Georgia Books

Believable characters, setting, and plot for Georgia in 1947. Main characters are Freddy James Johnson, age 13; his mother-Elenora; and younger brother, Kenny Lee. Supporting characters are 'Big Kenny' - Freddy's father who deserts his family; Ms. Priddy (the town's owner & overseer of all); Theodora, the cook at the saloon; and Ms. Suzanna Doolittle, who gives French lessons to the more elite ladies of their society. It is humorous at times and oddly sad at others. Language & dialect are pure 'Southern'. The main plot consists of the fact that 'Big Kenny' Johnson leaves home one day and never returns. His oldest son, Freddy James-age 13, takes on the responsibility of keeping his family together and providing shelter and food. The best way he sees to do this is to move his Mother and brother to town. They all would rather stay on the family farm - after all its been in their family for generations; however, Freddy knows thats impossible. So, he goes off to town one day - not telling anyone where he is going - and finds a job at the local saloon doing odd jobs. As luck would have it, he finds a room to rent at Ms. Priddy's. To find out what lies ahead for Freddy James and his family, you'll need to read the book. I promise you won't be disappointed.

I loved this book! There are several reasons for my enthusiasm. It's setting is 1947 on a Georgia farm. I am a history 'buff' and have a rural background. I felt I could relate to Freddy James Johnson (age 13-Protagionist) situation. Freddy's father, Big Kenny, deserts his family and it is up to 13-year old Freddy James to try to keep his family together. Although they would all prefer to stay on the family farm - it is impossible. Freddy James goes into the local town on his own. He finds a job and a place to rent where he, his Mama and younger brother, Kenny Lee, can live. I can't tell you all the 'life situations' Freddy James faces as he tries to keep his family together. I will tell you, however, that he matures throughtout the story. It is a 'must read' for an English class or a History class focusing on this period of time. It will make you cry, laugh, and gain respect for Freddy James Johnson. In my opinion, it is realistic historical fiction at its best. Also, I forgot to mention - I read this book by audiocassette. If you've not tried a recorded book yet, then, it's time you gave it a try.

As a writer, I love this beautiful little book.
As simply a reader, I still would have loved it!

Son of outstanding poet, William Stafford,
Kim Robert Stafford has his own unique and beautiful writing style.
There is a succinct eloquence in his prose that,
at times, is so poetically breath-taking ~ one must stop,
go back and re-read the given passage to savour the
hidden nuance of deeper meaning.

Stafford never rambles or drifts, he does not dwell
in the shallows of trite meaningless verbosity ~
each word he writes carries depth and insight,
each chapter enriches perception.

This is pure literary kindling for any writer
who feels their creativity needs a little spark...
Serving to remind you, with every page,
of the original joy to be found in artistic craft.

I came across this book at the local library in the new book section, had the book six weeks total and decided I had to buy it. There are simply too many subtleties, suggestions and insights to explore. If you aspire to be or if you are a writer, you'll treasure the ideas and admire the warm, personal tone of a man who invites you to open yourself to others, to the world around you and the world within. I didn't realize until part way through the book that Kim Stafford is an Oregon writer. It was good to see familiar places in fluid prose and through another's eyes.

This is more than a story of a Holocaust survivor, it is a story of one man's personal trimuph. In this brutally honest and open autobiography the author decribes his peaceful childhood that was shattered by the Holocaust. Although a portion of the book describes his life, and death of most of his family, during the Holocaust, the second half of the book is a psychological drauma of how this young man rebuilds his life against more improbable odds. After he survives near certain death in the concentration camps his losses continue to mount. The author brings the reader into his psyche when he decribes pivitol decisions: whether to kill his abusive concentration camp guard when given the opportunity, to live with his father after the war or seek out an education, or to marry into wealth but loose control over his destiny. Although I would recommend this book to any person interested in Holocaust history or Jewish Studies, I think my recommendation goes beyound that limited group. This is a book that most mature high school students should read but I can recommend it to any adult who wants to know how one young man rebuilt his life after loosing everything, then loosing more.

I was fortunate enough to get a prerelease copy of this book before it hit the streets. Some people wanted to know what I thought about it because I have an interest in identity issues. I really liked it. It's a very honest treatment given the series of events that the author describes. The author contrasts different times of his life in relation to the atrocities that occurred in Hitlerite Germany. I don't think that you have to have a pronounced interest in Judaism to appreciate the depth of pain and suffering that happened during this time in history or to this man in particular. Though, if you do or if you're in interested in human rights issues, there's an additional benefit associated with it. The net result is that this book gives a very real human face to a very real human tragedy that now seems foreign to most. Though the barbarism of the Nazis is unsettling at times, it's worth the read. The truth often hurts. Maybe it should because that way you can learn from it. Good stuff.

This is a magnificent book. It tells the story of a special place and the people who live there. Southern Crackers are often maligned for ignorance and bigotry, but the people observed and recorded here deserve great credit for understanding the natural beauty of their surroundings and for creating a lifestyle that used what nature offered without abusing it. Fortunately, Francis Harper, the naturalist and the author, took a lifelong interest in the Okefenokee. Thanks to him, the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge is protected and available for all of us to appreciate, and thanks to this book, we can appreciate the people who lived in and around the swamp back in the days before strip malls, chain stores, communication gadgets and other intrusions. You do not have to be a naturalist to enjoy this beautiful book. If you read it, you will have a much greater understanding of a very special place.

This book contains much information on some of the early settlers of the Okefenokee Swamp - focusing on families that resided in Charlton County, GA. Many pictures are included as well as folk stories, local legends and songs, and even a swamp vocabulary section. This book is a must for those researching this area.

Ever since I was a little girl, my Nanny (grandmother) has told me stories about a fortune teller that her grandmother knew. Everyone in the town was kind of afraid of Miss Lancaster..but they all respected her. I never really knew if the stories about her were true or not, seeing as how my Nanny is an excellent story teller. Then, out of nowhere comes this book! It's a wonderful and captivating story. Perhaps I am partial, being that I have lived in Georgia my whole life and always heard stories about Miss Lancaster from someone who knew her, but I'm pretty sure that even if I had no idea about this increadible woman, I would have still enjoyed this book.

This book is a page-turner, and very well written! I enjoyed the true historical account of an eccentric fortune teller in the Old South! Good job, Mrs Moore and Mrs Smith!

A superb study of the civil rights movement in one city that has direct meaning for all communities, north and south. The author traces the sources of the strength of the activists, but does not neglect their weaknesses or mistakes. Covering the period from 1945 to the present, the book gives a rich sense of what the struggle for (and against) civil rights meant then and means now.

Rabby has done a wonderful job capturing the essence of the civil rights struggle on the local level. She has the full cast of characters: impatient students, anxious elders, foot-dragging whites,mean-spirited judges, foolish community leaders, and violent racists.

What makes this book so good, so essential is the humanity, the people who led and bled to advance the movement in Tallahassee and the nation, to make America live up to its promise of freedodm and equality.

In the end, Rabby restastes with passion and eloquence an essential truth of the civil rights movement--it was a daily struggle carried forth by ordinary people cast into extrordinay circumstances by their courage and determination.

Read this book if you want to appreciate America at her best.

Publishers Weekly provides a synopsis of Singer's stories; the Product Description under Editorial Reviews encapsulates her collection in its entirety. But what both inexplicably fail to mention, as do other reviews and the tributes on the book's back cover, is what a gifted writer Singer is. It was, in fact, her well-crafted, descriptive prose that compelled me to read this collection in one evening, then reread countless passages the next. Be certain to read the "Search Inside" excerpt of the first story to see why lovers of good writing will be hooked by the end of the second paragraph. And savor the passages that I've included below to further establish that THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT is indeed a literary treasure.

But first, A NOTE OF CAUTION: Readers who prefer linear plots and action probably will not care for this book, which is predominately a collection of musings that shift back and forth between present and past and various countries, even within a single story.

PASSAGES FROM SINGER'S STORIES
In "LILA'S STORY," Susan studies photographs taken shortly after her grandparents had immigrated to Palestine: "Here is my grandmother...arms linked with her two sons, posing on the beach. She is beautiful, or almost, cat-eyed and slim, with an aquiline nose and prematurely white hair. Here she is leaning against a railing by the sea...The camera has caught that fleeting moment that precedes the self-consciousness of a smile, and that, with that slight squint and wind-blown hair, makes her look contemplative and a little reckless, both vulnerable and brave."


"DEIR YASSIM" begins with Susan ruminating about the ashes of her uncle: "All the way from New York to Tel Aviv, she keeps the box beneath the seat in front of her....Thirty-six thousand feet up, she's thinking about the many possibilities of return. In a Tibetan air burial, bodies are left naked on a rock for vultures to pick to bones. In India, pyres smolder along the Ganges, ashes and marigolds drifting with the stream. Maybe she'll just leave the box at Ben Gurion, revolving like a planet on a bagage carousel. Maybe she'll drop it inside Damascus Gate, ticking like a bomb. Or maybe she'll take it to a cafe deep inside the souk and stir the ashes, a teaspoonful at a time, into a cup of Arabic coffee, boiled sweet. She'll turn the cup over, twist it three times, read the prophecy etched into the grinds.

"As dawn splits over the Mediterranean, three men in black suits and rumpled shirts shuffle past her and place themselves in the space between the galley and the lavatories, behind her seat. They wind phylacteries around their arms and foreheads, drape prayer shawls over their heads, and daven toward the streaks of light. She feels the chanted words bending, bobbing, against her neck. The words keep the hurtling plane miraculously aloft. Susan touches the box with her toes and listens to the praying men. She's thinking that bodies, like words, dissolve, dry up, fly into the air. They fly away and are gone."


Midway through "EXPATRIATE," Susan imagines the mindset of her parents when she was very young: "They went to Israel nearly every year. They rented a flat for three weeks in the summer across the street from Ezi's parents, took their meals with them. They sat around with army friends on Shabbat, drinking Nescafe, picking at a bowl of grapes, the babies playing at their feet. They argued over Eshkol and Nasser, the discoveries at Masada and the Dead Sea, the successes of the kibbutzim, whether the lira could ever be shored up.

"Their friends in Israel always said, Nu, so when are you coming back? It was not really a question. It was an accusation, a matter of loyalty.

"Next year, they always said, and they meant it, at the time. Next year Ezi's fellowship would be up. Next year they would have saved enough to buy a car.

"So they went to the beach, took day trips to the Kinneret and Caesaria and Tel Aviv, but after a week or two they began to feel claustrophobic and bored. They shopped for gifts for the secretary in Ezi's department, souvenirs for their American friends...They exclaimed over the quality of the Jaffa oranges, the Tnuva cheese. But at night they lay in their borrowed bed and whispered how expensive everything was here, how Yoav was not satisfied with the equipment in his lab, how Nir was earning barely half of what an ophthalmologist could make back home. Home. They turned off the light and lay sleepless in the dark.

"Back in New York again, everything felt oversized. Even their own apartment, with its twelve-foot ceilings and bay windows, felt out of scale. They sat around the table on Indian summer afternoons with Yitzhak and Carol, or Shmuel and Ruthi and their kids, the fans blowing grimy air through the windows. They complained about LBJ and Lindsay, the potholed condition of the roads, the declining standards of the schools. They didn't like the idea of their children growing up in such a materialistic society, they said, not to mention all the drugs and crime, hardly noticing that they'd switched to English, unable to find the word they were looking for in the language they spoke less and less frequently but never stopped thinking of as their own. The plank-and-packing-crate shelves had come down long ago, the card table replaced by a Danish Modern dining set in teak with matching chairs. They fanned themselves with sections of the Sunday Times and said, It's a khamsin! forgetting that the gritty yellow khamsin wind was nothing like this humid heat at all."

An astonishing collection; individually each story stands on its own but read together they achieve a novelistic depth and texture. Rarely does writing about Israel & Palestine by "outsiders" achieve this kind of insight and truth. Singer gets every detail right. But cultural specificity aside, these stories are timelesss in their beauty, piercing truths, and unforgettable characterizations.

beautiful, compelling...a great study of one of the most interesting rebel artists of our time. everyone should know who howard finster is!

Fans of the odd and eccentric will find Howard Finster's Paradise Garden fascinating and entertaining. The quality and selection of photographs of the garden is fantastic, and Finster's statments regarding the vision behind his creation are intriguing. This book is definitely worth examining for its unusual scope and content.

While the philosophy underlying this work is reminiscent of Thoreau, Sanders writing is much more graceful and his personality more warm and human than the Walden Pond horned frog ever hoped to be. Sanders has a keen eye for the insightful moment and treats himself and his subjects to piercing, yet sympathetic, examinations.

As the daughter of a former U.S. Marine, I wasn't sure I'd like this book. I am pleased to say I not only like it, I fell in love with it. Scott Russell Sanders has more than a way with words, he has a love affair with words. In reading this book, I found a decent man, a thoughtful man of lively intellect. It is a pleasure to be in Mr. Sanders's company even if its only through the medium of the printed word.

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.