READ our Book Reviews 1999-2003
Over the past ten years, Southern Cultures has published numerous Book Reviews on all manner of topics. You can read the Book Reviews 2000-2005 by using the direct links below to the Project Muse Digital Library. Likewise, links to Book Reviews 1993-1998 are here, and Book Reviews 2004-present are here. All of our Book Reviews are searchable by content and are grouped under the READ by Subject categories to the left. You also can search Book Reviews by Author and by Title.
Volume 5, Number 1, Spring 1999
Philip J. Schwarz's
Slave Laws in Virginia
reviewed by Thomas D. Morris
Edward D. C. Cambell Jr. and Kym S. Rice, editors
A Woman's War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy
reviewed by LeeAnn Whites
W. Fitzhugh Brundage's
A Socialist Utopia in the New South: The Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia, 1894-1901
reviewed by Christopher H. Owen
Tracy Elaine K'Meyer's
Interracialism and Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm
reviewed by W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Elna C. Green's
Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question
reviewed by Pamela Tyler
Tommy L. Bogger's
Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790-1860: The Darker Side of Freedom
reviewed by Robert C. Kenzer
Xi Wang's
The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860-1910
reviewed by John David Smith
Mark A. Fossett and M. Therese Seibert's
Long Time Coming: Racial Inequality in the Nonmetropolitan South, 1940-1990
reviewed by Robert A. Margo
James Axtell's
The Indians' New South: Cultural Change in the Colonial Southeast
reviewed by Tim Alan Garrison
Tenth Conference on Restoring Southern Gardens and Landscapes
The Influence of Women on the Southern Landscape
reviewed by Rachel V. Mills
Ray Jenkins's
Blind Vengeance: The Roy Moody Mail Bomb Murders
Byron Woodfin's
Lay Down with Dogs: The Story of Hugh Otis Bynum and the Scottsboro First Monday Bombing
reviewed by Larry J. Griffin
Thomas E. Douglass's
A Room Forever: The Life, Work, and Letters of Breece D'J Pancake
reviewed by Ruel Foster
Kenny Dalsheimer's
Go Fast, Turn Left: Voices from Orange County Speedway
reviewed by Elizabeth A. Fenn
Conjunto Bernal, 16 Early Tejano Classics, and: Santiago Jimenez Jr., Purely Instrumental
Jim Mills, Bound to Ride, and: Nashville Bluegrass Band, American Beauty
Mississippi String Bands: Traditional Fiddle Music of Mississippi
Mama Don't Allow No Easy Riders Here: Strutting the Dozens, and: Shake Your Wicked Knees: Rent Parties and Good Times
reviewed by Gavin James Campbell
Volume 5, Number 2, Summer 1999
Tom Wolfe's
A Man in Full
reviewed by John Shelton Reed
The Museum of the New South
Don't Touch That Dial: Carolina Radio Since the 1920s
reviewed by Lisa Yarger
Julia Sims, with an introduction by John Randolf Kemp
Manchac Swamp: Louisiana's Undiscovered Wilderness
reviewed by Bland Simpson
Clarice T. Campbell's
Civil Rights Chronicle: Letters from the South
reviewed by Melton McLaurin
Laura F. Edwards's
Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction
reviewed by Christopher Waldrep
John C. Guilds and Caroline Collins, editors
William Gilmore Simms and the American Frontier, and: From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms
reviewed by Michael O'Brien
Chuck Guillory, Grand Texas, and: Wade Frugé, Old Style Cajun Music
Dock Boggs, His Folkways Years, 1963-1968
I Can't Be Satisfied: Early American Women Blues Singers—Town & Country (vols. 1 and 2)
Bob Holt, Got a Little Home To Go To
reviewed by Gavin James Campbell
Volume 5, Number 3, Fall 1999
Jerry W. Cotten's
Light and Air: The Photography of Bayard Wootten
reviewed by Jessie Poesch
Art Rosenbaum's
Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition
reviewed by Dale Volberg Reed
Frank De Caro, editor
Louisiana Sojourns: Travelers' Tales and Literary Journeys
reviewed by Gaines M. Foster
William E. Ellis's
Robert Worth Bingham and the Southern Mystique
reviewed by Walter E. Campbell
John Hope Franklin and John Whittington Franklin, editors
My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin
reviewed by Jimmie Lewis Franklin
Sheila L. Croucher's
Imagining Miami: Ethnic Politics in a Postmodern World
reviewed by Raymond Arsenault
Tom Rankin, editor
Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain
reviewed by Christopher Brookhouse
Kentucky Old-Time Banjo, and: Morgan Sexton, Shady Grove
Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, The Original Band, and: G.B. Grayson and Henry Witter, The Recordings of Grayson & Witter
Boozoo Chavis and the Magic Sounds, Who Stole My Monkey?
Caribbean Sampler
Lydia Mendoza, Vida Mia
reviewed by Gavin James Campbell
Volume 5, Number 4, Winter 1999
Mojo Productions, in association with Company Carolina and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Department of Communication Studies
Good Ol' Girls, the world premiere
reviewed by Shannon Ravenel
"She'll bring you casseroles and she'll kill you, too."
Richard J. Powell and Jock Reynolds's
To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Patti Carr Black's
Art in Mississippi: 1720-1980
reviewed by Dale Volberg Reed
"The art of the South has, until recently, been terra incognita."
Nancy C. Parrish's
Lee Smith, Annie Dillard, and the Hollins Group: A Genesis of Writers
reviewed by Amy Thompson McCandless
"It was like falling into a womb."
Jane S. Becker's
Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940
reviewed by Marla R. Miller
"We like the money we make, that's all."
Bryant Simon's
A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands
reviewed by Alex Lichtenstein
"It will no longer be possible to write off this group of white southerners as mere ignorant racists."
John M. Grammer's
Pastoral and Politics in the Old South
reviewed by Mark G. Malvasi
"They were wise innocents dwelling in an enduring, earthly paradise."
Bruce Adelson's
Brushing Back Jim Crow: The Integration of Minor-League Baseball in the American South
reviewed by Steven F. Lawson
"They saw themselves as heirs to Jackie Robinson's legacy."
Big Joe Williams and Friends, Going Back to Crawford, and: Black Appalachia String Bands, Songsters and Hoedowns
Music From the Lost Provinces: Old-Time Stringbands from Ashe County, North Carolina & Vicinity, 1927-1931, and: Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers, vols. 1-3
Black Texicans, Balladeers and Songsters of the Texas Frontier, and: Cowboy Songs, Ballads, and Cattle Calls
Taquachito Nights, Conjunto Music From South Texas
reviewed by Gavin James Campbell
Volume 6, Number 4, Winter 2000
John B. Rehder
Delta Sugar: Louisiana's Vanishing Plantation Landscape (review)
reviewed by John Michael Vlach
“‘The plant would be dumping fifty-three million gallons of wastewater in the Mississippi daily.’”
Stephen Cushman
Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (review)
reviewed by William L. Barney
“The great value of an eyewitness account--its unvarnished emotion and immediacy--comes at a price.”
William G. Thomas
Lawyering for the Railroad: Business, Law, and Power in the New South (review)
reviewed by Frank G. Queen
“‘I amused myself by counting the cars scattered along the track and turned over by recent wrecks, and got tired when the number reached twenty-five.’”
Pete Daniel
Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (review)
reviewed by Fred C. Hobson
“In Ellis Auditorium in Memphis in 1955, twenty-year-old Elvis Presley, one year removed from obscurity, stands with his arm around bluesman B. B. King.”
Volume 6, Number 2, Summer 2001
Calder Loth
The Virginia Landmarks Register, Fourth Edition (review)
reviewed by Henry Taylor
“He addressed the Vatican, suggesting that the Sistine Chapel ceiling had been more dignified before Michelangelo came in there and started mucking about with his scaffolding and his angst.”
Ken Breslauer
Roadside Paradise (review)
reviewed by Robert E. Snyder
“Miami’s Monkey Jungle reversed the traditional exhibit format by placing humans inside protective walkways while primates ran free.”
Michael McFee, editor
This Is Where We Live: Short Stories by 25 Contemporary North Carolina Writers (review)
reviewed by George Hovis
“‘For the artist to be unwilling to move, mentally or spiritually or physically, out of the familiar is a sign that spiritual timidity or poverty or decay has come upon him.’”
Lucinda MacKethan, editor
Recollections of a Southern Daughter: A Memoir by Cornelia Jones Pond of Liberty County (review)
Allan Paul Speer, editor, with Janet Barton Speer
Sisters of Providence: The Search for God in the Frontier South, 1843-1858 (review)
Laura Edwards
Scarlett Doesn't Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (review)
reviewed by Julia Ridley Smith
“The girls’ desire to leave a mark upon the world and make themselves heard is plaintive and constant throughout their writing.”
Volume 7, Number 3, Fall 2001
Mark Catesby
Catesby's Birds of Colonial America (review)
reviewed by T. Edward Nickens
“Catesby broke rank with other naturalists, including the professionally trained Linnaeus, when he lambasted theories that birds hibernated in hollow trees or dove into the bottom of lakes and stayed there during the winter.”
Donald Edward Davis
Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians(review)
Daniel S. Pierce
The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park (review)
Margaret Lynn Brown
The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains (review)
reviewed by Frank G. Queen
“He catalogued the plants he didn’t step on, the friendly people he met (he liked everybody, and everything--he devotes a couple of pages to the excellent character of the rattlesnake), and the liquor he didn’t drink.”
Daniel Patterson
A Tree Accurst: Bobby McMillon and Stories of Frankie Silver (review)
reviewed by Brooke Calton
“In the winter of 1831 Frankie Silver killed her husband Charlie with a blow to the head from an axe.”
Al Burt
The Tropic of Cracker (review)
Janisse Ray and Rob Storter
Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (review)
Rob Storter
Crackers in the Glade: Life and Times in the Old Everglades (review)
reviewed by Carolyn Kindell, KC Smith, Andi Milam Reynolds
“Her father locked the children and their mother in a back bedroom, and only after several hours and pleadings of hunger from the family did he allow Lee Ada to pick, with her eyes closed, a single package from the freezer to be eaten uncooked, because ‘that’s the way God says to feed the children.’”
Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 2001
Erik Larson
Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (review)
Patricia Bellis Bixel and Elizabeth Haynes Turner
Galveston and the 1900 Storm: Castastrophe and Catalyst (review)
Casey Edward Greene and Shelly Henley Kelly
Through a Night of Horrors: Voices from the 1900 Galveston Storm (review)
reviewed by Jay Barnes
“In one wretched night of wind and water in September 1900, Galveston endured a great hurricane that is still regarded as the deadliest natural disaster ever known to strike American soil.”
John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney
The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (review)
W. Todd Grace
Mountain Rebels: East Tennessee Confederates and the Civil War, 1860-1870 (review)
reviewed by Jan Davidson
“Their ancestors were almost as likely to have been Unionists as Confederates, and if they were Confederates, about one in four deserted.”
Shelly Romalis
Pistol Packin' Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong (review)
reviewed by Patrick Huber
“She boasted that she was the inspiration for the 1943 smash hit ‘Pistol Packin’ Mama’ written, she asserted, not by Al Dexter but by her husband’s cousin to commemorate her own handiness with a .38 Smith & Wesson.”
Volume 8, Number 1, Spring 2002
Sarah-Patton Boyle
The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition (review)
reviewed by Melton Alonze McLaurin
“‘We’re all bastards; God loves us anyway.’”
David Cecelski
The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (review)
reviewed by William Scott
“Slave boatmen carried more than goods and runaway slaves; they carried an insurgent, democratic vision born in the maritime districts of the slave South.”
David W. Blight
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (review)
reviewed by Bruce. E. Baker
“‘Yes, though naked, we are your masters.’”
Ralph W. Johnson
David Played a Harp: A Free Man's Battle for Independence (review)
reviewed by Hunter James
“He soon lost count of how many times the windows of his shop had been shot out by vigilantes passing through in the night.”
Volume 8, Number 2, Summer 2002
Helen Taylor
Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens (review)
reviewed by Brian Ward
“In 1958 a newspaper survey of thirty British schoolchildren revealed that although only twelve of the fourteen-year-olds had heard of Dwight Eisenhower, seven of Nikita Khrushchev, and four of Jawaharlal Nehru, “everyone was on Christian name terms with a Mr. Presley.”
David. R. Davies
The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement (review)
reviewed by Berkly Hudson
“In the late 1960s, in an act of teen-aged defiance against the waning Closed Society, I took a hammer to remove a ‘colored reception room’ sign outside a white doctor’s office.”
Jonathan S. Bass
Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail" (review)
reviewed by Katherine Mellen Charron
“Most can remember that 1963 began in Alabama with Governor George Wallace’s famous inaugural declaration ‘segregation now…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever.’”
Volume 8, Number 3, Fall 2002
Donald M. Kartiganer
Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect (review)
reviewed by Stephen M. Ross
“Much of what we say about Faulkner we are really saying about ourselves.”
Erik Bledsoe
Perspectives on Harry Crews (review)
reviewed by Frank W. Shelton
“‘I do think that if I live, and assuming they don’t blow the frigging world up, that I’ll finish Assault of Memory because I really want to write it, but, damn, it’s ugly."
Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2002
Elaine Mensh and Harry Mensh
Black, White, and Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream (review)
reviewed by Christopher Windolph
“‘Persons attempting to find a motive will be prosecuted.’”
Kari A. Frederickson
The Dixiecrat Revolt and the End of the Solid South, 1932-1968 (review)
reviwed by Jack Bass
“‘There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the southern people to admit the Negro race into our schools and into our homes.’”
Walter M. Brasch
Brer Rabbit, Uncle Remus, and the 'Cornfield Journalist': The Tale of Joel Chandler Harris (review)
reviewed by Jennifer Lynn Ritterhouse
“Harris is not only odorless but invisible--forgotten, ignored.”
Gregg D. Kimball
American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond (review)
Wesley Phillips
Montgomery in the Good War: Portrait of a Southern City, 1939-1946 (review)
reviewed by David R. Goldfield
“Wars change lives. How the Civil War and World War II did and did not remain fascinating issues for southern writers.”
Clive Webb
Fight Against Fear: Southern Jews and Black Civil Rights (review)
reviewed by Eliza R. L. McGraw
“‘There is only one word to describe their madness—Godlessness.’”
Kenneth E. Koons and Warren R. Hofstra
After the Backcountry: Rural Life in the Great Valley of Virginia, 1800-1900 (review)
reviewed by John C. Inscoe
“The Valley served as a natural corridor of migration from the middle Atlantic colonies into the southern backcountry, and as such developed a distinctive character.”
Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 2003
Harlan Greene
Mr. Skylark: John Bennett and the Charleston Renaissance (review)
reviewed by Dale Volberg Reed
“Charleston society cut him dead, and he began again the cycle of illness, depression, and addiction."
Harvey Broome
Out Under the Sky of the Great Smokies: A Personal Journal (review)
reviewed by Daniel S. Pierce
“Broome relished hiking through mist-shrouded old-growth forests, sleeping in the rain, or rock-hopping in winter on ice-covered boulders.”
Michelle Brattain
The Politics of Whiteness: Race, Workers, and Culture in the Modern South (review)
reviewed by Carl Burkart
“No wonder federal efforts to integrate schools and workplaces met with hard-line opposition from white mill-hands.”
Carol K. Bleser and Lesley J. Gordon
Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives (review)
reviewed by Nina Silber
“Would the war have gone differently if Stonewall Jackson or William Sherman had listened more to their wives?”
Don Harrison Doyle
Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (review)
reviewed by Linda Wagner-Martin
“Faulkner and his work remain lynchpins of the study of southern culture.”
Benjamin R. Justesen
George Henry White: An Even Chance in the Race of Life (review)
reviewed by John H. Haley
“In July 1900, George Henry White allegedly stated, ‘May God damn North Carolina, the state of my birth.’”
Randy J. Sparks
Religion in Mississippi (review)
reviewed by David Edwin Harrell
“‘Attacked by right-wing segregationists for being too liberal and almost equally denounced by their coreligionists outside the region for being too conservative, white religious leaders across the state were virtually paralyzed.’”
Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2003
Hunter James
The Last Days of Big Grassy Fork (review)
reviewed by Fred C. Hobson
"James can certainly laugh at himself and his forebears--at his grandfather's flying leap from a second-floor whorehouse window to a sturdy maple during the great Winston flook of 1916."
David R. Goldfield
Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (review)
reviewed by David W. Blight
"Southerners have, since 1865, lived under a 'burden' of history and memory."
Bill C. Malone
Don't Get Above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class (review)
reviewed by Patrick Huber
"'You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly."
Volume 9, Number 3, Fall 2003
Fred C. Hobson
South to the Future: An American Region in the Twenty-first Century (review)
reviewed by Michael Kreyling
“When Tiger Woods (whose presence at Augusta swinging a club rather than carrying a bag changed golf--and Fuzzy Zoeller's career) won his third green jacket this past April, golf writers complained that the competition had given up.”
Brooke Blevins
Hill Folks: A History of Arkansas Ozarkers and Their Image (review)
reviewed by John C. Inscoe
“The Ozarks have long suffered from an image problem. Even compared with Appalachia--itself no stranger to degrading stereotypes and blatant misrepresentation--these other southern highlands have been exceptionally maligned.”
Volume 9, Number 4, Winter 2003
Christopher Metress, editor
The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative (review)
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
“After all, once Moses Wright pointed his finger at ‘Big’ Milam in court, the identity of the killers was not in doubt.”
Don Harrison Doyle
Nations Divided: America, Italy, and the Southern Question (review)
reviewed by Susan Delfino
“Northerners were not all angels, just as southerners were not all devils.”
Jim Wright
Fixin' To Git: One Fan's Love Affair with NASCAR's Winston Cup (review)
reviewed by Dan Pierce
“As far as love affairs go, unfortunately, Fixin’ to Git is the equivalent of a one-night stand.”