South Carolina Books

Solve for X is the fourth collection of brief, "creative nonfiction" essays by author Arthur Saltzman (Professor of English, Missouri Southern State University). From reflecting on the phenomenon of child prodigies in "Wunderkindergarten", to a tongue-in-cheek suggestion of how the degree to which a woman enjoys James Joyce's novels can be used to estimate her level of arrogance, to the unquestionable dominance the automobile has claimed in modern American culture, Solve for X ranges the gamut of introspection, insight, and at times, crushing criticism. A most delectable intellectual smorgasbord.

Arthur Saltzman has again exhibited his superb writing style, displaying his biting satire, poignant observations and hilarious sense of humor. This collection of essays covers a wide range of his interests and experiences, and flows so easily that the book becomes a very fast read. The stories are fresh and never fail to arouse the reader's curiosity about where the essays will lead. Some of them caused me to have the best laugh I've had in a long time from a piece of writing. Others intrigued me as I considered the interesting viewpoints of the author. And all of them exhibited his usual flair and his wonderful choices of words and images. I truly enjoyed this book and recommend it highly to all age groups, along with his earlier collections of original essays. The material is current, witty and just plain fun to read. I eagerly await the topics, issues and recollections to be covered in the next series.

Guy Beck's Sonic Theology is a superb introduction to sacred sound in Hinduism. He covers a great deal of material including shabda and nada brahman. It is well written and covers a lot of ground.

As a writer and researcher in the area of Hinduism and Yoga, I read and review a number of books everyday. This work successfully opens the field for study in sacred sound in the Hindu Tradition.

Although a number of works deal with mantra in relation to the various soteriological traditions of India, none have truly brought all of the knowledge together as efficiently and decisively as he has. His comparitive approach and weaving together of helpful, contextual historical information make it a valuable study. His treatment of the grammarian traditions and their theories on language, meaning and mantra are insightful.

I heartily recommend this work for those interested in learning more about the role of sound in soteriology. As India's legacy is its oral tradition, this book provides a unique perspective into the Indic spiritual traditions. Beck's approach has reset the perspective and opened a doorway to the heart of Hinduism. As one of my mentor's stated, "Only a fine musician could have written such a book."

Tip** If you want a starter book on the topic, look up Harold Coward and David Goa, Mantra: Hearing the Divine in India.

As a personal friend of the author I have seen the proofs of this beautiful book which ranks right up there with Ms. Kiefer's "A North Carolina Christmas" A great birthday or Christmas gift for ANYONE

Are you wondering what to give someone as a very special gift? THIS is the answer, or Ms Kiefer's other books on Christmas traditions, songs, poems, cartoons, recipes, with super-de-luxe photos that make you remember a visit there or just dream and really enjoy.

This is a great book and even though it was a used edition, It was like new.
This book is out of print and I was glad to find a copy.

I have fond memories of this book and return to it regularly to read once again the very interesting history of the Palmetto State. This is such a good, accurate, and complete history book my college class at Furman University used it as a textbook, yet it is definitely written so that the average person can enjoy it. Lewis has a friendly writing style that most should enjoy. He does not bog you down with numbers, and there are no footnotes or obscure references to deal with.

One of the major problems in South Carolina history is that many writers allow themselves to take sides, either on the Civil War, the slavery issues, racial issues, and Reconstruction. If you want a good example of what I mean, read David Duncan Wallace's very good and very interesting three volume history, written in the late 1920's, which is just as interesting for the cultural slant of the writer when dealing with these issues as it is for its actual content.

Lewis avoids these problems adroitly, without sounding "politically correct."

This book would make a great gift for someone moving to South Carolina, or a great buy for yourself if you just want a good thorough history of the Palmetto State.

Published by the U. of South Carolina Press, these 300 recipies are collected from South Carolina Wildlife Magazine. They represent the tried and true results from long experimentation with Native American, European, African, and Caribbean cooking of foods taken straight out of their natural surroundings.

You can eat at expensive 5 star restaurants, but you won't find more delicious meals than what you can make yourself using these recipies.

The compliers tell you up front that this book is "for people not too uptight to try a 'dash' of this and a 'dollop' of that, but particular enough to know that sometimes only one brand name is the right one."

Both freshwater and saltwater foods are extensively covered as are pretty much any sort of bird, small game, and, of course, deer.

The shellfish section is especially good, with 15 pages on shrimp alone.

Even vegetarians will find this book a gold mine. The 20 page section on wild plants includes treats like crabapple jelly, huckleberry pie, and wild muscadine juice, and some unusual vegetable treats like squashpuppies or cattail pancakes that can be washed down with sassafrass tea.

Marinades and Sauces get almost 20 pages to themselves, and though not singled out for a separate section, jambalaya and etouffe dishes are here too.

The great world beyond the Southeast has never grasped how well we eat down here, but if you just read this book--much less actually savor the fare--you'll find yourself turning a jaundiced eye towards the uniform, homogenized cuisine of modern life.

Southeastern Wildlife Cookbook is the best wild game cookbook I have ever read. I come from an outdoors family and this book has some of the best recipes and tips I have ever used. The recipes are very simple and easy to follow. I used to struggle when having to cook wild game, not any more. From deer to fish to wild turkey recipes this book has it all and then some. This cookbook is a GREAT gift idea to anyone who loves to hunt or fish.

In 1936 William Faulkner posed the question: "Why do people live there?" In 1999 Jan Gretlund allows us to delve into the Southern psyche at the beginning of the 21st century by collecting sixteen superb essays on "the present states of Southern mind" in this volume. The stellar line-up of contributors inlcudes James C. Cobb, Dori Sanders, Charles Regan Wilson, and C. Vann Woodward. Gretlund, who should be knighted as an "honorary Southerner," for all he has done to take Southern culture to Europe, deserves high-marks for this landmark collection.

In 1936 William Faulkner posed the question: "Why do people live there?" In 1999 Jan Gretlund allows us to delve into the Southern psyche at the beginning of the 21st century by collecting sixteen superb essays on "the present states of Southern mind" in this volume. The stellar line-up of contributors inlcudes James C. Cobb, Dori Sanders, Charles Regan Wilson, and C. Vann Woodward. Gretlund, who should be knighted as an "honorary Southerner," for all he has done to take Southern culture to Europe, deserves high-marks for this landmark collection.

This book tells how it was for the first women to serve our country. There is happiness, saddness, and even the bittersweet. The Army had to switch gears to provide the "right" sizes for women, which even now we don't always get the right size, so it's the closest men's size. The fact that the training took place in the Midwest in the winter at a converted US Cav. post was fascinating to learn. To bad Fort Des Moines was not conservered for others to see. This was a wonderful and insightful book to read. I recommend it for anyone interested in women's place in military history.

Aileen Kilgore Henderson's "Stateside Soldier: Life in the Women's Army Corps 1944-1945" published by University of South Carolina Press in 2001 is an excellent read.

Between her family members, friends and herself Aileen acquired many documents to put together this book. Some of it was excerpts from her daily diary. Some were letters that went back and forth between family and friends. But Aileen was able to weave them all together to make an interesting story of what it was like being in the Women's Army Corps during World War II.

She started with a look at her birth home, family, jobs, and a desire to serve our country while in her early twenties. The Army almost didn't take her because she was underweight but on 3 February 1944 Private Aileen Kilgore was on her way from Palos, Alabama to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia for Basic Training.

Aileen made entries to her diary almost every day for the next month. She also found time to write letters home and to her friends. I wondered when she found time to write so much having been in the Army myself but perhaps it was our generation's differences.

Her interactions with fellow and sister Veterans helped to make the book very interesting. The letters from her friends who were sent overseas helped to show the differences of the training and day to day life between being stateside and overseas. She showed how friendships here and there made the difference to these women and kept them going when they were ready to give up at times.

Aileen included twenty-four photographs in the book and an Epilogue where she pointed out what became of some of the folks she met so long ago. I would recommend this book for students and adults of all ages. It should be part of our women's studies programs in colleges as well as our military history collections. And it should be included in gift shops of military/Veterans museum as well as on Army installations for all to see. Aileen Kilgore Henderson and the University of South Carolina Press should be proud of this book published in 2001.

Anne M. Whisnant has written not only an analytical work with penetrating insights into the difficulties of creating recreational spaces for the public good but has managed to do it with beautiful and engaging prose. The first work on the Parkway not to get bogged down into trivial details about the construction process (as a response to Harley Jolley's work), Super-Scenic Motorway uses several vignettes to highlight how the Parkway came to be, what it was supposed to represent in the eyes of many different groups, and the difficult choices inherent in pursuing a public good. These vignettes illustrate how the Parkway was vigorously pursued by Ashevillians as a panacea for the ills of the Great Depression as well as by other groups who saw its potential for economic benefit. What is clear from Whisnant's work is just how much the Parkway was a creation of mankind -- clearly, Parkway planners had to "improve" upon the natural setting to make it live up to their ideals.

Though Parkway boosters praised the combination of conservation and economic benefit, not all people welcomed the super-scenic motorway. Displaced mountain residents, those who worked with restrictive land covenants, and those who were denied the promise of a paved road by limited access all found reason to complain about the beaucratic nightmare that was the process of building the Parkway. Whisnant is careful to show that the definition of the public good creates winners and losers and she does not privilege the Parkway's boosters over the losers, nor does she romanticize the losers as victims. The account of both sides is nuanced and insightful.

The majority of the vignettes come from the North Carolina experience, highlighting incidents involving Asheville, Little Switzerland, Grandfather Mountain, and the Eastern Band of the Cherokee. A nod to the Virginia Parkway experience looks at the politics of history and memory at the Peaks of Otter. Whether this unevenness of treatment is the result of the bounty of archival material, authorial choice, or historical circumstance (perhaps North Carolinians had more to fight over?) is not clear. The theme of public good and the choices that it defines, however, ties the vignettes together in this masterfully written work.

"Super-Scenic Motorway" tells a fascinating history of the Blue Ridge Parkway -- just one small piece of the entire history, but an important and, as the author points out, a neglected one. At the heart of the book, Ms. Whisnant tells four stories to illustrate the impact of the political process, largely (but not exclusively) at the administrative level, on land acquisitions for the Parkway route. As noted in the Epilogue, other examples could have served the purpose, but the four, the Peaks of Otter in Virginia, and Little Switzerland, Grandfather Mountain, and the Cherokee lands in North Carolina, are well chosen, exhaustively researched and documented, and "to her credit" [a phrase I just had to throw in -- you'll have to read the book to find out why], fairly told. Along the way we are also given insights into the evolution of the National Park Service and its approaches to historical interpretation. I should add that the book begins with an explanation of the parks, roads and Western N.C. tourism setting within which the Parkway came about, followed by a cursory look at the roughshod way that state government, particularly in North Carolina, and the NPS treated small landowners and small businesses when acquiring land and building the Parkway. On the other hand, if you're looking for design, engineering and construction details or information about the contributions of the CCC and other New Deal agencies, i.e., the actual work on the ground, you'll find precious little of that here.

All that having been said, bear in mind that Ms. Whisnant is a professional academic historian, not a writer of popular histories (e.g., a Stephen Ambrose). Thus, we're frequently told (every couple of pages would be an exaggeration, but it eventually feels like it) that issues of class, culture, the broader society, competing economic interests, etc., etc. played out through the political process that gave us the Parkway. Sample sentence: "The equilibrium of public needs [a concept Whisnant conveniently glosses over] and private interests, local exigencies and broad policy concerns that the often-competing constituencies involved in the project had sought to achieve in the Parkway's first twenty years were knocked askew." Apparently that kind of language is intended to give the book its academic credentials. Ms. Whisnant having gone that route (no pun intended), I only wish that the publisher had opted for convenient footnotes rather than cumbersome endnotes.

If you have the same reaction to this book I do, your appetite will be whetted to learn more about the BRP and the NPS. One tiny example: How did the "Orchard at Altapass," a treasure near Spruce Pine and Little Switzerland that is a commercial venture (though possibly organized as a non-profit) of the roadside-tourist variety that the NPS apparently despised, end up directly on the Parkway?

[A disclosure of my particular interest. I've been a North Carolina resident for more than 40 years, and have made substantial personal use of the Parkway and its facilities. For the last 6 years I've lived within a couple miles of the Parkway, which is now my shortest route to the Wal-Mart in Spruce Pine, N.C. Again, you'll have to read the book to find out why this final fact is significant.]

I bought this book for my nephew and he loved it! It's a nice hardcover and had great pictures.

I just finished Jim Sumner's book. It's called "Tales From The Duke Blue Devils
Hardwood". It's a great read and nearly impossible to put down. The Book Chronicles Duke Basketball history beginning with Wilbur "Cap " Card a Trinity College graduate from 1902 who returned to introduce basketball at Trinity in 1906 and culminates with the Blue Devils 15th ACC title in 2005.
The majority of the book was taken from interviews from the likes of Mark Alarie,Tate Armstrong, Gene Banks, Joe Belmont,Vic Bubas, Tom Butters, Johnny Dawkins,Randy Denton,Danny Ferry, Mike Gminski,Bernie Janicki,Jack Marin,Dan Meagher,Gary Melchionni, Jim Spanarkel and Robby West to name a few.

Thorough collection of detailed stories of the Gamecocks - not to be missed for any 'Cocks fan!
Makes us remember all the hot, steamy nights watching those Gamecocks play football...

This book is a must for Gamecock fans! Tom Price has used his years of experience as South Carolina's Sports Information Director to put together a collection of stories about the athletes, coaches, teams, and traditions that make a Gamecock proud. Everything from debunking the myth of the 'chicken curse' to how the Gamecock was chosen as the mascot.