Georgia Books

This book is something like the description of bare life that informs one of Giorgio Agamben's recent books. Consisting of fragments that will never end up whole, much like the fabulous sherds from the broken vessel of the Lurianic Kabbalah that disperse throughout the darkness of space during the world's creation, this text flickers with meaning and insight, and accomplishes something very rare: it does not flinch from placing the barest facts of life on display. It is an ethnography of the everyday, a meditative reflection on states of being, tuning in to the author's many years of patient elaboration of difficult texts as a professor of literature, and produces at certain times a space that succeeds in approaching Blanchot's. This is highly unusual. This unpretentious book serves keen insights to a patient reader, in a simple, unadorned language informed by a life that has been thought as well as lived, and has soaked up pieces of the world. The section on love and breaking up is very special and and an extraordinarily honest description of the experience. It is probably the high point of the book's many excursions into fragmentary life. The entire book is a testament to the remainders in life that aren't appropriable but that stay with us anyway and even motivate our future choices. In the end the purpose of the book may be to be something like the ornament of this task of thinking the remainders of life, which "together" form an arabesque line of lived thought. As for the translation, it is quietly exquisite in its evocation of the simple style - and its rendering into English of the occasional difficult word play - of the original German.

Other recent ethnographic works of everyday life have tried and failed to capture what this little book does. I am thinking of the French ethnographer Marc Auge's forays into airport waiting rooms, or riding the Paris metro at night, where he encounters others and attempts to produce a theory of his relations to them, but ultimately one concludes that all this is really only the fiction of his own imagination, rather than a reflective pause such as Frey takes that opens outward to live and think the experiences that are specific to our relations with others. Frey suggests in this little zen book, or manifesto, how our so-called "relations" to ourselves and to others are really ungrounded, and will always remain non-relations, broken off experiences, interrupted.

Exquisite book - captured my daughter's heart (10 yrs old) when we were waiting for dinner to be served at a B&B in Galisteo N.M. While not O'Keeffe's most famous works, this is an intimate book, with poems. Would love to find one for her.

Overall, this textbook was one of the most helpful I've had this year. It has sidenotes, online help and is very easy to read. Great book.

Everyone has those days - where life spirals downwards and all in all just seems to have it out for you. Sometimes you need some indulgence to keep yourself sane. "Isabella's Appetite" follows one woman's dive into a particularly horrible day where the only hand hold she can find to avoid plummeting into the abyss is food. Memories call themselves up, about her husband, her children, mother, sister, and many others - and food to keep her stable as she sorts her mind through all this chaos. Deftly written with a greatly realistic character, "Isabella's Appetite" is highly recommended for community library fiction collections with a focus on chick lit.

Lya Luft is a little known, but terrific author. I was introduced to her works in a Women of Brazil class led by an astounding proff. P. Sharpe. Since then, I have read anything and everything by Luft that I could get my hands on. Island of the Dead still seems to me her most powerful work, maybe because it was the first one I read, but... In 150 pages, Lya Luft manages to put so much about human relationships, about love, about woman's struggle in the world of societal pressures, it's nothing short of miraculous. Very gothic and alluring, and absolutely a must read!

Sue Walker's long book-length poem that consists of an imagined conversation with the late Carson McCullers where both women share their stories is a very original way to cover the subject matter: her own life, a tribute to a woman and a writer she admires, and just commenting on Southern life. Each of the "Conecuh Series" books is worth reading, all are fairly short in length, and this one is the best one for fans of poetry.

As a Marine veteran of the battle for Iwo Jima and having read many books on the battle I feel that, "Iwo Jima" by Richard Newcomb is the definitive book on what the battle was all about. The first time that I read it, it brought the whole thing back, it was almost like being there again.

Reviewed by Natalie Novakowski (age 9) for Reader Views (4/07)

This is a story about an African American girl named Janie. She is 11-years-old. The Civil War is over and Miss Laura tells the slaves at Rubyhill Plantation that they can stay or are free to leave.

Janie doesn't know what to do, where she should go to. She knows that the South is still dangerous and she doesn't know much about the North. If she moves up North, she knows she may lose the chance of finding her mother.

"Janie's Freedom" has a lot of American history in it. I enjoyed reading about the history. I also enjoyed reading about Janie and the things she did. This book has a lot of Christian principles too. I would like to read more books like this.

This book is perfect for those who want to learn about the facinating history of Jekyll Island. It not only outlines the lifestyles of some of the Club's highest profile members, but offers a vivid account of what life was like for those who worked on the Island. This is a book I highly recommend, and would benefit both long-time and first-time visitors.