Louisiana Books

Al Rose has provided a unique and important look into the lives and times of many of the most influential jazz men and women of the 20th century. His book, "I Remember Jazz" is a valuable historical glimpse at not only the musical influence these wonderful musicans had on the arts, but also a fascinating look at the social and economic conditions they endured.

This book should be required reading in every music program at the high school and college level. Some of the language is not appropriate for younger ages.

If an effort is not made to educate our young people about the history of jazz and its pioneers like Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, James P. Johnson, and the rest, this important part of our American history will be lost.

The book also includes many rare and fascinating photographs of the author with many of the musicians featured in his book.

Jazz is America's original artform and Al Rose has written a book that is required reading.

Margaret Gibson, a poet who has given us many books exploring the human experience, brings us in Icon and Evidence a passionately spiritual oratorio. The poems are among the most musical I have read in a good while, and their literary antecedents and allusions are beautifully woven into the whole.
The voice of Gerard Manley Hopkins echoes from many of these pieces, giving them an urgency too often lacking in much of our lackadaisical contemporary poetry. This is a book of poetry one can't put down, as if it weaves a spell, a spell approaching chant and liturgy.

Enhanced with an informed and informative essay by Michael Plante (Jessie J. Poesch Professorship in Art, Newcomb Art Department, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana) Ida Kohlmeyer: Systems Of Color showcases the prolific artistry of Ida Kohlmeyer, a lifelong resident of New Orleans who took up painting at the age of thirty-five and became an outstanding representative of both modernism and abstract expressionism in her work. Indeed, Ida Kohlmeyer achieved national recognition as a teacher, painter, and sculptor. In addition to presenting more than one hundred large color illustrations documenting the development of Kohlmeyer's artistic career, the reader is provided with a full chronology, a bibliography for further study, as well as a listing of exhibitions, collections, and commissions. Ida Kohlmeyer: Systems Of Color is a significant contribution to American 20th Century Art History Studies and should be a part of all academic library reference collections accordingly.

The seven essays collected in this book, written by Southerners between 1830 and 1860, are unpalatable pompous nonsense for any modern reader except perhaps a "stars-and-bars" Red State neo-confederate. All seven are self-righteous apologies for slavery, on the basis of the authors' interpretation of the Bible showing that the Negro is accursed and that slavery is God's Will. All seven make similar sociological arguments than slavery is a beneficent institution and a necessary component of a well-ordered society, in which some must always serve as the "mudsill." All seven accuse "fanatics," who ought to be tending to their own class of "wage-slaves," of campaigning to disrupt the idyllic social structure of the South, the new Athens. The authors in question are Thomas Roderick Dew, William Harper, Thornton Stringfellow, James Henry Hammond, Josiah Nott, Henry Hughes, and George Fitzhugh.

Historians as a profession sometimes need to comb through some awful trash to glean insights into the course of human events. Southern historian Drew Gilpin Faust (now serving time as President of Harvard University) has assembled and edited these essays, not only to hold them as exhibits of the intransigence with which the antebellum South defended its "peculiar institution," but also because she finds evidence in them of a larger cultural paradigm, of a world-view that depended on hierarchy and class consciousness for meaning, of a set of values based on white supremacy that didn't end with defeat in the rebellion of 1861-1865. She explains her hypothesis in a twenty-page introduction to the anthology.

She writes:

"In recent years... interpretations of proslavery thought have shifted. Perhaps more accustomed to the notion of a timeless and geographically extensive American racism, scholars have begun to place proslavery within a wider context, to regard it as more than simply a distasteful manifestation of collective paranoia gripping the South in the years before the Civil War. Historians have come to view the proslavery argument less as evidence of moral failure and more a a key to wider patterns of beliefs and values. The defense of human bondage...was perhaps more important as an effort to construct a coherent southern social philosophy than as a political weapon...
"The persistence of modern racism is but one forceful reminder of the ways human beings always view the world in terms of inherited systems of belief and explanation that only partially reflect the reality..."

Dispassionate language! Historians are rewarded for such. The dire corollary of Dr. Faust's hypothesis is that at least some segments of the American populace needed and still need "white superiority" to maintain the whole structure of their beliefs and values. If so, woe unto us!

This book is edited by Jane Officer and contains letters written by Andrew Lee Jones - the last man to die in Louisiana's electric chair. The book slowly reveals the character and thoughts of a young inmate waiting to die but hoping that his appeals will be successful. It is a one-sided correspondence because Jane Officer's letters to Andrew were lost around the time of his execution. However, we can easily deduce the nature of what she had written to Andrew from his comments on her letters.

One of the peculiar effects of the death penalty is to make those scheduled to die surprisingly articulate. Dr Johnson correctly observed that contemplation of one's death "composes a man's mind wonderfully". Despite his limited intelligence and rudimentary education, Andrew's letters to Jane set out the hopes and fears of a condemned man in a very direct and moving way.

They make an inlikely pair of correspondents - a widowed English grade school teacher and a poorly educated black boy from the bayou. Andrew's naive and dreamy view of England is sharp counterpoint to the harsh day-to-day reality of life on death row in Angola Prison.

As the end approaches, the reader would have to have a heart of stone not to find some compassion for Andrew as his hopes alternately are buoyed up only to be crushed as appeals are rejected and fresh execution dates set. This is a moving book and well worth reading for its inside view of what it is like to be warehoused for death.

Dr. Stone is a genius with words. His stirring descriptions of his travels, the people and places he has met, and his sensual reactions to each draw the reader into the circumstances and delight the senses. Keep writing, Doc. Keep writing!

One of the things I truly enjoy about reading is seeing our shared world through another's eyes. In my opinion, that's what the best writing gives us.

Mullenix's eyes see a world of variety and wide scope -- a world of nature that is shrinking as development impinges. His spare words are deftly combined to convey a place, a character, a passion, a sadness.

He contemplates his world through his own and his primary character's eyes: Charlie the Harris' hawk. What he reveals is a falconry hunting season's worth of descriptions of the hunting itself, and the place that hunting holds in both his and Charlie's world, which is the Bayou Country of Baton Rouge.

While it is written by a falconer, there are aspects of his essays that hold immediate relevance to anyone interested in the wild world that surrounds us and the species that co-habitate that world with us. He simply and without editorializing describes the difficulties he's had explaining the concepts of hunting, eating, and dying to his three-year-old twin daughters; how his own passion for falconry impinges on his spouse and his boss; the internal debate where passion overshadows reason and we all do things we later regret; and the loss of habitat in his own environs -- habitat as important for his wild neighbors as for himself.

Mullenix, however, doesn't try to solve the problem of human expansion into wild areas; he doesn't even rail against the system. He looks at the fact with a raptor's eye, in crystal clarity, and one expects, with a tear.

Not all is gloom and doom, as the Naturalist's Eye surveys the cycle of life, of seasons, of hunting and not-hunting, of living and dying, of the ways our disparate lives intersect with one another. It combines the hunter writer into an entity sought by the naturalist in all of us, and confirms our suspicion that we've also been a character in the book all along.

"In the Footsteps of Grant and Lee: The Wilderness Through Cold Harbor" combines the writing of Gordon Rhea, the foremost modern historian of the Civil War's 1864 Overland Campaign, with the eye of photographer Chris Heisey to produce a spectacularly beautiful "coffee table book". Rhea's text might be considered a distillation of his massive four volumes (a fifth is in preparation) about the Overland Campaign that stretched from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor in May and June, 1864, the narrative in "In the Footsteps of Grant and Lee" providing a concise yet vivid word picture. Heisey's photographs for the most part are "artistic" rather than efforts to precisely record battlefield topography, but those photographs are haunting in their emotional impact. In addition, this large-scale volume is illustrated with a good selection of contemporary photographs and drawings and with numerous maps of the military operations, some of the best and most clear maps I have seen dealing with this complex campaign. Rhea and Heisey very evidently hope that their efforts will stimulate interest in preserving these battlefields in northern Virgina. Rhea's words convey a strong sense of the importance and drama of what happened there; Heisey's photogrpahs capture the beauty of nature and building still to be seen.

Peter Taylor is one of the few writers who can stand toe to toe with Chekhov, and their work has a lot in common. Their characters are complex and full-blown. Their stories are subtle but stick in the mind and you may find yourself reinterpreting them long after you read them. But unlike Chekhov, Peter Taylor didn't publish a great deal -- a few books of short stories, a couple of short novels or novellas, some poems, a play or two. It's all so good that it's hard to pick a favorite, but this may be mine. This is real fiction for real adults.

This is a fine read, and it was delivered in a timely fashion.