A few interesting book reads in 2015

[William Thornton]

Here are a few books that I read this year that I found interesting. Some of these are a few years old. I gotta guy who bought several bins of books, thousands of them, wholesale and I found a good many digging through the piles.

1491 and 1493, by Charles C. Mann: OK, my second go-around on both of these. It's tough to get what was current in the 1950s and 60s out of mind. The pre-Columbus and post-Columbus New World as described by Mann was revelatory to me.

Onward, Engaging the Culture without Losing the War, Russell Moore: A free book, gift of NAMB at the Send conference in Nashville. Interesting. Some good material. No index.

A Lawyer's Journey: The Morris Dees Story: Updated. Cookbook publisher to the destroyer of the Klan. Someone had to do it.

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff: Much of the Civil Rights Movement unfolded (or exploded) when I was a child and a teen. The details of the reporting and the people involved are interesting.

The Oregon Trail, A New American Journey by Rinker Buck: I have had a fantasy about hiking the Appalachian Trail one of these days (could have done it but it won't happen now) but not about taking three mules and a wagon on the old Oregon Trail for a couple thousand miles. Fascinating. One of the mules was obviously an obstreperous Southern Baptist.

James Monroe Smith: Georgia Planter by E. Merlon Coulter: Smith was the biggest post-Civil War landowner in my neck of the woods. I've been through his main farm many times. While he never owned slaves, he worked lots of tenant farmers and was one of the biggest lessee's of convicts in the state of Georgia. He never married and after he died suddenly, the fun began with his estate. Coulter is described as a "southern apologist" by some.

Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice by David M. Oshinski: I have heard about Parchman from my Mississippi in-laws. John Grisham visits Parchman often in some of his great storybooks. My local county had a prison farm. In the 1970s it was a great place to eat lunch because they grew their own food. Nothing great about Parchman.

Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon: I generally browse for books and happened on a cluster of books on slavery and civil rights. This is a history hidden from white folks but all to real to black southerners of a certain period.

[Stephen Fox]

Anybody who covers both those poles can't be all bad. Fairly impressive list from a fellow whose blog is read by Jerry Vines

In all sincerity, Dr. Thornton I think tne New Yorker review "How the South Won the Civil War" is a must google for you. I read Johnson's The Dark Kingdom a year ago on recommendation of fellow Furman grad, Greenwood SC native Tomiko Brown Nagin, now teaching in History Dept at Harvard. And I'm now reading Paul Theroux's Deep South which I honestly think you'll want to read asap.

Parchman gets a good scene in the award winning Black Theatre production The Piano player--I think that's the title, may get exact for you soon. My sister's youth choir went there last year and said it was the best creamed corn she'd ever eaten and my Grandmother Fox's wasn't bad.

Turns out it was the Piano Lesson: https://www.seattlerep.org/Plays/1415/PL/Synopsis

The interesting news is a classmate from Furman and I had great phone chat last night. He was raised in Catholic Schools in Ft Lauderdale, had a sister who dated Nixon's friend John J Alpanalph's son, and gave me Hades jokingly for being a Baptist preacher's son from Gaffney. He is now enchanted by the history of SC Baptists as it inflected the development of Furman from slave holding Richard to the present day. I can't wait till he gets to Harold Bloom The American Religion and that take on the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC with the comparison of Cane Ridge to Woodstock.

Merry Christmas