Virginia Books

During several summer vactions on Virginia's eastern shore, I've enjoyed researching and piecing together information about this special peninsula. I purchased "Off 13" in a local museum during this summer's vacation and spent a day devouring it. I now consider this my key quick reference book to one of my favorite places. Off 13 provides succinct and accurate guidance for exploring off the shore's beaten path. It also provides fascinating appetizer bits of history for an 'oldcomer'. Simply a wonderful book. It can be purchased at the Cape Charles Museum off 184 in Cape Charles, VA.

But I ask a favor... please don't tell too many people about this wonderous world off the 'mainland.'

Kirk Mariner's book "Off 13 - The Eastern Shore of Virginia Guidebook" offers a highly informative and entertaining guide to an overlooked but tranquil peninsula bounded by the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean, not far from the Nation's Capital. Many people know of Chincoteague but may not be aware that the rest of the Virginia eastern shore is well worth exploring. "Off 13" is full of interesting anecdotes and historical information about the area and its many little towns as well as useful and practical information for travellers.

Take this guidebook with you to Colonial Williamsburg, and it's almost like having a private tour guide showing you the high-points, and saving you wasted time getting around.

Buy it as a souvenir, and you'll have the perfect refresher of all that you've seen, with some in-depth information about the buildings and people of the town.

It's important to know that Colonial Williamsburg is, indeed, a living CITY, and there is more than can be seen in one day. The Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg is a valuable tool for that visit.

If you are planning a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, this is the book to have! It includes detailed drawings of each building, shop, tavern, and official hotels in the historic area. This book tells about each point of interest and ticket options. If you want to read up about the historic area before or after your trip, buy this book you won't regret it

This is one of the most useful guides I've ever read. Virginia was host to nearly 1/3rd of all Civil War engagements, and this guide covers them all like a mini-history of the war. Unlike travel books that are organized geographically, this guide organizes them chronologically. Each campaign is prefaced by a detailed overview, followed by concise (from 1 to 4 pages, depending on the battle's importance) but engrossing descriptions of the individual engagements. These descriptions make this a great book to browse through when you're not in the car. Most sites' summaries touch on their condition--whether they're threatened by development (as too many are) and whether they're in private hands or protected by the park service.

But the maps are where this book really stands out. Each battle features a very clear map designating army positions and historical roads, as well as historical markers (the author also wrote the /A Guidebook to Virginia's Historical Markers/), parking, and visitors' centers. Best of all, though, many battles are illustrated with paintings or photographs of the sites, and the point-of-view of these pictures is marked on each map!

If you are familiar with either or both of the two editions of the excellent "Civil War Battlefield Guide", then you should add "The Official Virginia Civil War Guide" to your collection. This book has the advantage than in focusing on about 1/3rd as much of the war, it can do so in far greater depth.

Many small conflicts that don't receive more than a mention in the other guides are prominently and competently presented here. This makes the work a handy reference tool and an interesting read in its own right.

The layout is an improvement over the previously mentioned guides in several ways. Not only is there increased depth, but tactical maps are included for every event covered--rather than just the major ones. In addition, simple campaign maps are also included (something missing in many battle monographs even.) One weakness is that the tactical maps are not overlaid onto topographical maps, so in cases where the guides both have maps the general work is preferable in most instances.

The information on visitor centers, directions, and interesting background is very helpful as well. Also of note, the introduction states that all royalties from the book will go towards preservation efforts in Virginia.

One can only hope that similar works will be produced for other regions. This guide sets a fine standard for others to follow.

I read this book 25 years ago and it is still the best study skills book out there. Every high schooler headed to college should own a copy.

One of the first (if not THE first) appearances of this title, Ms. Voeks' work is concise yet commanding. With a soundly expressed point of view, she offers in this slim volume a much greater reward to her readers than can be found in subsequent, and more emptily-massive, publications with the same or similar title. In it's brief, yet kindly, tell-it-like-it-is manner, her book will be a welcomed -and valued- gift to any young person about to leave "the nest".

While the projects involve time and effort, the end results are beautiful quilted wall hangings that depict the stories of our childhood. These are beautiful artist-quality products that you can recreate for your home. I found the instructions, patterns and illustrations to be very direct and informative.

This is a very hard book to find but it's worth the money. Bonnie Kaster is a master applique artist and has done a fine job with these patterns. I have over 200 quilting books and this one is still THE ONE I choose to show people. If you can't get the book, at least check out Bonnie's other patterns from Sweet Memories. They are equally as stunning.

Chris Manning's book is an outstanding account of the importance of teamwork. Manning avoid drifting into cliche, as other "True stories" do, in order to present us with real life characters, warts and all. Through an almost game by game recount, Manning keeps the reader on the edge of his seat every game, conveying the emotion that he and his team felt during every pitch. This is a definite must read for anyone who loves baseball, especially anyone who wants to be a baseball player. It's refreshing to read about athletes who put their team, instead of themselves, first.

Being a kid that spent every minute of his time growing up wanting to be on a baseball diamond, Chris Manning's book "One Team One Dream" brings back all of those feelings that I had so many years ago. He does a wonderful job covering the highs and lows, the ups and the downs, essentially the true roller coaster emotions that embodies high school baseball. It was easy to relate to the players as the games and season unfolded, each chapter bringing me not only closer to the ending, but bringing back those lost memories of my high school glory days as well. I recommend this book for any sports fan, or even just the casual one who wants a reminder of the innocence of the game.

I re-read this book from time to time, the focus on different essays depending on where I am in my own life. The chapter on Virginia Woolf is one of the best essays on Woolf for this Woolfian scholar. Fraser describes how Virginia and Vanessa Stephen's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, wandered around their Victorian house weeping after his wife died. "I am a man without a skin," he said. He reportedly told his fragile, beautiful, and talented daughters: "When I am sad, you should be sad. When I am angry, you should weep." According to Fraser, Virginia Woolf believed her father "the model of the patriarchal family, with men given license to bully and rant while women and children submitted and served...." Fraser says Woolf believed that when such conditions are tolerated in private life, in public they can lead to fascism. "The tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other."

Fraser interviewed the Russian ex-patriot Nina Berberova many times. Nina Berberova only became known to the English-speaking world in her eighties, and is a role model for those who hope to thrive to their final breath. Berberova was active, thinking, writing, and living on her own to her death at 92. Fraser quotes the questions Berberova poses to herself as a writer: "Did you try to look inside yourself, or did you play the victim and look to others to blame? ... Did you speak out and tell the truth? Were you bold in your work? .... Did you fulfill your promise, the talent you were born with? ...Were you cooperating with the life force, or were you willfully moving in the direction of suicide?"

Also of interest is Fraser's reading of Edith Wharton. After describing an attempted rape in The House of Mirth, Fraser poses the possibility the author knew enough about such events to portray this scene and its impact on the heroine so vividly. As happens with so many young women, the character, Lily, feels shamed. "I am bad--a bad girl--all my thoughts are bad." She keeps the attempted rape a secret even from her best friend. Again, Fraser hones in on the secrets, the "ornament and silence" so many women continue to observe.

"Lily, though a grown and sophisticated woman, is strangely spellbound, lonely, and unprotected, like a girl in an incestuous house," Fraser says.

The other evidence the author might have been molested include her childhood illnesses, and in young womanhood, "symptoms of what her Victorian doctors called neurasthenia but which contemporary diagnosis often links to early sexual trauma. Panic attacks, breathing difficulties...migraines, debilitating depressions. .... Nausea so severe...she became incapable of eating."

After citing the famous quote from Flaubert: "Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works," Fraser politely observes how easy it can be for some male artists and writers to pursue their art with mothers, wives, lovers, or daughters to cosset, cook, and keep the household quiet.

For example, Fraser says, "In the old, old female story, Penny embarked on the old, old course: trying to mend a wounded man in an attempt to heal the hurt little girl from her past." This refers to Penny Scott, who married Paul Scott, a British novelist. Penny Scott kept the world quiet for her husband even though he disdained and possibly abused her. She didn't "know" of his homosexuality or his alcoholism, though at least one of these should have been fairly obvious, and she later had to take refuge in a shelter for battered women.

"As an alcoholic who couldn't stop drinking, he was still committing suicide. The disease of alcoholism is as patient as a tiger; it will life in wait for its victims for years and years," Fraser observes of Scott. With this, Fraser astutely hones in on yet another "secret" many continue to believe in poor taste to discuss.

Fraser refers to women in their roles as ornaments to men's art, or their silence in the face of duty or shame. In her chapter on George Eliot, she writes: "To a woman writer, exposing family secrets can seem perilously close to going mad. Men have had the support of the culture as they recognized their own experience and laid claim to it by writing it down. On the whole, they have been able, without inhibition,to feed their creative ambitions with the details of other people's lives. Men had a mandate, after all, to inform the public about the nature of life. Things have not been--are not--so simple for a woman. Women have often withheld their stories, because honesty about emotions and about the family feels to many women like a sin. It means drawing aside the curtain, lifting lids. It means rencouncing the role of good girl....It may mean expressing anger....Women must set aside the bowl they have used to beg for approval and praise. George Eliot was not free as an artist until her respectable family had cast her out. Only a community larger than family, only powers greater than lovers or husbands, can sustain women writers....

Finally, of interest to anyone who has been a long-time reader of the New Yorker, is Fraser's memoir of her own arrival there in her early twenties, and her apprenticeship with William Shawn. Not only is the essay hilarious, with the author's description of flying up the stairs in her mini-skirt, her hair so long she could wrap it around her neck, but the reader gets to glean some of Mr. Shawn's wisdom about writing and writers as taught to someone who clearly learned her lessons well.

I read this book looking for something and I found in it the most strong women I could ever know. An inspiration in every way to my young mind I will be changed forever by this amazing collection. Kennedy Fraser captures the essence of each of the women (and the few men) that she writes about. She's amazing, it's amazing.

Full disclosure: Stephen Ausband is my cousin. Having said that, I give you my objective assurance that this book is a small masterpiece.

Outdoors Year Round is in the literary tradition of Izaak Walton and Thoreau, and in spite of its brevity and its stated quotidian purpose, compares favorably to the modern masters of writing about the outdoors - Stegner, McPhee, Peter Matthiessen, Norman Maclean. According to the Introduction, Outdoors Year Round is "for people who need to get outside during every month." That's true: Outdoors Year Round is a practical guidebook of the kind that hunters and anglers along coastal Virginia and North Carolina might carry in the glove compartment or the tackle box. But it's a great deal more, too. Ausband is an altogether accomplished writer, and his setting - the maritime forests and wetlands of the mid-Atlantic U.S. - remains one of the most beautiful and diverse expanses of temperate coastline in the world. The book covers the year in twelve chapters, "January" through "December." Into the local, topical month-by-month where-when-and-how, he has woven closely observed vignettes about hunting and fishing, and a series of moving and humane reflections on the relationship between the natural world and nature-loving hunters and anglers.

In particular, I want to recommend Outdoors Year Round to people who dislike or disapprove of hunting and fishing. The purpose of the book is not at all to address such concerns, and I don't necessarily think that reading this book will change anyone's mind; but I do think people who blanch at the idea of hunting or fishing will find it instructive to consider the love of nature that informs Ausband's text, and the active stewardship of wildlife and habitat practiced by the men and women who populate the pages of his book - the hunting and fishing guides, the proprietors of the bait shops and hunting lodges, and the hunters and anglers themselves.

Dr. Stephen Ausband, a professor at Averett University, is an avid outdoors man who has written a book on
fishing and hunting in costal Virginia and North Carolina. I found the book to informative, entertaining and easy
to read.

Ms. Virginia White's book about Hungary is indeed a valuable edition to the genre, and I congratulate her for this volume and her splendid life.

Virginia White tells two equally engrossing tales in her fascinating new book: that of Hungary as it makes a difficult transition from Communism to western style capitalism and her own personal story full of adventures, mishaps, warmth, wisdom and humor. As a "senior" Peace Corps teacher in Hungary in the early 90s, White was well-positioned to observe the unprecedented turn-around in that country, and her insights into the politics, economics, and society of the time are right on the mark. But it is her talent as an observer of everyday details and her fascinating interactions with her new neighbors, friends, and students that make this book so hard to put down. One looks forward to reading the further adventures of someone who is far from being "over the hill."

The southern states east of the Mississippi were in a territory that was for a long time under Spanish or Indian jurisdiction. By law, only persons issued passports were allowed to enter the southeastern territories, and so the passport records have the largest body of data relating to the pioneers to the Southeastern United States.

Dorothy W. Potter spent eight years doing research in the records of the War Department, the State Department, the archives of the individual states, as well as records of the Spanish and the British in West Florida. So she has assembled a complete collection of the passports and travel documents issued to individuals and families going to the Mississippi Valley area from Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.

Never again can genealogists complain that research in the Old South is hampered by lack of a comprehensive source book, for in this one outstanding reference work there is now a huge and invaluable body of source material at their disposal. No wonder this book was awarded the Certificate of Merit by the Tennessee Historical Commission!

"...This is one of the finest reference books we have ever seen."--Winston De Ville, Alexandria (LA) Daily Town Talk

"...Mrs. Potter has made a major contribution to genealogical research in the southern states."--Charles F. Bryan, Jr., Tennessee Historical Quarterly

"May I take a moment of your time to tell you how impressed I am with your Passports of Southeastern Pioneers. It is a model work of genealogical scholarship...."--Letter to the author from Elizabeth Shown Mills

This book was well writing, with many unknown facts on the movement of American families caming to the Southern states. It is a shame that it is out of print.