Louisiana Books

Kelly Cherry has always brought poetry alive for me. In her way of writing, Cherry cuts to the core of human understanding in as clear a way as possible. Cherry's newest collection, Death and Transfiguration: Poems, is no exception. Breath taking, painful and searching, the collection is an exploration of the darker moments in human experience, rendered in sensitive, rich, and refreshing thought, passion, and language. These poems are urgent, crucial contributions to our understanding of such moments, and our understanding of the power of poetry. Those readers familiar with Cherry's poetry know she writes through those subjects considered not conquerable (death, love, God). Yet, where many poets fail under the intellectual and emotional weight of such subjects, Cherry masters each with skillful intent. Diction is sharply crafted, metaphors are clear and beautifully created, and language and meter choice make Cherry's poetry sing like the strongest and saddest of songs.

Anyone familiar with Colonial Williamsburg will want to learn about this period of its history. Major Civil War figures such as McClellan, Longstreet, Sumner, and Pickett were present, yet the details of the Battle of Williamsburg and the lengthy occupation of the town by Union forces are not widely known. This book compiles the facts and tells the story with excerpts taken directly from the memoirs, journals, and newspaper accounts of those who were there. This is not a fictionalized novel. The movements of the troops are well chronicled, and it is interesting to read the various perspectives on the strategic importance of the Battle of Williamsburg. Anyone interested in Civil War history will treasure the details offered in this book. In my mind, the images of the town's honorable aspirations and its historic significance as represented by the College of William and Mary, Bruton Parish Church, the Mental Asylum, and the care offered the wounded of both sides, were graphically contrasted with the harsh realities of slavery, and a bloody war.

They say that when it comes to politics, the House is for offense, the Senate is for defense. That was true around the time of the Missouri Compromise, where the South feared a loss of parity in the Senate, to the Civil Rights era, where Southern senators stalled efforts to pass legislation friendly toward African Americans. In this insightful analysis of Southern politics, Keith Finley explores the efforts by Dixie's senators to delay the passage of civil rights measures. His story begins in 1937, when senators sought to block an anti-lynching bill, to 1965, when the U.S. passed the Voting Rights Act. Finley shows that senators ultimately did not think they could defeat civil rights reform, but they were convinced they could delay it indefinitely. To bolster their efforts, they used arguments that claimed black and white people were naturally inclined toward a separation of the races, which suggested the inherent wisdom in the existing Jim Crow laws. Segregation eventually collapsed, but not for want of effort on the part of Southern senators. They believed action in Congress, not at the state level (which was plagued by race-baiting demagogues), could best maintain de jure segregation. Dr. Finley's well-research and cogently argued book is must reading for people who want to understand the ideology of white opposition to civil rights legislation as well as the racial attitudes of white Southerners in general in the mid-20th century.

"Harvard is the Emory of the North," said Atlanta boosters in the period following World War II. But it wasn't true, and Harvard was not the Duke of the North, either. The presidents and faculties of five elite southern schools - Duke, Emory, Tulane, Rice and Vanderbilt - knew their institutions were inferior, by orders of magnitude, to the Ivies, Stanford and the University of Chicago. Morally and pragmatically, segregation stood in the way of advancing their schools. To become a research university and to mount competitive graduate programs required outside funding, principally from large national philanthropic foundations and from the federal government. But such funding sources as the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller organizations began to attach a string to their largesse - abandonment of Jim Crow restrictions on race. And beginning with Truman, each succeeding federal administration increasingly pressured the private schools to end segregation voluntarily or risk losing grants and other major sources of funds.

University trustees manned the barricades, barring transformation of the institutions. Uniformly well-fed, white, and backward-facing, these worthies dedicated their tenure to the maintenance of racism in their beloved schools. Melissa Kean avoids an "inside baseball" study of the five universities. Instead, she offers a well-written, fast-paced account of the faceted conflicts between the academicians and their well-intentioned superiors. University presidents, sometimes aided by a conservative but practical trustee, became whitewater guides, steering through political rocks and hazards. Readers know the outcome of the struggles, and Kean gives us a thoughtful and absorbing account of how it happened.

This history of a river swamp that threatens to capture the Mississippi is a wonderfully balanced and thought-provoking account of engineering conquest and the politics of public works. Published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers through the indiscriminate Government Printing Office, the publication stands apart from the usual history-as-public relations effulent from agencies such as the Corps. DESIGNING THE BAYOUS, a work of scholarship despite the in-house publication, moves well beyond agency ego. Topics include the history of the Mississippi River, flood control and navigation, environmental assessment, interagency squabbles, scientific contributions to river engineering, and the unintended consequences of technological progress.

This is by far the best dictionary of any of the French creoles I've seen to date. As such, it's a must-buy for people interested in Louisiana Creole or any of the other French Creoles, Cajun, general French dialects, or dialects of American English in general, and certainly in Southern US dialects or Black Vernacular English. (In fact, until someone puts this kind of work into a Haitian lexicon, the /Dictionary of Louisiana Creole/ might have to do if you need a nice big Haitian-English-Haitian lexicon.)

This lexicon uses a coherent phonemic orthography, has a wide base of sources, and has lots and lots of example sentences (something I always appreciate). The lexicon deals well with lexical variation, which is a problem area in any dictionary of Creole. The lexicon is well printed -- in organization of entries, choice of font faces and sizes, and in quality of reproduction. And, altho it's new and only time will tell, it seems well bound.

The notable parts of this edition are:

* An about 20 page grammar sketch of the language.

* About ten pages on using the dictionary, orthography, and bibliography.

* About 470 pages comprising the creole lexicon. Each entry here consists notably of the Creole headword (and alternate forms); translation into American English; translation into Modern French; and example sentences in Creole (each translated into American English, but not into French). Then if there are subentries, those are listed too, with their own translations and examples. There are abbreviations noting the source of the data.

* An English-to-Creole index. About 80 pages.

* A French-to-Creole index. About 80 pages.

Although I haven't had the opportunity to read Annie Laurie's cookbook because I am now living out of the States, I can assure any potential purchaser that, based on all the hometown buzz I've heard about the cookbook, plus what I personally know of her cooking expertise, I recommend it highly. Plus, there's nothing that can compare to Louisiana cuisine, something we have taken to an art.

The title of this first collection of short stories (1986) by Janette Turner Hospital says it all. These characters are dislocated by space, time, religion, education, unforeseen events, even death. And though they may travel to the four corners of the earth, whether it is India, Canada, the United States or Australia, they never really ever leave their homeland. When left unattended, their thoughts return there.

Most of these stories have hard sayings. A burn victim, formerly a pretty young girl ("Golden Girl") must face a reconstructed future with a reconstructed face. A dying woman ("The Dark Wood") who two days ago learned of her death sentence longs to putter in her tomatoes. A friend whom the narrator has just left is killed by an automobile in "Some Have Called Thee Mighty and Dreadful" leaving the narrator overcome with guilt: "If I had invited them back to our house. If I had only tilted time a few minutes to one side or the other. This is shock. Of course I am not responsible. Life is random, brutally indifferent." In "After Long Absence" a woman returns to Brisbane and her family whose fundamentalist religion she has long since left behind. Her teetotaler father, so as not to embarrass her in front of her friends in a university lounge, "takes polite sips" of white wine. She, on the other hand, is unwilling to select a passage and read from the Bible as is the custom for visitors to do in her parents' home at the evening meal. "It cannot be a concession anywhere near as great as my father's two sips of wine. . . Yet I canot do it. 'I am sorry,' I say quietly, hating myself. . . Outside I hug the mango tree and weep for the kind of holy innocence that can inflict appalling damage; and because it is clear that they, the theologically rigid, are more forgiving than I am."

As always, Ms. Hospital gets right to the heart of the matter as well as the hearts of her readers.

Though we know him now mostly from his writing about tennis and true crime, once upon a time Michael ("Mike") Mewshaw had loftier ambitions and moved with the famous novelists of his day (the 1970s is the period treated in this book), aided and abetted by his lovely wife, Linda, whom William Styron called, "Slim." You will love reading Mewshaw's accounts of his brushes with fame, as he tries to get this one to write a blurb for his book, the other one to write him a reference letter. He is endearing, always saying and doing the exact wrong thing, and managing to alienate the shallow people he wants to impress. His account of meeting Eleanor Clark and her rudeness to him is very well written. She is a monster in human form, even down to having a face with a tragic flaw in it which made her look as though she were sneering all the time. Eventually her personality came to match her face (according to this book, there may be another side to the story). And Mewshaw's account of the Southern writer Peter Taylor is another prize. What a terrible person!

When he gets to Rome, he tries repeatedly to impress the once-famous novelist Anthony Burgess, who wrote A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Instead he has a hilarious eight-hour encounter with Burgess' wife, an excitable and grasping Italian, and their little boy of 7, a wild child with nothing but id. In this context we come to admire Harold Robbins, the lowbrow best-seller. He may not have been esteemed to critics, but at least he was generous to Mike and Linda!

When the dust of 20th century American literature clears, George Garrett's ingenious and hilarious novels will stand. Do, Lord, Remember Me is the wild, exuberant story of the final night of a religious tent revival that has been rambling through the South, led by a hard-drinking, hard-living preacher who is swept up by the Spirit despite his manifest sinfulness. The story is at once a profound meditation on the mystery of man's relationship with God, and a ribald, sidesplitting comedy (it has one of the most hilarious fart scenes in all of literature). Garrett himself has descibed the book as "redneck rowdy." Anyone who has an interest in Southern literature, or who just wants to have a damn good time, is well advised to read this classic novel. FYI: The "Voices of the South" edition published by LSU is the author's original (uncensored) version.