North Carolina Books

Bill Neal was and is the consensus visionary leader of the Southern cooking renaissance. This book by his ex-wife and business partner provides a unique vantage point to his development as a chef and food writer. The recipes contained therein are a motherlode of food ideas and formulas. Buy this one and celebrate food and the best of the American family that carries on even when divorce splinters its legal union. This is great food and family values all in one place. Precious reading.

If you want to process dentures, this book is a great step-by-step guide. It's got a lot of pictures and shows the right way to do things.

Playing off the double entendre in the title of her book, Beth Reingold examines the representative nature, action, and effectiveness of women legislators. "Are women in public office simply women who represent, or are they also women who represent women? And what about the men in public office-do they represent women? Do they represent women to the same extent their female counterparts do"(2)? Reingold researches legislative records, conducts extensive personal interviews, and issues surveys to male and female legislators of California and Arizona in order to deconstruct popular views of female/male representation.

By defining, dissecting, and finally, dismissing the"strategy of difference" (what legislators attribute to legitimize women's positions in legislation) in chapter 1, Reingold is able to prove that there are no significant differences between the representing behavior of men and women legislators (243). In fact there are more similarities, than there are differences.

Utilizing Hanna Pitkin's (1967) work, The Concept of Representation, as a framework, Reingold further reveals that in "neither [the California nor Arizona] legislature was being female (descriptive representation) a guarantee of attitudes and activities associated with women (substantive representation)"(30, 243). Men and women have an equal opportunity to effectively represent women.

Reingold research proves that "descriptive representation was, as a criterion for substantive representation, neither absolutely necessary nor always sufficient" (243). These findings indicate two things: (1) men are able to fairly and successfully represent women, regardless of the lack personal or bodily connection (i.e. abortion); and (2)women representatives do not always make a difference for women adequately or justly. Reingold is quick to say that it does make a difference that women hold public office,even if the importance only lies in increasing the numbers.

Beth Reingold's research and findings brilliantly challenges the foundations of gender politics and expectations in America.

Excellent maps, photographs and text. Uses taxonomy current at the time (early 1990s) and uses common names standardized since 1978. The authors provide a wealth of information about the turtles and reptiles native to North Carolina. A must buy for anyone living along the east coast, and any herpetologist or naturalist interested in North American herpetology.

Paul Rahe's Republics Ancient and Modern was originally published in hardback in one volume. For the paperback version published in 1994, he has chosen to split his work into three volumes. Each volume deals with one of the three major time periods on which his work focuses. The first volume deals with the classical Greece city states.
Rahe has two main purposes in these books. His first purpose is to debunk the idea that the American founders were heavily influenced by the classical republican tradition. In fact, Rahe argues that the Constitution was designed in opposition to classical republican ideas.
His second purpose is a methodological one. Rahe is heavily influenced by Leo Struass. It shows in his basic thesis of the war between the ancients and the moderns and it shows in his attempts to reveal the esoteric in many of the writers he discusses.
It also shows in his rejection of historicism and other modern historical methods. Which brings me to one thing that I admire about Rahe. He obviously has methodological bones to pick with Quinton Skinner and the Cambridge School, and with the Marxist approach of, say, the early Eugene Genovese. But he has also read deeply of these and many other writers with whom he disagrees and has learned from them all. Rahe is at one and the same time a very generous and opinionated scholar. And he is phenomenally learned.
In this volume he discusses Homer, Hesiod, Xenophon, Lycurgus, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Polybius, Thucydidus, Euripides, Cicero, Plutarch, Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Isocrates, Pericles, Pindar, ad infinitum. He has read them all, absorbed them all and compared them all.
He then seems to have absorbed anything ever written about all of them. It is overwhelming.
Rahe wants to argue that life in classical Greece was the result of two main influences. The Greeks believed that human beings are political animals possessed of a capacity for logos. In other words, we can reason together and come to agree on what we feel to be "the good, the just and the advantageous". To the Greeks of the democratic city-states, politics was about the communal discourse sustaining the "concord regarding loved things held in common" (Augustine's phrase which is a leitmotif for Rahe). This concord has to be seen as an end in itself, it is not some sort of false consciousness used to legitimate the hegemony of a ruling group.
The other main influence on the Greek city states was the fact that they were nearly always in a state of war (with each other or those pesky Persians) or preparing for war. Thus the Greeks had to foster "homonoia" or "like-mindedness" or solidarity. The way that they came to do this was through both a paideia (education or character formation) and a system of dispersing honor or recognitions.
Rahe takes Sparta as his case study for his argument. He does so because up until the last century or so, most students of ancient Greece recognized Sparta as being the most representative of the city-states. In many ways, it was what the other city states like Athens or Cornith hoped to achieve.
The end result was an obsession with honor, virtue and with largeness of soul. Everything was subordinate to the requirements of the city. This included family and personal liberty. Liberty for the Greeks was the right to participate in the politics of the city state and to vie for glory. They would never consider allowing someone who was opposed to war to not serve in the ranks of the army. Two of the consequences which Rahe explores was the subjugation of women and the embrace of slavery. Slavery freed the citizen from having to be involved in the making of money.
The personal property of the citizen was not personal. It was expected that it would be used for the good of the city. A man who came from a wealthy family might earn the gratitude of other citizens by providing them with the necessary armaments of the hoplite (foot soldier). They strove to minimize civil strife and to make sure that everyone within the city thought as much alike as was possible. They used pederastry as a means to indoctrinate young men into armed service. As those young men grew older they then would come to take younger men as lovers and so on.
These relationships would then be abandoned in their thirties for married life. But even after marriage, the men were expected to spend most of their time with their hoplite units.
Rahe explains how all this helped to generate the Greek disregard for commerce and for technical innovation. He also talks about the importance of their religion in maintaining the community. He brings out the underlying irony of the basic Greek presumption of humans as being rational political animals. This presumption encourage the development of philosophy which served to critically undermine many of the institutions of the city state. Socrates was executed for good reason. Or so the Athenians believed.
Throughout this volume, Rahe is throwing in Hamilton, Adam Smith and many others into the mix. In fact, I started to notate some of my underlinings with "DBAM" to indicate a passage that noted a difference between the ancients and the moderns. For example,in discussing the attitude of the Greeks toward technological progress, Rahe notes that they viewed it "with a jaundiced eye" because a science pledged to make life easier was a science that would make "soft men" (p.74). To someone like Adam Smith or James Madison, that was exactly the argument in favor of such a science.
I am not a student of ancient Greece. I came to read Rahe to understand more about the founding fathers of this country. But I think that what he has achieved in this first volume of this work is altogether brilliant.
In fact, my major complaint is that it isn't long enough or detailed enough. He sometimes states that he disagrees with another scholar (in his very extensive notes) without going into the dispute thoroughly enough. Another complaint (more of an annoyance)is that he seems to expect the reader to have a rich classical library close to hand. In many of his notes, he will say something like "Consider this passage from Plato's Republic in light of what Cicero had to say here and don't forget that Polybius said something in this book that must be compared with what Xenophon had to say in that passage. After absorbing all that, read what Augustine had to say in this part of The City of God. And then you will see that I am right." Okay, he doesn't ever really say anything like that last part but it is there sometimes between the lines. (See, I am turning into a little Straussian).
But seriously folks, I cannot imagine that anyone has done a better job of explicating how their knowledge of the Ancient Greeks effected the founding fathers. Rahe has given us something strong and rich- not only a good look at what life was like in ancient Sparta but how that effected the men and women who created this country.
In my review of volume 2, I will speak a little more to Rahe's method.

This is clearly the work of a dedicated scholar. The amount of research, refinement of detail, and the stunning success of the author in introducing pregnant thoughts make this a worthwhile LONG read. Every moment spent absorbing this work is well spent. Dr. Rahe brings the discerning reader on the long journey of discovering republicanism from the ancients up to the formation of the American constitution. The whole trip culminates in his brilliant discussion of the American experiment in the flow of ideas over the centuries. Thank you for this wonderful experience, Dr. Rahe.

Following up on her 2004 work, Families of Cabarrus County, North Carolina, Kathleen Marler has assembled an alphabetically arranged collection of abstracts of early inhabitants of Mecklenburg County, the parent county of Cabarrus. The principal sources for her new book are Mecklenburg County Deed Volumes 1-3 (July 1778 through September 1786), Mecklenburg wills, the 1790 U.S. Census for Mecklenburg County, and several other primary and secondary sources. Although deeds are not as strong in establishing relationships as, say wills, they have the virtue of placing individuals in a particular place at a moment in time. Since they also indicate the names of prior, as well as current, deed holders, the coverage of this book extends outside the years of the deeds themselves, from 1762 through 1790.

Typically, the abstracts provide the names of the deed holders (frequently spouses), the property's location, names of adjoining landowners, sometimes the names of other family members, and more. Complete with maps showing Mecklenburg and Cabarrus county waterways and townships, this important collection provides about 15,000 references to inhabitants of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, during the years under investigation.

Erudite, concise and to the point, Dr. White has penned a modern day masterpiece in the field of Revolutionary War soldier research. Men (and the occasional woman) whose memories were threatened to be lost in the mists of time, have been rediscovered and presented here for mankind to remember. A tour de force desintined to be on the bestseller list!!

In order to better understand perhaps one of German literature's most difficult puzzles, Small's "Kommentar" is a must-have. As Small suggests, Rilke's "Aufzeichnungen" is a mosaic, one difficult to view without this companion. Clearly annotated, Small also provides numerous bits of historical information to help the reader piece together the dozens of stories Rilke uses in explaining Malte's tale

Mr. Ouimet has put together an eye-opening account of the forces that shaped Soviet foreign policy during and after the Breshnev era. I'm no Cold War history buff, but I didn't have to be to enjoy this excellent book. The writing is engaging and provocative.

Ouimet argues that the death of the Breshnev Doctrine of "limited sovereignty" with regard to its satellite Warsaw Pact states, began much earlier than previously thought. His access to archival information and first-hand accounts make his conclusions virtually indestructible.

Of the most interest to me were the glimpses he gives us into the very thoughts of what has always been, to me, a somewhat opaque police-state mentality. His analysis of the Politburo's internal battles between the preservation of ideology and the pragmatic desire to simply retain power have implications down through history and into our present conflicts.