Georgia Books

This is an excellent historical account of blacks in Glynn County and is a valuable tool for African Americans. It dispells the many myths that have existed for years concerning the quality of separate education. Many of the blacks featured here excelled in their efforts long before intergration. I applaud the
private schools that cared enough to give the best and I applaud those early settlers who demonstrated courage and valour. In addition I thank the author for having the insight to record the events that most history books refuse to tell. This is a first for blacks in Glynn County.

I happen to be in this book. Two cousins of mine contributed some of the material for this book and included some of my achievements. Ironically, the first person shown in the book is an old man to whom I used to take meals when I was seven- or eight-years old (prepared by my mother or grandmother, of course). I agree that the educational system during my childhood was pretty good. I left Brunswick, Georgia with only an eighth grade education, yet found that I could compete in the workforce with college graduates. I intend to get copies of this book for my children and grandchildren so they can visualize my origins. Major E. Magwood

When I returned home to Savannah after being gone almost 25 years, the first place I wanted to visit was Gottlieb's Bakery. Sadly, a short time later, they closed their doors for the last time. I brought my NY-born daughter with me and wanted her to try my favorite dessert in the world. She had heard about it all her life. While it was still unique and delicious, not sharing it with my mom took away a little of the magic. But having my own daughter to share it with made up for that. A cookbook filled with childhood memories of a bygone time. Now everyone in the US and beyond can savor the recipes I grew up on. Wonderful book. Wonderful memories.

I have had this cookbook for about 10 years. I am always using it for the pastry recipes. I honestly feel that my reputation as a GREAT baker has been established by the use of this book. The writing style is wonderful and warm, such as, 'don't even think of using butter flavor shortening!' I love it and would recommend it to everyone, new and experienced bakers!

Grace under Fire by Charlotte Russell Johnson will show you first hand how to make any homegoing a celebration of life. A funeral should be a time for a family to bond. Planning a funeral is very complicated. It involves a great deal of coordination and organization at a time when you are probably not feeling very organized. Surviving the death of a loved one is very difficult. You experience so many emotions including anger, death, sadness, remorse, and even relief if the loved one was suffering. Now add additional family problems to the equation and you will need to experience Grace from God while under Fire. Ms. Johnson does not demean the experience, but rather offers humor as a way of relieve the pain. Even the Bible says, "Laughter doeth good like a medicine Every funeral should be a celebration of life. This book changed my life and view of death.

Charlotte Johnson is a very talented author. She is able to capture the very essence of the tremendous triad of being African-American, female, and southern. The richness of her writings leans the reader into envisioning that they are sharing in each experience. This book is thought provoking, ensightful, and a much needed analysis of life long love, forgiveness, infidelity, passion, and the search for the perfect union and soulmate. I was hooked on the book after reading the Introducton on page 13. My desire is that every one that I know has an opportunity to experience life through the eyes of Charlotte Russell Johnson.


I have read each of Ms. Johnson's book. She is able to touch her readers in a very intimate way. Initially, I thought the book was about grief and then half way through the book it surprised me. Every reader can identify with being overwhelmed and pressured to make a life altering decision

I started reading this book in the beauty shop. I was so excited that I audibly exclaimed 'oh'. I wish Oprah would have a book this exciting on her show instead of some of her recent books. It was easy for me to see the main characters dilemna. I thing everyone has had to make a choice to trust and love or embrace loneliness. After reading the book, I was forced to ask myself some questions about my own romantic life.

GROUNDED GLOBALISM: HOW THE U.S. SOUTH EMBRACES THE WORLD is a pick for college-level libraries strong in either Southern history and culture or world history. It charts how the South and its peoples and businesses are 'going global', how it's been affected by demographic and economic changes, and how globalism has affected the southern sense of self. GROUNDED GLOBALISM comes from an anthropologist but crosses genres in examining history, religion, ecology and other influences on southern cultural evolution.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Grounded Globalism builds a fascinating model for the new South on an original insight: that globalization fundamentally transforms the region by transcending its oppositional identity to the North and subsuming it into the greater framework of the world as a whole. The crippling burden of history is lifted, freeing the South to soar, and yet to remain grounded in its regional specificity: the world is not truly flat, as Tom Friedman postulates.
Author James Peacock traces the forging of Southern history from its expansive early period to its nineteenth century definition by secession, civil war, reconstruction, and forward to its transformation by globalization in the new millennium. He makes a compelling case for the embrace of globalization by the new South, arguably contributing to its dominance in areas ranging from the economic to the political. Charlotte, North Carolina, is headquarters for Bank of America and Wachovia, Atlanta, Georgia for CNN, Raleigh for SAS. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, Southerners both, ranked among the most intellectually impressive of American presidents.
The scholarly underpinnings of the book are enlivened by anecdotes and images, making for an insightful and informative contribution to the conversation on regional identity in a globalized world.

This volume of regimental histories of Georgia units in the Civil War is a gem. James Madison Folsom traveled to Virginia near the end of the war and worked directly with the regimental leaders of the units included to compile these histories, along with statistics (e.g., number of men enlisted, killed, wounded, etc.). Civil War history buffs will enjoy reading the histories. Family historians will be especially interested in the histories. My great-great grandfather was a member of the 6th Georgia Volunteer Infantry, and its regimental history is 11 pages in length. Heroes and Martyrs of Georgia provides the most complete source of information about the 6th Georgia regiment that I have been able to find.

Because of the extreme scarcity of the original edition of Heroes and Martyrs of Georgia, few historians have heard of or utilized the book. This is unfortunate, for this volume stands as one of the most important published sources on Georgia troops in the Army of Northern Virginia. Included in Heroes and Martyrs are eighteen detailed histories of infantry, cavalry, and artillery units, most of them written in the summer of 1864 by Confederate officers in the trenches at Petersburg. The author of Heroes and Martyrs, James M. Folsom, originally intended on issuing multiple volumes that would chronicle the service of every military unit raised in Georgia during the Confederacy. Wartime exigencies, including the destruction of his manuscripts at the hands of Sherman's men, and postwar poverty prevented Folsom from ever completing his project. The one volume he was able to publish through the firm of Burke, Boykin, and Company of Macon, Georgia, appeared for sale in the spring of 1865, only weeks before Appomattox. Today fewer than a dozen original copies of Heroes and Martyrs are known to exist in public repositories. This new edition of Heroes and Martyrs of Georgia contains a new introduction and index prepared by Keith S. Bohannon, a doctoral student in the history department at Penn State University and a seasonal historian at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park.

An underlying sense of tension and urgency runs like a thread through this exciting mystery and carries you to the surprise ending. I would never have guessed the outcome. Interesting characters and an intriguing plot make this a mystery you won't want to put down.

The characters are intriguing and you won't want to put it down until you find out "who dunnit"!

If you're a native Atlantan there are a few things that you will hold dear to your heart--the swan-shaped cream puffs at the Swan Coach House at the Atlanta Historical Society, the Ladies Lounge at the Fox Theatre, the frozen chicken salas at Rich's Magnolia Room, the old magnolia tree at the old Ponce de Leon Ball Park, Mary Mac's pimento cheese, and--at the top of the list--Priscilla the Pink Pig Flyer at Rich's. It's just the most unique thing about Christmas in the city. We might not have snow or ice skating, but we have Priscilla!!! This book is just adorable. The book has a scrapbook section in the back so I printed out photos of my daughters on Santa's knee (in 1964!)and the photos we took of my grandbabies Kylie, Josh, and Paige at the Pink Pig last year (the 50th anniversary)and gave copies to each of those grandchildren. They just though it was so "cool" to see their mommies at their age--in a Mini-skirt kilt and saddle shoes and horn-rimmed glasses! This book is such a blessing and a treasure!

If you're an Atlantan--a true, old-line Atlantan, that is--you'll love this book! Riding the Pink Pig was THE way to get into the Christmas spirit for anyone who grew up in the 1950s or 1960s (although the ride continues to the present day). This book is packed with so many memories, pictures of Santa's Secret Shop, recipes from the old Magnolia Room downtown (remember the frozen chicken salad), it just about made this old fool cry. Although the Rich's name is not going to be around too much longer--which is a crying shame itself!--the Pink Pig Flyer continues and this book is a must-have celebration of something uniquely Atlanta and too rapidly disappearing.

Even after being a Civil War buff for years and years, it was after reading this book that I finally realized that this war wasn't a soldier's war but really a war about normal people who brought all their fears and worries and preoccupations with them to camp and the battlefield and learned to adjust to being soldiers, and that is what makes this book so interesting. Eli rarely speaks of battle or carnage, but rather focusing on the mundanities of camp life, or musing on some piece of news from back home, or apologizing for how he can't finish his letter correctly because "the boys are pestering me", or that he misses his mother more than anything in the world, that he'd love to be back on his "settlement", begs the local girls not to all get married before he can get back, or giving salutations to his "connections" and "inquiring friends".

The book doesn't have any footnotes except for an introduction at the beginning and a list of short bio's on the other people mentioned in the book. Landers was a middle to lower class yeoman farmer from Gwinnett County Georgia and it shows in his provincial worries, and his punctuation and spelling (very humerous), but Eli is an incredibly blunt, verbose, and honest writer. He wears his emotions on his sleeve and pours out his feelings and quite detailed observations of everything around him. He is constantly talking about what everyone is doing, what they're cooking, what the weather is like, where the camp is located, who's sick, and who dies. In one poignant and chilling part of the book, he mentions the death of a comrade who succumbed to fever and in a rare civilian letter, his sister writes back recounting the same soldier's funeral. He also gives out numerous instructions to his mother and sisters as to ploughing and sowing fields, taking care of the newly born horses (which consequently grow and cause him heartache for he doesn't want to give them up), giving advice to his little nephew, clarifying that, despite rumors, he hadn't "been killed" (he has to do this quite often), explaining the reasons for why his letters are "poor" or "sorry", and commenting on local news from the homefront. The book actually gives an interesting window into what life was like on an average farm in the 1860s thanks to the spattering of civilian letters and Eli's responses to his family. But rarely does he speak of the war itself except for a patriotic phrase here or there, or a brief overview of where they might be headed or what they had recently done. He often expresses his enjoyment of camp life and how he feels about the idea of a battle or just hanging about with his comrades. Yet, also, in nearly every single letter he mentions how he yearns for his home, misses everyone, wishes he was at home, and tells his mother that he's reconciling himself with God for the Eternal Life to come and that she should too. The awareness of death, from the very beginning to the end of the book, is acute and gives this work a dark and foreboding side. Tragedy strikes hard and often, the family endures quite a bit of hardship (also fascinatingly pointed out in a handful of surviving letters from the homefront that explain what's in shortage back home), and makes you marvel at the strength of the human spirit.

Through the course of the book Eli always sounds like a fellow fresh off a farm, though alternately he quite obviously sounds like he becomes a veteran soldier. But as his anecdotes become more war savvy as the book progresses, he never seems to stop being a civilian and that is what gives this collection it's profundity. These were the boys who fought this war and the people who endured it.

A fantastic, if not different, book. Not full of exciting battle descriptions, but an earnestly compelling, very poignant, and always fascinating look at the day to day life during the Civil War of one very endearing young man.

Excellent history of the inner feelings of this soldier during his time in the army of the Confederacy. Simply, these are, word for word, his letters home to his mother. We get his thoughts, not the thoughts of a reviewer or historian. A true glimpse into the camp, not the battles, is what we find in Mr. Landers' letters home.

Debra Susie and I were a couple from approximately 1978-1982, during which time and subsequent to our relationship, she was researching, interviewing and writing her dissertation at the Florida State University. I particularly remember Dr. Susie's steadfastness against some faculty who were not enthusiastic about her dissertation subject; her meticulous commitment to her research and writing; her excellent writing abilities; her passion for the subject; and much more. The book is well worth the read!!!

Dr. Susie is presently employed (2006) as the Executive Director at Florida Impact (234 South Magnolia Street, Tallahassee, Florida 32301 -- 850.309.1488). Florida Impact is a social justice advocacy and lobby organization funded by Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic traditions. She has been employed there for well over ten years.

"The book inspired me to have a baby," says a reader, "on my own."
Debra Ann Susie left her home in Miami, Florida, to attended Florida State University. In the time of receiving her PHD, she wrote a dissertation. Her subject was brilliant; Midwifery.
The book involves the broad-range of interviews from [mainly] southern, black midwifes in the Georgia/Florida rural areas.
This charming book is truthful, and gaining, and will leave you in a new education of this life-producing job.
`In the way of our grandmothers' is brilliant, and captures the amazing beliefs, and funny stories from midwives; our grandmothers.

Mark Anderson's account of his life growing up in the 60s and 70s and his relationship to pop music, Christian music, God and teen sin is immensely fun and entertaining. I hope he writes another book soon!

I purchased "Jesus Sound Exposion" yesterday and became quickly captivated by Anderson's engrossing memoir of navigating his adolescence and young adulthood between the twin poles of Evangelical Christianity and Rock n Roll.

Anderson transports his readers to a parallel universe riddled with dualisms: Heaven or Hell, Jesus or Satan, chastity or making out, etc. The book presents an honest look at the conservative end of the Christian spectrum and the narrow-minded worldview that accompanies it. Picture a typical 17-year-old boy compelled to share "The Four Spiritual Laws" with his high school classmates, motivated by visions of hellfire awaiting the unrepetant.

But Anderson leavens the tale with humour and musical discoveries while dispensing grace to his parents, siblings, and Sunday School teachers. While no longer a believer per se, Anderson reveals a significant amount of personal growth and maturity, eschewing fundamentalism and black/white thinking for a catholic (little c) worldview that encompasses divorce, teaching, retail work, and the horns blaring out on Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run."