South Carolina Books

This is an excellent resource for the study of colonial NC, esp. since very little has been written on the subject. "Poor Carolina" is well written, well-researched and painstakingly documented. Having been through most of the records the author used to write this study, I can attest to his great ability to analize and contextualize the raw materials of NC before the Revolution.

Neufeld's Popular History of WNC is a true marvel and the sort of history I like best. It's people.

Neufeld's research is detailed and accurate, as it should be, but he takes a giant step closer to his research than most -- he talks with people. His section on WNC women by itself is to be applauded and cheered. The personal histories of everyday life among railroad and lumber camp women, trainmen's wives, members of the 1920s High School Girls' Championship Basektball team, and others, sets a high goal for other historians.

You don't just read about history in this wonderful book. You meet the people who are history. What a rare treat it is being introduced to Inez Virginia Daughtery. Neufeld lets her tell you what it was like growing up black in Black Mountain in the 1920s. Bee Fraizer's life as a black nanny in WWII Asheville is told both through her original letters from the 1940s and through Neufeld's conversations with Jordan Maynard, who grew up under the care and attention of his nanny Bee. Written history doesn't get any better than this.

Neufeld's "peoples' history" moves from the original Cherokee of the area, the settlers and pioneer families, the War of Separation... to the lives (and death) of the people behind a roadside memorial of a simple white cross with the name Festus prainted on it --- and to a delightful contemporary profile of Maria and Juan Carballo, who migrated to Arden, North Carolina, from the mountains of El Salvador. I'm proud to call them neighbors.

The music of the mountains is always in the background (and sometimes the foreground) of Neufeld's insightful work. Still, it is the voices of the people you will remember best.

A handsome book, Neufeld's "Mountains, Heroes, & Hootnoggers" includes numerous historical photographs. Like all good books, though, the best pictures here are drawn by words. The book concludes with a very useful bibliography. But don't be fooled; the real bibliography of this volume is the author himself -- and the people he has met. You need to meet them, too.

I lived on the edge of the poquosin country for a decade, and it seemed so wild, so untouched, so empty that it couldn't have had a history. But of course it did, and Professor Jack Temple Kirby has written it in his expected elegant style.

A poquosin is a slightly higher and drier patch in the soggy coastal plain of the American South, with its center in the Great Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. It might have been logical that with an entire rich continent to expand into, the early white settlers would have passed by this unhealthy and difficult country. But that is not how people behave.

Kirby divides the people into the cosmopolitans and the inhabitants, or as he calls them, the hinterlanders.

The cosmopolitans lived on the fringes of the swamp, were educated and had capital and skills. They wished to employ these close to home. They financed canals, roads and railroads and hired the inhabitants or paid for the resources they could gather, primarily shingles, but also furs, turpentine, fish.

The hinterlanders were marginal characters, especially the black slaves, getting by on canal digging, trapping, fishing, logging, turpentining and farming. Yet, ironically, they were also independent. For the slaves, especially, working on their own, away from their owners, being a "swamper" was a kind of freedom.

Kirby also interprets these men and women as more or less conscious rejecters of consumer society. "Free workers used their wages to resist modernity."

I don't think this is the correct reading. They consumed avidly when they had the money, which was seldom. That they did not abandon their hard, sickly life was probably because it is easier to be a poor man in the country than in the city. For a long time, cities had not much to offer the debilitated, illiterate, unskilled poquosin-man.

Once that changed, the people escaped. For the blacks, with lower material expectations, this happened around 1916. Whites, slightly more demanding, did not flee until 1940. (See my review of Linda Flowers' "Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina.")

Left behind were the helpless and feckless. Kirby has not much to say about them, except to lament the "tragedy of a people unable to sustain themselves harmoniously on a rural landscape." Well, as Peter Huber wrote in "Hard Green" (see my review), the peasant squatting over a cow-dung fire is not green, he's just poor. The people of the area did sustain themselves harmoniously, they were just desperately poor.

It isn't in Kirby's book, but in 1966, Sen. Bill Spong of Virginia made a hunger tour of the area and found whole communities -- almost all black women and children, the men were gone -- that sustained themselves on an annual two-months' worth of low-paid labor in vegetable canneries, plus whatever they could scratch out of their gardens. They were hungry, but they had not rejected modernity. Modernity had rejected them.

As in Kirby's book "Mockingbird Song" (see my review), which is an expansion geographically of the themes in "Poquosin," the author weaves his human story with ecological history. Trees, or the disappearance of them, dominate ecological writing about the South. For Donald Edward Davis, writing about the southern Appalachians in "Where There Are Mountains," the missing tree is the American chestnut. For Kirby, it is the longleaf pine -- always described as tall and stately.

The piney woods are still piney, but today the trees are slash pines. Hogs and turpentining almost extinguished the longleaf. Kirby understates the violence of the turpentine camps, being more concerned about the trees. They were more brutal but less picturesque than Hollywood's idea of Dodge City, and there was no tradition, not even a mythical one, of freelance agents of justice who cleaned up the camps.

Kirby arguably also understates the impact of diseases in preserving the premodern life of the poquosins. Robert Desowitz, in "Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria?" has a good summary of how malaria, hookworm, yellow fever and other diseases beat down the Southerner, white or black.

I am not particularly sympathetic to the yearnings of writers like Kirby or Flowers or Davis for the old rural South. I lived in it, and the modern South is nicer. But Kirby's books about the South are stimulating, valuable, engaging. The real history of the South was much different from the opposing, highly politicized versions its young people more commonly are exposed to today. They should all get a good dose of Kirby.

I am surprised to find no other reviews here of this special book, a collection that should be read.This is a wonderful volume, by a poet so at ease with forms,with his own voice of casual,yet complex insight,with the balancing of colloquial tone and wisdom,the poems really speak wonders. I bought this book after reading his "Echo" in the Best American Poems of 1998, John Hollander's edition. (Checked the back promptly--how to find more of this poet's work!) I think what moves me most about these, beyond the mastery of formal technique made to look so natural, organic really, is the honesty. The pain expressed in many of these poems is familiar -- love, loss, longing,-- but Cummins seems to see into the pain of all the players, and especially into the pain of women, (which startled me,the recognition of my own experience so perfectly expressed by a male poet) and I loved the way he captures the affections and bonds between men and women who willingly suffer at eachother's hands, and the pained humor he has in describing the failings of this "I". "Fling" is fabulous, the strained comedy of an infidelity that should be assuaging but turns ridiculous; "Portals" is a ladder of insights, each stanza taking me deeper into the experience of praying, loving, lying,ego; and my favorite, "The Husband", which never esteems one partner's experience over the other's. I learned a lot from this poet: to admire formal mastery more than I have,the possibilities of it for a modern sensibility, and mostly, how to view others with compassion. In truth, I feel I understand the experience of my own loved ones more because of this book, and will be kinder to them as a result. These poems do what poems should -- change things. I hope many others -- new poets, experienced poets, and lovers of poetry, and skeptics of poetry, will read this book.

"Portrait of America" was a popular video documentary series in the mid-eighties, a product of collaboration between Superstation/Turner Broadcasting Corporation and Ambrose Home Video. Well-researched, each video is divided into 5 segments covering most unique historical, social, and cultural aspects of each state. Watching such an interesting documentary, each being roughly about 50 minutes long, without advertisements and other interruptions seems to be a privilege in these days!

I saw Robert Drapala at a book signing last summer on Hatteras Island because I was a fan of his last book, but this one was even more interesting. I did not know that the first amphibious attack of the Civil War was on Hatteras Island--it was absolutely fascinating! The journal drawings are just beautiful, I never knew they existed. As a 12-year summer resident of Hatteras Island, I learned a lot from this book. Just wonderful!

This book took me through a wonderful pictorial journey- through the history of one small southern town that rightfully claims its own special niche in Georgia's rich cultural heritage. This collection of photographs shows how one small community maintained its beautiful southern charm but also prospered when the rich mineral content of the town's seven springs brought visitors to enjoy the water's medicinal powers. For anyone who marvels at southern history, architecture, or culture, this book is a gem. Whether you are intrigued by spiritualism or scandal, Hannon includes something to please any enthusiast. The photographs are complemented by informative captions that reflect a depth of research. Also: thanks to the author for avoiding a shortcoming in some historical works by including a lovely assortment of African-American scenes.

Collaboratively compiled and edited by Robert P. Watson (Editor of "White House Studies, a journal of scholarship and commentary on the politics and history of the White House) and Anthony J. Eksterowicz (Professor of Political Science at James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia), The Presidential Companion: Readings On The First Ladies is an impressive and informative collection of insightful and revealing essays by a variety of authors concerning the political impact of American presidential wives throughout history upon their husbands, their husbands policy making/implementing colleagues, and the general public. From Martha Washington's selection of furnishings to Hillary Rodham Clinton's leadership of the President's Task Force on National Health Care Reform, The Presidential Companion is unique in its close study. Of particular note is the debunking of the commonly held myth that only Eleanor Roosevelt and the First Ladies after her made significant political contributions to America itself. The Presidential Companion is a scholarly and very highly recommended contribution to American Political Science and Women's Studies reading lists.

This is a book slight in pages, but powerful in impact, about a foot soldier in Cromwell's New Model Army during the English Civil War in the 17th century. The story centers on an idealistic young soldier and his compatriots who join Cromwell's army to overthrow the King and establish a new order. Their hopes are gradually crushed, however, as Cromwell abandons any path towards radical change. Ultimately Cromwell and his cronies turn on these same men whose idealism is now seen as a threat.

The language is vivid, authentic, and the story is both informative and thought provoking. It effectively uses the perspective of the common man to frame historical events that otherwise can seem quite bloodless.

The ideals of these doomed young soldiers, such as those which the main character in the book holds, would later take root in America and eventually lead to more fundamental change. Hence this book's connection to the rest of the books in the Beulah Quintet that are set in America. While it is called the first of the Beulah Quintet, Prisons is a pre-quel having been written 17 years after the first book published in the series, O Beulah Land.

I find it difficult to believe this is the first review for this book on Amazon, considering the author won the National Book Award for Blood Ties, and she was the founder of the PEN/Faulkner Awards. One can read from many other sources that the Beulah Quintet is considered a landmark of 20th Century American fiction. This book is an essential backdrop against which the other novels in the Quintet are set. While Prisons may not be the best of the Quintet, it is still highly recommended.

If you haven't had the opportunity to see the beautiful gardens of Charleston in person, then this book should suffice until you can get there. Twenty-five private gardens are presented here with color photos and an essay for each. All of the elements that make these gardens so special - brick walls and pathways, neat boxwood hedges, colorful flowers like azaleas and camellias, fountains, wrought-iron gates and cobblestoned courtyards - are on delicious display. Various garden styles are represented here - classical, contemporary, an atrium garden and the garden of a palm collector are just a few examples. The author's own garden, featuring neat brick-edged beds filled with roses and perennials is included.