Facing South’s bi-weekly listing features new books about the U.S. South and books written by Southern writers.

Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority by Bob Moser, 274 pages, Times Books, (August 2008)

From the publisher: In 2000 and 2004, the Democratic Party decided not to challenge George W. Bush in the South, a disastrous strategy that effectively handed Bush more than half of the electoral votes he needed to win the White House. As the 2008 election draws near, the Democrats have a historic opportunity to build a new progressive majority, but they cannot do so without the South. In Blue Dixie: Awakening the South’s Democratic Majority, Bob Moser, a native and longtime resident of North Carolina and a political correspondent for The Nation, argues that the Democratic Party has been blinded by outmoded prejudices about the region. Moser reports that a volatile mix of unprecedented economic prosperity and abject poverty are reshaping the Southern vote. With evangelical churches preaching a more expansive social gospel and a massive left-leaning demographic shift to African Americans, Latinos, and the young, the South is poised for a Democratic revival. By returning to a bold, unflinching message of economic fairness, the Democrats can win in the nation’s largest, most diverse region and redeem themselves as a true party of the people.

Facing South has reported on many of these very changes and the need for a new political strategy in the South. Indeed, Moser presents a powerful case for a new Southern strategy for the Democrats. The New York Times asserts that Moser achieves in convincing “Democrats that the South is a lot more complicated and interesting than they have made it out to be. It just might be a worthy object of their affection.” In These Times writes that “Dixie isn’t going to be solid blue anytime soon, but neither will the South be the safe base on which the Republicans have long built national victories.”

“By viewing the South as hopelessly, stubbornly, unchangeably ‘red,’” Moser writes, “the superior hearts and brains of non-Southern liberals can rest assured, once again, that American evils are not theirs to confront — or to overcome.”

For more information, visit Times Books.

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3 Years After: New Orleans & the Gulf Coast - In Their Own Words, Oxford American, Issue 62

Oxford American's most recent issue is devoted to masterful post-Katrina writing. The Times-Picayune's book editor calls the issue "an unbelievable bargain, a feast of good writing. No matter what your post-Katrina mindset, you’ll find some version of it rendered here, and the end result is strangely cheering, as though reinforcements have arrived for the struggle.”

From the Oxford American website:

On the third anniversary of Katrina, Gustav reminded us that New Orleans and the Gulf Coast remain vulnerable. This time around, however, we were also reminded that a lot has changed in the last three years to protect one of America’s most vital regions. Still, some media pundits continue to assert that we shouldn't spend “a single dime” on continuing to rebuild—and fortify—an area that is prone to hurricanes and flooding. Sure, we could offer up statistics about how Katrina’s devastating effects were not the result of a so-called “natural” disaster but were instead a culmination of profound bureaucratic ineptitude and negligence. Gustav, in fact, revealed that diligence and organization can thwart loss of life and delineated the exact weaknesses that still need to be addressed. But rather than offer an outsider's perspective on the matter, we decided to let people on the scene tell us the truth about what's going on in this complex and vibrant region. This special issue of the magazine is devoted to clearing public misconceptions about a beloved historic region that continues to feed American culture not only with its unique cuisine but also with its music and arts and politics and personalities and, of course, joie de vivre. Ninety percent of this issue is written by New Orleans and Gulf Coast locals (and/or people embedded with deep and long-term ties with the city).

For more information visit Oxford American online and to order click here.

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Response of Upper Gulf Coast Estuaries to Holocene Climate Change and Sea-Level Rise, John B. Anderson and Antonio B. Rodriguez (editors), Geological Society of America Special Paper 443, 146 pages, (September 2008)

From the Geological Society of America press release: Climate change and sea-level rise in the upper U.S. Gulf Coast and across the globe are two of the greatest concerns of our time. This new Special Paper from The Geological Society of America addresses the response of upper U.S. Gulf Coast estuaries to Holocene climate change and sea-level rise in an effort to understand the current impact of global warming. According to volume editors John B. Anderson of Rice University and Antonio B. Rodriguez of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the U.S. Gulf Coast is characterized by a strong climatic gradient, making the area particularly vulnerable to climate change, as seen in both coastal erosion and wetland loss. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predictions suggest that the rate of sea-level rise associated with climate change could reach as high as 5-10 mm/yr by the end of this century. This study of seven Gulf Coast estuaries (Mobile Bay and Mississippi Sound, Weeks Bay, Calcasieu Lake, Sabine Lake, Galveston Bay, Matagorda Bay, and Corpus Christi Bay) examines past environmental response to changes in the rate of sea-level rise and climate change of similar magnitude as those predicted for this century. This volume will help ready scientists, policy makers, and others concerned about the current and future impacts of global warming to better react to its effects on some of Earth’s most vulnerable environments.

Individual copies of the volume may be purchased through the Geological Society of America online bookstore or by contacting GSA Sales and Service at gsaservice@geosociety.org.

Labels: arts and culture, authors, book fridays, books, environment, southern culture, southern history, Southern Politics, southern writers

Facing South's bi-weekly listing features new books about the U.S. South and books written by Southern writers.

Covering for the Bosses: Labor and the Southern Press by Joseph B. Atkins, 280 pages, University Press of Mississippi (July 2008)

From the publisher: Covering for the Bosses probes the difficult relationship between the press and organized labor in the South from the past to the present day. In gathering materials for this book, veteran journalist Joseph B. Atkins crisscrossed the region, interviewing workers, managers, labor organizers, immigrants, activists, and journalists, and canvassing labor archives. Covering for the Bosses shows how, with few exceptions, the press has been a key partner in the powerful alliance of business and political interests that keep the South the nation's least-unionized region.

For more information about the book, visit the University Press of Mississippi.

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Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice, by Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Fernando Gapasin, 324 pages, University of California Press (June 23, 2008)

From the publisher: Candid, incisive, and accessible, Solidarity Divided is a critical examination of labor's current crisis and a plan for a bold new way forward into the twenty-first century. Authors Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin chart changes in U.S. manufacturing, examine the onslaught of globalization, consider the influence of the environment on labor, and provide the first broad analysis of the fallout from the 2000 and 2004 elections on the U.S. labor movement. Ultimately calling for a wide-ranging reexamination of the ideological and structural underpinnings of today's labor movement, this is essential reading for understanding how the battle for social justice can be fought and won.

For more information about the book, visit the University of California Press.

Labels: arts and culture, authors, book fridays, books, labor, southern culture, southern history, southern writers, workers' rights

This week, Facing South's Book Fridays brings you a selection of online photo essays.

Over at Southern Spaces, Earl Dotter presents “Coalfield Generations: Health, Mining, and the Environment," an exploration of mining communities in southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. The photo essay documents the lives of people in Appalachia as they intersect with the coal mining industry. Since 1968, Earl Dotter has photographed miners in Appalachia, and has documented the lives of workers throughout the country. According to Southern Spaces:

In this photo essay set in mining communities of southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, Earl Dotter seeks out changes in consumption and leisure, healthcare, coal mining practices, and the environment that have occurred since he first photographed in the region in 1968.

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Here’s a couple of older selections, but worth sharing.

Facing South has reported on the importance of coastal protection. Touted as one of the most innovative experimental travelblogs on the web, Erik Gauger’s Notes from the Road has been around since 1999. The site combines Gauger's stunning photography with his engaging stories about people and places. In Catfish Heaven: Winter on the Bayou, Gauger presents a series of photos and narratives published just a few months before Hurricane Katrina. In this travelogue Gauger paddles and drives through the backwaters of Louisiana bayou country talking to people and photographing the local geography. Speaking with locals he hears what would soon prove to be prophetic announcements: “Louisiana will sink, or face horrific damage from a hurricane, unless efforts are made to reverse the damage to the coasts and bayous.” For more information on Gauger, read his interview with TravelBlogs.

On a similar regional note, check out John Amrhein and Earl Robicheaux’ Voices of Atchafalaya, photographs documenting the Atchafalaya Swamp Basin of south Louisiana. As the site explains, “by combining photographs with a soundscape composed from oral histories and ambient sounds, we hope to portray life in this region.” Using photographs and oral histories to explore the rich folk heritage within the Atchafalaya Basin, the photographss were exhibited in Patterson, Louisiana in 2006. You can see a slideshow of some of the work here. According to the exhibit:

Featured are an Austrian oyster fisherman, the architecture of the Greek-based Florida shrimpboat, African-American storytelling traditions, French fisherman, a Native American traiteur, and others from this primordial and mystical world. The oral traditions of these cultures represent more than just a record of a previous time; rather, like the river that is their livelihood, sacred story flows through the generations, nourishing and nurturing them, and providing us all with an understanding of the nature of past, present, and future. Named for the Choctaw words for long (atcha) river (falaya), the river becomes a metaphor for that which binds generations, a keeper of dreams in south Louisiana.

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John Ficara's Black Farmers in America project was published as a book in 2006 and ran as an exhibit throughout that year. The Digital Journalist did a feature on Ficara's project, and still has a photo gallery of some of the photography featured in the project. Ficara, an international award-winning photojournalist and documentary photographer, spent four years photographing Black farmers across America, witnessing firsthand the difficulties faced by families who simply want to continue living and working on their land. The photographs capture a portrait of America’s Black farmers as their numbers dwindle. From the Digital Journalist:

Those of us concerned with the welfare of meaningful photography take some heart whenever a worthy project gets exhibited and published. John Francis Ficara's elegant take on black farmers in America documents a vanishing way of life and points to failures of social justice that sadly contribute to its passing. The book and exhibitions from his project are a significant contribution to the photographic ethnography of what has been one of our country's most important institutions, the independent family farm.

For more information on the book visit the University Press of Kentucky. Also check out this NPR report interviewing Ficara back in 2006: Twilight for Black Farms.

(First photo from Voices of Atchafalaya site and second photo from NPR.)

Labels: arts and culture, authors, book fridays, books, coastal protection, southern culture, southern history, southern photography, southern writers

Facing South's bi-weekly listing features new books about the U.S. South and books written by Southern writers.

Perpetual Care: Stories by James Nolan, 239 pages, Jefferson Press (May 2008)

Perpetual Care, the winner of the 2007 Jefferson Prize in Fiction, is the first short story collection by New Orleans poet, critic and essayist James Noland. The collection provides a window into the lives of post-Katrina New Orleans residents and into the neighborhoods they inhabit. According to the Seattle Times, “the ghost of Tennessee Williams haunts this fine debut collection of stories. But it's New Orleans, in all its seamy, sultry, dilapidated glory that is the book's protagonist.” The Times Picayune said “[New Orleans’] long conversation with itself has never been louder or more insistent than it is in these stories, with all their exuberance, despair and wit.”

For more information on the book visit Jefferson Press.

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The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction by Scott Romine, 336 pages, Louisiana State University Press (June 2008)

Scott Romine’s study explores the impact of globalization on contemporary southern culture and the South's persistence in an age of media and what he terms "cultural reproduction." The Real South explores a wide range of southern narratives that describe and travel through virtual, simulated, and commodified Souths. Where earlier critics have tended to assume a real or authentic South, Romine questions such assumptions and whether the "authentic South" ever truly existed.

For more information please visit Louisiana State University Press.

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Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964-1972 by Susan Youngblood Ashmore, University of Georgia Press, July 2008

Carry It On is an in-depth study of how the local struggle for equality in Alabama fared in the wake of new federal laws-the Civil Rights Act, the Economic Opportunity Act, and the Voting Rights Act. Susan Youngblood Ashmore focuses on the Alabama Black Belt and on the local projects funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the federal agency that supported programs in a variety of cities and towns in Alabama. Ashmore looks closely at the interactions among local activists, elected officials, businesspeople, landowners, bureaucrats, and others who were involved in or affected by OEO projects.

For more information please visit University of Georgia Press.

Labels: arts and culture, authors, book fridays, books, southern culture, southern history, southern writers

This week Facing South begins a bi-weekly listing of new books about the U.S. South or written by Southern writers.

Slavery by another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War by Douglas A. Blackmon, 480 pages, Doubleday (March 25, 2008)

Based on a vast record of original documents and personal narratives, Slavery by Another Name unearths the lost stories of slaves and their descendants who journeyed into freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation and then back into the shadow of involuntary servitude. The book has been hailed by Bill Moyers as “the most stunning book you will read this year.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called it “an important, ambitious account of the black men engulfed in a legal system operating for the white South’s pursuit of racial dominance and private profit. It weaves together a vast quantity of existing scholarship, interviews and archival records in order to tell the personal stories of black Southerners snared by the South’s interlocking systems of racial exploitation.”

For more information, visit the book’s website.

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Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How by S. David Freeman, 248 pages, Gibbs Smith (September 7, 2007)

In Winning Our Energy Independence, Tennessean-born environmentalist and long-time energy insider S. David Freeman sheds light on America’s deadly addiction to the "three poisons": foreign oil, coal, and nuclear power. He challenges the United States and the world to create a high-energy global civilization where each nation has its own homegrown, carbon-free renewable source of energy. The LA Times blogs that Freeman’s book “is a highly inspiring and optimistic read that encourages environmentalists to think big and act fast.”

"We now are aware that this civilization of ours is on death row,” Freeman told a crowd gathered to him speak this month at The Carter Center. “Almost every climatologist tells us we have about 10 years to get greenhouse gases under control… or the greatest likelihood is our civilization will go down and go down for keeps."

For more information visit Gibbs Smith publishing.

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On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail by Charles Cobb, 388 pages, Algonquin Books (December 20, 2007)

Charles Cobb’s On the Road to Freedom is a journey through Southern history and an insider's tour of the Civil Rights trail. Cobb left college in the early 1960s to join the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South, and went on to spend five years working with people who would become icons of the movement and in places that would become pivotal battlegrounds in the fight for civil rights.

FireDogLake called On the Road to Freedom “a book about freedom--the idea and pursuit of it--not only from slavery itself but also from the unique history of slavery in the United States, a history so ugly, so painful but yet fundamental, the author argues, that even after over two hundred years later in the 21st century we still haven't fully come to grips with it: We still haven't completely dealt with the collective trauma and social neurosis in its wake.”

For more information visit Algonquin Books. You can listen to an interview with Cobb on North Carolina Public Radio or on NPR’s Tell Me More.

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Let Them Eat MoonPie: The Southern Fried Poetry Slam From 1992-2000 by Bill Abbot, 274 pages, The Wordsmith Press (March 1, 2008)

Poetry slam is the competitive art of poetry originating in Chicago over 20 years ago, and is now practiced at venues worldwide. It is an interactive experience that involves the audience as well as the poets, according to Nashville-born writer Bill Abbott. Abbott captures the colorful history of Southern performance poetry in Let them Eat Moonpie, a book that is part history and part Southern study.

According to the Winston-Salem Journal, the book takes a look at some of the South’s most decorated competitive poets and the events and people who were and continue to be a part of the Southern Fried circuit, a quirky regional poetry slam held annually in cities around the South. The Winston-Salem Journal goes on to call the book an “oral and somewhat insider history of a competition that's as much about performing as it is about writing, eight years of Southern poetry slamming stitched together by the colorful memories of creative people. Like poetry and performing itself, it is sometimes bawdy, sometimes piecemeal but a celebration of an activity that prides itself on being on the fringe.”

The Southern Fried Poetry Slam continues to remain strong. As the Tallahassee Democrat reported, this year’s Southern Fried Slam attracted more than 200 poets and 40 teams to Tallahassee, Fl. earlier this month.

For more information about the book, visit its website or the website of The Wordsmith Press.

Labels: arts and culture, authors, book fridays, books, southern culture, southern history, southern writers

This week the Raleigh News & Observer profiled Institute for Southern Studies board member and North Carolina native Tim Tyson, a renowned lecturer, writer, and professor of African-American Studies.

Labels: authors, north carolina, southern history, tim tyson