READ our Book Reviews 2004-present
Over the past ten years, Southern Cultures has published numerous Book Reviews on all manner of topics. You can read the Book Reviews 2006-present by using the direct links below to the Project Muse Digital Library. Likewise, links to Book Reviews 1993-1998 are here, and Book Reviews 1999-2003 are here. All of our reviews are searchable by content and are grouped under the READ by Subject categories to the left. You also can search our Book Reviews by Author and by Title.
Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2004
Henry Clay Anderson
Separate, But Equal: The Mississippi Photographs of Henry Clay Anderson (review)
reviewed by Todd J. Moye
“Wedding couples beam. Bathing beauties strut their stuff. A homecoming queen waves from the back of a convertible. A couple of motorcycle riders simply show off in one of the most evocative portraits I have ever seen.”
René Pol Nevils and Deborah George Hardy
Ignatius Rising: The Life of John Kennedy Toole (review)
reviewed by Bryan Giemza
“I don’t intend to suggest that sexual matters are always beyond the pale. No, the sin of it is simply this: the claims in the book are very thin indeed.”
Karen L. Cox
Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (review)
reviewed by Gaines M. Foster
“Women, not men, shaped the South’s memory of the war and thereby perpetuated a ‘Confederate culture’ that celebrated mainly the veterans but also the women of the wartime generation.”
James R. Goff Jr.
Close Harmony: A History of Southern Gospel (review)
reviewed by James Parrish
“Southern gospel is as important to America’s musical and cultural heritage as are jazz, blues, and country.”
Earl Black and Merle Black
The Rise of Southern Republicans (review)
David C. Leege, Kenneth D. Wald, Brian S. Krueger, and Paul D. Mueller
The Politics of Cultural Differences: Social Change and Voter Mobilization Strategies in the Post-New Deal Period (review)
reviewed by John Quinterno
“Republican campaigns that skillfully employed race-based symbols like those linked to urban crime, school busing, and ‘big government’ often managed both to depress turnout among white southern democrats and prompt defections to the GOP.”
Volume 10, Number 2, Summer 2004
Rob Amberg
Sodom Laurel Album (review)
reviewed by Cary Fowler
“How unusual these days to hold a book whose size, layout, typeface--everything down to the texture of the hardcover (reminiscent of old photo and record albums)--has been thought through and woven together with such craftsmanship.”
Trudier Harris
Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South (review)
reviewed by Melton Alonza McLaurin
“Her conclusions, a mixture of experience and hope, recognize the changes that have occurred in her native region, the racial tensions that remain, and the hope for a better tomorrow.”
Suzanne Lebsock
A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial (review)
reviewed by S. Willoughby Anderson
“Intricately constructed from rural county court records and newspaper clippings, Murder in Virginia reads like the best of crime novels.”
Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2004
George P. Garrett, James McKinley (Editor)
Southern Excusions: Views on Southern Letters in My Time (review)
reviewed by Samuel F. Pickering
“George Garrett’s presence turns dark rooms brighter than rainbows. He makes people smile, and for moments worry grinds slower and life seems more gift than burden. In George’s company scoffers become appreciators.”
J. Mills Thornton
Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma
reviewed by Ralph Luker
“To understand the Montgomery bus boycott, Birmingham’s dramatic street confrontations, and the struggle for the enfranchisement of Selma’s African Americans, Thornton insists, we must immerse ourselves in the minute details of local politics before and after these events.”
David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis
The South, the Nation, and the World: Perspectives on Southern Economic Development
reviewed by Gavin Wright
“Those slave traders and slave drivers were not in it for their health, and slavery continues to cast a long shadow over the region as well as the nation. What forces, motives and circumstances led southerners to make these choices, and what were the implications?”
Barbara Ransby
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision
reviewed by Charles M. Payne
“I used to give a speech which began by claiming that Ella Baker invented the 1960s. That’s not as crazy as it sounds.”
Volume 10, Number 4, Winter 2004
Timothy B. Tyson
Blood Done Sign My Name
reviewed by Fred C. Hobson
“Ten-year-old Timothy Tyson, of course, wasn't aware of all the consequences—or the context—of Henry Marrow's murder at the time, and his family left Oxford shortly afterward.”
Kwame Ture
Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
“In August 1967 the director of the FBI urged his agents to ‘prevent the rise of a messiah who would unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.’"
William F. Powers
Tar Heel Catholics
reviewed by John Quinterno
“John Monk, a physician from Newton Grove, converted to Catholicism after receiving a package of medical supplies wrapped in a copy of a sermon given by the Archbishop of New York, and went on to become the state’s most effective evangelist.”
Jim Carrier
A Traveler's Guide to the Civil Rights Movement
reviewed by S. Willoughby Anderson
“The gripping historical narrative will inspire travelers to chart their own course.”
Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 2005
Keith Perry
The Kingfish in Fiction
reviewed by Bryan Giemza
"In the Senate Chamber there is a bizarre reminder of a failed assassination attempt—a bomb in a desk—that sent a pencil rocketing into the ceiling. There it remains, stuck in a tile, a spotlight vigilantly trained upon it."
Michael B. Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall
Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English
reviewed by Michael Chitwood
"I remembered my maternal grandmother saying of a man she did not care for, 'Oh, he's always got a plug of tobacco in this mouth and that ambeer running down to his chin.'"
Louis M. Kyriakoudes
The Social Origins of the Urban South
reviewed by Tom Hanchett
"Thank you to Louis Kyriakoudes’s Social Origins of the Urban South for showing the social history behind the songs."
Robert A. Caro
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 3
reviewed by John Quinterno
"Lyndon Johnson combined talent, ambition, and genius into a form of power capable of taming the Senate, that most unruly and aristocratic of America's political institutions."
Volume 11, Number 2, Summer 2005
K. Michael Prince Michael O’Brien Margaret Bender, Editor Catherine W. Bishir, Michael T. Southern, and Jennifer F. Martin Catherine W. Bishir and Michael T. Southern
Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys! South Carolina and the Confederate Flag
reviewed by John M. Coski
"'The flag is, in its very essence, irresolute and contradictory. Wiping it out, eliminating it from view, would be just as wrong as hoisting it atop the highest flag-pole in the center of town--if only because it serves as a useful reminder of a past that failed and of an alternate future not taken.'"
Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860
reviewed by Paul D. H. Quigley
"If all of this proves anything, it is that there was no one 'mind of the South.'"
Linguistic Diversity in the South: Changing Codes, Practices, and Ideologies
reviewed by Michael Montgomery
"The South was linguistically diverse before diversity was cool."
Catherine W. Bishir and Michael T. Southern
A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Eastern North Carolina
A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Western North Carolina
A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina
all reviewed by William S. Price Jr.
"Among the pieces of progressive legislation that marked the early years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency was the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966."
Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 2005
Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, Editors
The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture
reviewed by W. Fitzhugh Brundage
"Soon after the Civil War Americans understood that the way they remembered the Civil War would define their nation."
Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, Editors
Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies
reviewed by David A. Davis
"Perhaps the question to ponder now is how will the South change the globe?"
Robert F. Pace
Halls of Honor: College Men in the Old South
reviewed by Peter S. Carmichael
"These young men, facing an unpredictable future, were wrought with anxiety and desperate for their families and friends to see them as men."
Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2005
John Lane
Chattooga: Descending Into the Myth of Deliverance River
reviewed by Timothy Silver
"Billy Redden, the iconic 'banjo boy' who will ever be remembered for playing with Drew Ballinger on the hit song 'Dueling Banjos,' now mops floors at a local Huddle House and has a second job at a barbecue restaurant named—as luck would have it—'Oinkers.'"
Anthony Dunbar, editor (foreword by Jimmy Carter)
Where We Stand: Voices of Southern Dissent
reviewed by E. M. Beck
"While white southerners are often stereotyped as extreme right-wingers and hard-rock Bible thumpers, the southern progressive tradition of dissent is alive."
Jeannette Keith
Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight
reviewed by Jonathan F. Phillips
"What inspired draft resistance in the rural South?"
Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2006
Hal Crowther
Gather at the River: Notes from the Post-Millennial South (review)
reviewed by John Shelton Reed
"If you agree with Crowther you'll really enjoy it when he gets a good rant going."
Roy Blount, Jr
Robert E. Lee: A Shattered Nation (review)
reviewed by J. Tracy Power
"'What on earth,' you may be asking yourself, 'is the point of another book on Robert E. Lee?'"
Anne Sarah Rubin
The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868 (review)
reviewed by Don H. Doyle
"The nation resided in the heart and mind."
Keith Lee Morris
The Best Seats in the House (review)
reviewed by Dave Shaw
"There's craft in asking the right question—in asking it in just the right way and in leaving it at that—and South Carolina's Keith Lee Morris has it mastered."
Volume 12, Number 1, Summer 2006
Peter S. Carmichael
The Last Generation: Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion (review)
reviewed by Stephen Berry
"The young fight our wars. They have the least to lose, the most to prove, a high tolerance for risk, and a low degree of cynicism. When it comes to killing, we tap our children."
Andrew Burstein
Jefferson's Secrets: Death and Desire at Monticello (review)
reviewed by Kristofer Ray
"Jefferson certainly cared for Hemings, argues Burstein, much as an English nobleman cared for an employee mistress—but they did not (and could not) share a long-term, loving partnership."
Helen C. Rountree
Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (review)
reviewed by Michael D. Green
"Rountree debunks the myth of Pocahontas saving Smith’s life as he was about to have his head beat in."
Steve Estes
I Am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (review)
reviewed by Larry Isaac
"Massacres of entire African American communities were motivated, in large part, by rumors that a black man raped a white woman."
Volume 12, Number 3, Fall 2006
Marcie Cohen Ferris
Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (review)
reviewed by Dale Volberg Reed
"Take Jewish studies and southern studies, add study of southern foodways, throw in oral history, and you getMatzoh Ball Gumbo, the book Marcie Ferris was born to write."
Gary R. Mormino
Land of Sunshine, Land of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida (review)
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
"'I spent thirty years of my life trying to get people to move down there,' the former mayor of Orlando has recalled. 'And then they all did.'"
James Applewhite
Selected Poems (review)
reviewed by Robert M. West
"James Applewhite, unmistakably a southerner, has managed to win fame at the national level."
W. Fitzhugh Brundage
The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (review)
reviewed by John Bodnar
"Fitzhugh Brundage's excellent book takes up the subject of public forms of remembering and commemoration in the South since the Civil War."
Paul Harvey
Freedom's Coming
Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era, (review)
reviewed by Matt J. Zacharias Harper
"If you think you understand how religion and race work in the South, then obviously no one has explained it to you properly."
Volume 13, Number 1, Spring 2007
Jack Temple Kirby
Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (review)
reviewed by Otis L. Graham
James C. Cobb
Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (review)
reviewed by Jane Elizabeth Dailey
Sheldon Hackney
Magnolias without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration (review)
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
Nick Kotz
Judgement Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws that Changed America (review)
reviewed by Jack Bass
Renee Christine Romano and Leigh Raiford, editors
The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (review)
reviewed by Carole Blair
Volume 13, Number 2, Summer 2007
Wilber W. Caldwell
Searching for the Dixie Barbecue: Journeys into the Southern Psyche (review)
reviewed by John Shelton Reed
"Those photographs. . . there are ninety-some. . . would make a good coffee-table book in their own right."
Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2008
Marcie Cohen Ferris Mark I. Greenberg, Editors
Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History (review)
reviewed by Leonard Rogoff
"'The study of southern Jewish life has now come of age.'"
Pete Daniel
Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post-World War II South (review)
reviewed by Otis L. Graham
"'The corporate compulsion to market first, test later, and resist regulation has left a legacy of widespread sickness and death.'"
Leigh Anne Duck
The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (review)
reviewed by Michael Kreyling
"It is no secret that the South represented a tough ‘problem’ for modern literary critics because the region seemed immune to calls to shift its cultural time zone."
Christopher Hitchens
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (review)
reviewed by Brian Steele
"A crusade to destroy a de facto regime in hope of creating a lasting republic formed no part of Jefferson's conception of political reality."
Wendy Reed and Jennifer Horne, Editors
All Out of Faith: Southern Women on Spirituality (review)
reviewed by Barbara Brown Taylor
"'Every Southerner has been shaped by religion in some form or fashion.'"
Andrew Silver
Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor (review)
reviewed by Johanna Shields
"This is a book about humor that will not let you smile."
Volume 14, Number 2, Summer 2008
Philip C. Kolin and Susan Swartwout, Editors
Hurricane Blues: Poems about Katrina and Rita (review)
reviewed by Rachel Richardson
"This volume provides a record of the lingering trauma and the need for art--for creation out of the rubble."
Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009
John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed, with William McKinney
Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue:
The Definitive Guide to the People, Recipes, and Lore (review)
reviewed by Fred Sauceman
"The Reeds and McKinney have crafted a book that ranges from the roasted meats of Homer’s Iliad to yellow page ads in the restaurant sections of North Carolina telephone directories. Holy Smoke is a book not only of many flavors but also engaging scenes."
James L. Peacock
Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World (review)
reviewed by Leon Fink
"A Ugandan boy is lovingly adopted by a Peace Corps volunteer. An Indian wedding at the Carolina Inn features a groom entering on a white horse (substituting for an elephant) while a priest chants in Sanskrit."
Heather Andrea Williams
Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (review)
reviewed by Robin Bernstein
"The existence of any white children in black classrooms proved that the schools offered an education whose clear value motivated some white families to violate racial taboos—and assume physical risk for that violation—to learn alongside black children, and often from black teachers."
Andrew H. Myers
Black, White & Olive Drab
Racial Integration at Fort Jackson, SC, and the Civil Rights Movement (review)
reviewed by Alex Macaulay
"What effect, if any, did armed forces integration have in the area around the South Carolina post during the Civil Rights Movement that followed in the fifties and sixties?" The answer seems to be 'not much.'"
Jennifer Ritterhouse
Growing up Jim Crow
How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (review)
reviewed by Clara Silverstein
"Black and white children recounted playing together, then being confused by the pressure to give up their friendships as they grew older. Blacks remembered how normal childhood disputes could take on frightening repercussions if white adults became involved."
Roger D. Abrahams, with Nick Spitzer, John F. Szwed, and Robert Farris Thompson
Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul (review)
reviewed by Perry Kasprzak
"New Orleans as a city that ‘came into being with a kind of antic doom embedded into it,’ founded as it was in a hostile New World swamp, is brought into bright focus by Nature’s recent, temporary, reclaiming of the land, and Man’s persistent desire to rebuild the city."
Anya Jabour
Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (review)
reviewed by Katy Simpson Smith
"As a regional phenomenon, southern girlhood is as culturally resonant as it is understudied. From the myths surrounding Virginia Dare to the surreal pageantry of modern debutantes, the South has shaped its young women in its own ritualistic image."
Gordon Harvey, Richard Starnes, and Glenn Feldman, editors
History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie:
Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt (review)
reviewed by Charles W. Eagles
"As a scholar and as a Christian, Flynt advocated reform of Alabama’s regressive tax system, helped found Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform, supported better and equal funding for public schools, served on the board of directors of the Alabama Poverty Project, and spoke out against powerful special interests."
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (review)
reviewed by Daniel C. Littlefield
"When Alex Haley's Roots appeared in 1976 it set off a storm of excitement among African Americans about the possibilities of tracing their ancestry to a particular African homeland."
Volume 15, Number 2, Summer 2009
Anne Mitchell Whisnant
Super-Scenic Motorway: A Blue Ridge Parkway History (review)
reviewed by Charles L. Perdue
"My wife and I recall two primary impressions: the spectacular views from the Parkway and Skyline Drive, and the feeling of a long, vast emptiness and loneliness as we passed very few other automobiles and rarely saw as much as a house light as we drove into the night."
Volume 16, Number 1, Spring 2010
Steven P. Miller
Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (review)
reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield
“In 1953, Graham removed the ropes separating black and white attendees at his crusade in Chattanooga, and asserted that, were segregated seating restored, “you can go on and have the revival without me.” His sympathies were with those white moderates who acknowledged the inevitability of racial equality but did not feel its urgency.”
Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone
Working Girl Blues: The Life & Music of Hazel Dickens (review)
Bess Lomax Hawes (review)
Sing It Pretty: A Memoir (review)
reviewed by Joshua Guthman
“Hazel Dickens came of age in the West Virginia coalfields where so many of her family members and neighbors worked. By 2001, when Dickens was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship, Bess Lomax Hawes, who had been instrumental in creating the award, had long since been retired. Hawes’s performance career was short-lived, and so her autobiography dwells mostly on a lifetime spent as a folklorist, teacher, and—dare I say it?—bureaucrat.”
Volume 16, Number 4, Winter 2010
Joseph T. Glatthaar
General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse (review)
reviewed by Gerald J. Prokopowicz
"In the final tabulation, the vast majority of the volunteers of 1861 had a direct connection to slavery. For slaveholder and nonslaveholder alike, slavery lay at the heart of the Confederate nation."
Amy Louise Wood
Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in the Jim Crow South, 1890-1940 (review)
reviewed by Seth Kotch
"Power rested not only on the brutality of lynching, but also on its communicability, the way in which mob violence traveled from person to person, across state and regional lines, and from the striving white men of the South to African American activists in the Northeast."
David A. Taylor
Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America (review)
reviewed by Robert Hunt Ferguson
"Although they approached their writing very differently, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright found the space through the WPA to write compassionately and realistically about black life in America."
Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 2011
Leigh H. Edwards
Johnny Cash and the Paradox of American Identity
reviewed by Jocelyn R. Neal
"Johnny Cash is considered by many the quintessential country singer, yet others who claim to loathe country music are fiercely loyal to him."
Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012
To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America
by Robert R. Korstad and James L. Leloudis with photographs by Billy E. Barnes
reviewed by Michael K. Honey
"With poverty and unemployment at levels unprecedented since the Great Depression of the 1930s, as wages of those with jobs stagnate, as the federal government spends trillions for war and gives tax and bailout subsidies to the ultra-rich, we should be asking ourselves how it got to be this way and what can we do about it. To Right These Wrongs provides many of the answers."
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Southern Cultures, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 2012