Politician and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, in his December 22 column “Recommended Holiday Reading for the Caring, Agitated Mind” posted on his website, recommended Jack Shelton’s Consequential Learning: A Public Approach to Better Schools as “a wake-up call to parents and students” …
In advance of April 2012’s one-hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, NewSouth Books is pleased to make a rare firsthand account of the disaster newly available for readers. Sylvia Harbaugh Caldwell traveled on the Titanic in 1912 with her husband Albert and their ten-month-old son Alden; the family survived due to fortunate seats on the Titanic’s Lifeboat 13. In the aftermath, Caldwell published Women of the Titanic Disaster, a narrative of the sorrow and sacrifices of her fellow female passengers …
Author and humorist Lewis Grizzard famously refused to write using a computer, so the fact that a number of his best-loved titles are now available as ebooks carries no lack of irony. NewSouth has re-issued Grizzard’s They Tore Out My Heart and Stomped That Sucker Flat and Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself — both long out of print — in both paperback and ebook formats, with two more titles on the way. If I Ever Get Back to Georgia, I’m Going to Nail My Feet to the Ground and I Haven’t Understood Anything Since 1962 will both be available in print and ebook in early 2012 …
Dr. Ethel Hall, the first African American woman elected to the Alabama State Board of Education, died this month at age 83. Hall had recounted both her two decades on the Board of Education and her early struggle to achieve higher education in her memoir My Journey, published earlier this year by NewSouth Books …
After years spent published by New York houses, the distinctly Southern flavor of humorist Lewis Grizzard’s books has come home to the South. In the article “NewSouth Reissues Southern Humorist’s Oeuvre,” Publishers Weekly‘s Marc Schultz spotlights the unique connection between Grizzard and NewSouth, which has joined with the Grizzard estate to bring all the writer’s books back to print. “I spent a lot of time looking for publishers,” Grizzard’s widow Dedra told Publishers Weekly. “They either did not get Lewis, his works, or Southern heritage and traditions, or they were too small to market it, or they wanted to hold the rights.” After she spoke with NewSouth, Dedra said, “I literally felt at home. I had found what I was looking for: they published good books with a dedicated staff committed to excellence” …
NewSouth Books is pleased to have been involved with the Alabama Folklife Association‘s annual journal Tributaries from the beginning. Named after the waterways that divide the state’s regions from the Coastal Plain to the Tennessee Valley, Tributaries is also a symbolic title. As Jim Carnes said in the premiere issue, “The state’s cultural landscape, like its physical one, features a network of ‘tributaries’ rather than a single dominant mainstream.” Tributaries‘s thirteenth issue will be released later this month …
Writer Margaret Eby remembers the late Alabama folklorist Kathryn Tucker Windham and pays tribute to Southern ghost stories in her new Paris Review essay “Southern Gothic.” The essay coincides with the posthumous release of Windham’s final book, She: The Old Woman Who Took Over My Life. From the Paris Review: “Windham’s voice is unforgettable. In high school, I would listen to All Things Considered every couple weeks to hear … her rolling, sticky Southwest Alabama accent … ‘I don’t care whether you believe in ghosts,’ Windham was fond of saying. ‘The good ghost stories do not require that you believe in ghosts’ …
That breeze you feel this morning must be one of two things: either it is caused by Bull Connor spinning in his grave over the international expressions of sympathy for the passing and admiration for the life of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, or it is caused by a lot of angel wings flapping as Shuttlesworth has arrived in heaven. Where he will begin organizing and demonstrating shortly …
With the news that John Pritchard’s novels Junior Ray and The Yazoo Blues were now available as ebooks, Pritchard hurried to tell his eponymous character, Junior Ray Loveblood. The results were as unpredictable as Junior Ray himself … “On Kindle?” Junior Ray asked. “Correct,” I said. “Da-um!” he said. “They gon’ set em on fire?!!” Before I could respond, he took off like Miss Ruth McGrew, back in 1952, when she found a three-foot water moccasin coiled up in her mother’s yellow Buttercup-Spode serving platter in the kitchen cabinet above the sink: “I knew it!” he shouted. “Bygod I knew it! I knew sure as shootn that sooner or later them Baptists — and all the rest of them Bible-Bangers was gon’ get around to burnin up my books!” …
From the Alabama Review: Anyone researching a nineteenth-century Alabama topic that touches Montgomery must consult Matthew Blue. Before the appearance of Mary Ann Neeley’s edition of Blue’s works, this was difficult because copies were rare and fragile. Neeley’s edited and annotated volume of Blue’s works should be in major research libraries in the nation and included in most of Alabama’s public and academic collections. Collectors of Alabamiana will welcome this volume …