Devil," also about Germany during the Cold War. The two books complement each other nicely, and the comparison is made even more intriguing by the fact that Sarotte and Gray both studied German history at Yale University, only a few years apart.

This book is necessary reading for the graduate student or scholar of the Cold War, and it is an excellent choice for the casual reader looking to go beyond the History Channel.

Don Carlo Gesualdo (1560 - 1613) was rich, artistic, and - as the second son of a noble Neapolitan family - free to indulge his passion for music. But disaster struck: his brother died, and it was decreed that he must carry on the line. The bride found for him - Donna Maria d'Avalos - was his cousin, and the greatest beauty in town. Older and more experienced, she had already sent two husbands to their graves -one of them according to rumor, from "an excess of connubial bliss". Don Carlo, (who may have been gay) fathered a son, whereupon he his interest wandered elsewhere to music and to hunting. One day his uncle divulged to him that his attention starved wife was enjoying a brazen affair with the handsome Duke of Andria, and that whenever possible they would "invite each other to battle on the fields of love". Alerted to the fact that Don Carlo knew about the affair, the Duke tried to persuade Donna Maria to end the affair, but she proclaimed she would sooner die. Thus was the scene set for Don Carlo's historic act.

One day in October of 1590 Don Carlo surreptitiously disabled his locks, then accounced that he would set out on a hunt only to creep back in the still of night with his henchmen. The chronicles go into salacious detail about what happened next: About the night-dress Donna Maria asked to be put out on the bed, about the maid posted as sentinel, and the sudden commotion as Don Carlo and his men broke down the doors to find the pair "in flagrante delicto di fragrante peccato", exhausted and asleep after their love-making. There were shots and multiple sword-thrusts, with Don Carlo unable convince himself the job was done until he had cut his victims to ribbons, and had personally skewered his wife to the floor, repeating to himself "I do not believe she is dead". He dragged the bodies out onto the stairs, along with a notice explaining why he'd killed them, for all the town came to gape at next morning. The Duke was still clad in a woman's night-dress, while his lover's "wounds were all in her belly, and especially in those parts which ought to be kept honest".

Neapolitans were riveted, with as many taking the lovers' side as that of their murderer. All the local poets were spurred into song, including the great Torquato Tasso, whose friendship with the protagonists inspried his tear-drenched sonnet "On the Death of Two Most Noble Lovers". Don Carlo's nobility ensured there was no trial, and he quietly withdrew to Ferrara, where he remarried, but only to find himself "assailed and afflicted by a vast horde of demons which gave him no peace unless twelve young men, whom he kept specially for the purpose, were to beat him violently three times a day, during which operation he was wont to smile joyfully."

Don Carlo built a private chapel, completed in 1592. Inside hung a painting depicting the Virgin Mary and saints all pointing to the sinner, Don Carlo, while the fires of purgatory burnt below - out of which angels pull the figures of a man and a woman. Could these be the murdered lovers before which Don Carlo implored forgiveness? His music certainly becomes filled with an obession with themes of guilt, sin, pity, and death - even the joy of love being mixed with a fascination with pain: 'dolorosa gioia', such 'joyous pain' being a typical outburst.

Never has there been a composer with a more macabre background than this, nor yet so muscially so obsessionally fascinating.

Stravinsky began his famous foreword to Glenn Watkins' biography of Gesualdo with the words "musicians may yet save Gesualdo from musicologist, but certainly the latter have had the best of it until now". Watkins makes a wonderful companion through the vertigo inducing chromatic spirals leading into the strange, visionary world of this dark genius. The entire book makes gripping reading not merely for the dark details of his biography but for the profound insights into late Renaissance to early Baroque period in which he dwelled.

So truth indeed is stranger than fiction.

Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination is an eloquent tour de force that argues for the contemporary engagement and revitalization of the Islamic tradition through the reconciliatory hermeneutical strategy of al-Ghazali. Professor Moosa's extensive training in traditional Islamic scholarship as well as his fluency in the Western intellectual tradition allows him to address many challenges currently confronting the intellectual and spiritual interpretation of Islam with an original and powerful voice. As such, Ghazali is a quest for an emancipatory knowledge that is equally weighted by both esoteric and exoteric epistemologies. Highlighting al-Ghazali's liminal discursivity, Professor Moosa skillfully argues for a Muslim subjectivity that allows for multiple perspectives in order to embrace new paradigms that are simultaneously loyal to tradition and temporally appropriate. Far from apologetic, Ghazali is a dynamic and creative attempt to critically engage traditional Islam in the contemporary language of the Western academy. Although Moosa often offers provocations aimed at the entrenched forms of the tradition, he never loses sight of either its ethical imperative or its revelatory authenticity. In this sense Ghazali is far more than a rhetorical analysis; it is a continuation of the intellectual tradition of al-Ghazali and an interpretation of his rhetorical strategy of Islamic revitalization in the Technical Age.