Tennessee Books

I had expected a traditional (both context-wise and style-wise) cook book with recipes which I intended to use purely for research purposes. But this is not a strict "recipe" book. Nor is it a more loosely styled recipe book with text.

It is straight prose styling and absolutely delighful. It contains mountain vernacular - but not to the extreme. The recipes that it contains are narrative - more suggestions - as in "To it was added the whole array of giblets...." and "They made heaps of rich gravy to add to that in the turkey pots".

While you probably wouldn't cook Sunday dinner directly from the book, it will surely make you wish you were back there having Martha McCulloch-Williams do the cooking for you.

As a former resident of Rugby, Tennessee, I fell in love with Uffington House and with the Hughes family who lived there. This collection of letters is a favorite of mine and well worth reading for anyone interested in local history.

I am extremely impressed with Taylor's book, which explores the real and imagined consequences of the Civil War on families in border states, where the question of secession was the most complicated and the most fraught. This book not only documents (in writing that rises to the level of great literary writing -- a rarity in young historians) the actual occurrence of split families and what they had to say for themselves, but also the psychological, moral, and political implications of families at odds with each other. That is, this book gets beyond the idea of "the brother's war" as merely a curiosity or a sentimental metaphor, and shows how the state of the society -- the relations between men and women, white and black -- itself is revealed in the experience of these families, observed in extremis.

The writing, again, is extraordinary. Fans of Doris Kearn Goodwin or David McCullough will love this book, and will be pleased to know that Taylor is of the new generation of historians and likely to be around and writing for a very long time.

THis is an awsome book by Wm Lynwood Montell that is written about the life and times of the Cumberland River. Wonderful book just as all Mr Montells books are.

Dress Whites Gold Wings is a beautiful tapestry of the wonderfully rich stories told by pilots in the Officer's Club and the ready room. Dan Brown shows remarkable talent in his ability to bring the reader into the life of a naval aviator.

Is the book for everyone? No, I don't think so. But if you are interested in aviation at all or if you are interested in how a country boy climbs out of the backwoods of Georgia to conquer the world, then it is a great read. Some of the stories are on rather mundane topics, but Dan does a fantastic job of drawing the reader in and making him part of the narrative in a way that is most enjoyable even when dealing with topics that are somewhat ordinary. Then, of course, he hurls you across oceans at near the speed of sound to become part of a lifestyle known only to the select few.

In an easy, conversational style, Dan describes the life of the naval aviator in a way that makes it comprehensible even to the uninitiated. You'll find yourself reading more than you intended at one time for two reasons. Firstly, the book is well written and entertaining. Secondly, you know that each story is complete in and of itself. The tendency is to read "just one more."
This is Your Captain Speaking: A Common Sense Manual for Keeping Your Wings Level

This book is a "must have" if you are an attorney who is going to do any criminal work in Tennessee.

Once in a generation, someone compiles a genealogy reference work that instantly becomes a standard in its field because it aggregates a vital collection of records in one place, explains how those records originally came to be, and, in the process, promises to save its users hours of toil. Earliest Tennessee Land Records and Earliest Tennessee Land History, by Irene Griffey, is such a book.

The State of Tennessee was established, essentially, from land ceded to the federal government by North Carolina. Clouding the various land cession laws that transferred the title of land from North Carolina to the United States south of the River Ohio (a territory) and then to Tennessee was the requirement, however vaguely defined, that North Carolina Revolutionary soldiers' promise of land for military service be honored. Among other things, this requirement resulted in the inclusion of hundreds of footnotes to the Tennessee land laws that spelled out the land transfer process. In the first portion of this book, Mrs. Griffey has done an extraordinary job of sifting through and organizing the legal history of the early Tennessee land laws so that genealogists may be able to grasp their substance. Among other things, researchers can now understand when and why the various county land offices were established, the six-step process for obtaining a land grant, the differences between military and other types of land grants, and, of course, how to use early Tennessee land records.

The bulk of this remarkable volume, however, consists of abstracts of some 16,000 of the earliest Tennessee land records in existence, arranged in a tabular format. For each record we are given the name of the claimant, the file number, the name of the assignee (if any), the county, number of acres, grant number, date, entry number, entry date, land book and page number, and a description of the stream nearest to the grant. A separate listing of assignees, with the corresponding claimant and file numbers follows in a separate table. The volume concludes with a lengthy appendix consisting of maps and a detailed chronology of Tennessee's land statutes. All of which makes Mrs. Griffey's new book the most important contribution to Tennessee genealogy in recent memory.

Precise detailed listings, excellent index, should be in every rock-hounders back-pack. However, it's only failing are the rather crude maps. The maps would be more helpful if they included topographic elevation bars. But, all in all, a very delightful reference tome.

Oliver Temple's book is a must-read for anyone who would understand the causes of the war and the nuances of the issues of abolition and secession (Chaps. 8 and 9). Written by a contemporary of those events (published in 1899), it provides invaluable insight into the "feelings" of the participants on these issues; insight that is usually lost in the passage of time. Temple's discussion of secession in Chap. 9 is particularly valuable in refuting the argument in defense of legal secession. A personal letter from Robert E. Lee to his son in January of 1861, denouncing secession was particularly enlightening.

This book is an excellent source of information about the cantilever barns and some of the people to built them. I am a decendent of John Trotter, whose family built several of the barns. I visited Sevierville yesterday and was able to follow the map and see the barns myself. I didn't know about any of this until I ran across your book in a local store. Thank you very much. Stephanie