The Capitol Book & News Newspaper Column
Appears Every Other Sunday In
What We Learned At
The Alabama Book Festival
Careful readers of this column have noted that each of the last four columns
has featured books and their authors who were coming to last week’s
Alabama Book Festival. The conceit of each of those columns was that you would
be so intrigued by our descriptions of certain books that you would come to the
Festival just to buy one of those books, and to meet the author of that book.
So just how do you think it makes us feel when it turns out that several of the
very most popular books at the Festival, as measured by their sales there, were
books that we never even mentioned? Well, here’s how it makes us feel:
happy, and once again confirmed in our conviction that you folks are a lot
smarter than we about books, because we went back and took a look at the
surprise bestsellers, and you know what? They’re really good books, and
we should have mentioned them before now, but since late is better than never,
we’ll just go ahead and mention them now.
A Pocketful of History by Jim Noles.
A fascinating book, and a fascinating premise. Jim Noles is a
Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead. When three
different people come up to you at a Book Festival, and thank you profusely for
bringing a writer to the Festival, and then tell you that his latest book is
one of the great books ever, it makes you sort of wish you’d actually
read the thing. So that is exactly what Thomas is doing right now, and you know
what? This one, about a 14 year old boy dispatched by his mother to bring his
father home from the Civil War, and about his great horse, really is special.
($23.95 hardcover)
Major Crush and The Boys Next Door by Jennifer
Echols. These books are in the genre we call teenage romantic comedies,
and they are perfect for younger teenage girls, who if they’ve traveled
much around Alabama just might recognize the setting for these books, which is
Alexander City, even if it’s called something else in the book. This was
the first time we’d met Jennifer Echols, who grew up in
Ivorybill Hunters by Geoffrey Hill. A great
book, about an epic adventure, written by an
With Music and Justice for All by Frye Gaillard. This is Thomas’s favorite kind of
book. – a collection of short pieces about fascinating
people. Pick it up anytime, turn anywhere in it, and be thoroughly entertained.
Frye Gaillard has spent nearly 40 years writing about
folks in the South, and this collection must be of only his very best stuff,
because it’s all top notch. How many people do
you know who actually met John T. Scopes of monkey trial fame?
($24.95 hardcover)
Six Days
Older readers will recall the Six-Day War of 1967, the one
where
Or for creating the heavens and the earth, but that’s all it took, if the Bible is to be believed.
On the other hand, six days can sometimes seem like a long time. We are willing to bet that none of you has ever seen the movie Deadhead Miles, a bizarre trucker movie made in 1972, starring Alan Arkin, but as far as we know never actually released into theaters. Thomas saw it as part of a test audience in Nashville sometime during that year, and actually sat in the theater that day with the great country singer Dave Dudley, whose band The Roadrunners was also there, because they’d provided a good deal of the soundtrack for the movie, including the exhilaratingly heartbreaking trucker song Six Days On the Road (And I’m Gonna Make It Home Tonight.) That song makes six days seem like an eternity.
So it may seem like a long wait to some, and to some others it may feel like it’ll be here in just a wink of time, but either way six days is how long there is until the 2008 Alabama Book Festival, which will happen next Saturday, April 19, down at Old Alabama Town. We’ve written a good bit about the Festival in our last few columns, but still we’ve not even come close to mentioning all the writers and performers who’ll be there, and since there are only six days left to get it done, we thought we’d better do it today, so here’s who’s coming whom we haven’t mentioned yet:
Wildly popular (and very, very good)
writer Joshilyn Jackson. Local
favorite (and cultural asset) Mary Ann Neeley.
Stephen Fox, author of Wolf of the Deep, a very good book on civil war
Admiral Raphael Semmes. Doug Phillips, the guy who tromps through the woods on
Not to mention Wayne Greenhaw, from whom we always hear
something we’ve never heard before. And young adult authors Jennifer
Echols, Loretta Ellsworth, and the very controversial R.A. Nelson. Scenes from
Wade Hall’s play Conecuh People
will be performed. Kirk Curnutt, Elizabeth Dulemba, William Drinkard ( former
It’s the
Books For Older Young Readers
Young folks are
complicated creatures, and that’s why we keep an expert on staff to deal
with their reading needs. Here are a few books our expert Eleanor Lucas thinks
it might do the younger set good to read.
Reviewing books for older juvenile readers presents some challenges. Not every book is for every child, to be sure, and so I will make you this promise: I will always read them with the eyes and heart of a parent, but also with the memory of a pre-teen/teenager who loved to read about people and places and things that were not always part of my own personal experience. Young people enjoy the same things in fiction that adult readers do: the chance to step out of your own life for a while, a chance to read about people not exactly like everyone you already know, and a chance to take the risk that you may laugh at, or cry about, or think again about things that move you.
Finding things about which to laugh isn’t hard in Meg Cabot’s Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls: Moving Day. Allie has a growing checklist of things she needs to remember to navigate life successfully. Rule Number 4, for instance, is “If you don’t want a secret spread around, don’t tell Scott Stamphley.” When her family decides to buy a creepy old house in a neighborhood that will take her away from the friends she’s not even sure she wants to have anymore, Allie’s list takes on even greater importance. How she finds her way through the thicket of challenges she’ll face during this transition makes for funny and insightful reading. This is the first book in what should be another successful series for Cabot, author of The Princess Diary books. Hardcover, for ages 9 – 11, $15.99
Those readers with an interest in historical fiction should enjoy A Drowned Maiden’s Hair by Laura Amy Schlitz. When we meet Maud Flynn she’s been locked in an outhouse at the orphanage in which she resides as punishment for yet another infraction of the rules. She is discovered there by two mysterious sisters, Hyacinth and Judith, who adopt her forthwith. Maud is told only that she will need to remain hidden in that home for the foreseeable future, and once there she discovers that she will be part of a series of seances held by the sisters. The novel takes place during the Spiritualist period of American history, and while Maud’s role in making these seances successful at first exhilarates her she soon finds herself torn when she realizes just how much advantage is being taken of those who are grieving the loss of their loved ones. A wholly satisfying book, with exceptionally well-limned characters. For ages 10 – 12, $7.99
When I was a teenager about 37 years ago, there was one novel that none of our mothers wanted us to read, but which we all did. That was Go Ask Alice, and its harrowing “first-person” account of a typical teenager’s descent into drug abuse – resulting in her death by overdose – had a profound effect on my generation. I will not be surprised if Jay Asher’s extraordinarly moving Thirteen Reasons Why resonates just as strongly with older teens today. Hannah Baker has committed suicide, and left behind a box of cassette tapes to be listened to by the 13 people whose interactions with her laid the groundwork for that horrible decision. Each of them is instructed to listen to the tapes, and then send them to the next person mentioned. We discover them with one of those teens – Clay Jensen – who listens to Hannah’s haunting words with confusion, anger, grief, and finally a sense of personal resolution that is incredibly moving. This is an honest and frank book about a very sensitive subject, and one that deserves to find a wide readership among those 14 and up. I would be remiss not to mention that Jay Asher will be one of the authors at the Alabama Book Festival on April 19, and he deserves to have enthusiastic fans on hand to meet him. $16.99, hardcover.
Governor Patterson
The most interesting person we know is coming to the Alabama Book Festival on April 19.
Years ago, when the bookstore was downtown on
Luckily, somebody did. Warren Trest,
who several years ago wrote Wings of
Denial: The Alabama Air National Guard's Covert Role at the Bay of Pigs,
has now turned his considerable talents to writing the first authorized
biography of Governor Patterson, who not incidentally played a role in the
whole
The public part of that remarkable life began, tragically,
with the assassination of Governor Patterson’s father in 1954 in
NewSouth Books is bringing another
very popular writer to the Festival this year. Rheta Grimsley Johnson, whose column in the Advertiser must
surely be the most popular feature in the whole newspaper, has written a
wonderful book about her second home, deep in the Louisiana bayou. The book is Poor Man's Provence:
Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana, and if Festival organizers are smart
they’ll have somebody there selling boiled crawfish, for you will surely
want some after hearing Rheta talk about this book.
And not to be outdone by the local competition, Montgomery’s River City Press is also bringing a duo of Alabama writers, who’ve written two different books – one fiction, one not – about the very same grisly 1966 murder of Annie Jean Barnes down in Brewton. Suzanne Hudson wrote the critically acclaimed In a Temple of Trees, a novel about the case, back in 2004, and that book inspired her partner Joe Formichella to investigate the whole case again, which investigation has now led to the publication of his nonfiction account of the murder, Murder Creek: The "Unfortunate Incident" of Annie Jean Barnes. Believe us - we’ve heard these two talk about this one murder from two different perspectives, and it’s fascinating. You might just come away with some idea of whodunit. And you might not.
There are more great writers, and more great books, coming
to this year’s Festival than will fit into one newspaper column, or two,
or three. Which might give you some idea of what to expect to
see in this space in the weeks to come. In the meantime, just remember
this: Saturday, April 19 at
The numbers keep changing, but at last count they were 70 and 150, and that’s a lot, and a lot more than last year, when the numbers were closer to 50 and 110, which seemed like a lot at the time.
Those new numbers are the approximate numbers of writers (70),
and the combined total of their book titles (150), all of which will be brought
together down at
You can meet two Pulitzer Prize winners. Rick Bragg won his
Pulitzer in 1996, not for the books (All
Over But the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man) which have endeared him to
millions of people all over the world. but “for his elegantly written
(newspaper) stories about contemporary
The other Pulitzer winner is Natasha Trethewey,
who won the 2007 award for Native Guard,
her collection of poems published in 2006, and whose previous collections Bellocq’s Ophelia and Domestic Work also won great critical acclaim. Natasha once taught
at
And here would be a good place to mention one big difference in this year’s Festival, and that’s the inclusion of lots more poets than in years past, enough poets in fact to warrant the opening of a whole new section of the Festival featuring poets Bruce Alford, Nana Lampton, Irene Latham, Sue Walker, Matthew Graham, Jeanie Thompson, Jake York, Nickole Brown, Willie James King, Doug Van Gundy, Emma Bolden, Louie Skipper, and Dan Albergotti.
You can meet one of our very favorite writers for middle grade readers. Her name is Deborah Wiles, and her books Love Ruby Lavender, Each Little Bird That Sings, and her latest, The Aurora County All-Stars, have won lots of awards, but more importantly have turned lots of kids on to reading. Every middle grade teacher should be sure her students come meet this incredible writer.
Two local writers who’ve hit the big time with their
first books will also be here. Artist Anton Haardt’s
Mose T From A to Z is a beautiful memorial
to
If that were the whole lineup, it would be pretty good, but of course it’s not even close to the whole lineup. It’s only about 20 of the 70 writers, and we haven’t even mentioned the many great mystery writers, adult fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and other literary folk who’ll be here. Perhaps that will be a subject for our next column.
But here’s something we need to get to in this column.
A great event like this doesn’t just happen. It takes a lot of work, and
a lot of good people, and especially a lot of volunteers for jobs like author
escort, clock watcher at readings, green room attendant, help in
children’s area, and lots of other fun jobs, none of which will require
more than 2 hours of your time. And luckily there’s still plenty of time
for YOU to volunteer to help. Just call Nancy Griggs over in
How To Cook Fish
Last year, just after we had eaten our 36,000th meal together, Cheryl finally discovered how to cook fish. Not that she couldn’t cook an awfully good fish meal before then, but one day last year she discovered a revolutionary new way to cook fish, the way you would cook fish, too, if only you knew about it, but almost nobody does know about it, and she wouldn’t know about it either, had she not discovered this method in one of the many, many cookbooks she read last year.
So, in the hope that maybe you too can discover something to change your culinary life, even if you’ve prepared 36,000 meals, or more, and think you know it all, here’s Cheryl’s short list of her favorite cookbooks of the past few months.
The talented church ladies from Trinity Episcopal Church in Wetumpka have put their best recipes together in Shall We Gather: Recipes and Remembrances of a River Town. It sprinkles bits of local history throughout, including the Coosa’s connection to Popeye and why Alabamians should be eternally grateful to Hernando Desoto. Recipes include Pasty Riley’s Vegetable Soup, She Crab Soup from Our Place, the Wetumpka restaurant “that would make any city proud,” and an Episcopalian Cake involving an orange marmalade filling and orange whipped cream frosting. (Hardcover, $22.95)
If you are like us, and have bunches of recipe clipping in disarray around the house, you can get rid of at least some of them now. Fine Cooking Annual collects the best recipes of the last year from our favorite cooking magazine into one convenient book. The short rib section alone is worth every penny. (Hardcover, $34.95)
North Carolinian Jean Anderson, author of A Love Affair with Southern Cooking: Recipes and Recollections, has produced a wonderful book full of recipes we aim to try. Want to really impress a non-Southerner? Serve ‘em some homemade Pimento Cheese. Chances are they have never tried it. Even better, make it Blue Moon Cheese, and if you don’t know what that is, we have another cookbook for you. Think there’s only one way to fix black-eyed peas? How about Black-Eyed Pea Cakes with Tomato Salsa? Or in Sausage Etouffée? Or, maybe a southern style Hummus? This cookbook is making us hungry! (Hardcover, $32.50)
Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois sounds way too good to be true, but we are here to say it works! Mix it up with a spoon or your hands tonight and stick it in the refrigerator. Tomorrow you shape it into a free form loaf, let rise about 40 minutes and bake. NO KNEADING! Try it, you’ll love it. (Hardcover, $27.95)
We have really enjoyed Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food: Great Food Fast. At least six nights a week, fast is important to most folks. This cookbook is organized by season, and some of her ideas for February include Mediterranean Chicken Stew (30 minutes total) and Baked Ravioli (25 minute prep plus 25 baking). (Paper, $24.95)
One old cookbook which has become a new favorite of ours is
Patricia Wells’s Bistro Cooking, which was named cookbook of the year in 1989. From her favorite small family run
restaurants in
Not far from these parts, in
Oh, and the revolutionary method of cooking fish? Visit our website for the recipe.
African-American
Children’s Books
Some of you have complained that we have not written enough about children’s books in this space, and we think you’re right. So from now on, every fourth column or so will feature books for the younger set, and here’s the first one. Like those to come, it’s written by our children’s book buyer Eleanor Lucas.
In 1926 Dr. Carter G. Woodson launched Negro History Week to coincide with the birthdates of President Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. At that time, history texts gave scant recognition to contributions from our African-American population. One notable exception to this exclusion was George Washington Carver.
In 1976 the observance of Negro History Week was expanded and re-named as Black History Month, and in 2008 one of the finest new books for children is a pictorial biography about that very man.
Tanya Bolden’s fascinating George Washington Carver is written for children in elementary school, but substantive and fascinating glimpses into his life and career make it is quite satisfying for a much broader audience. Especially interesting is the inclusion of his illustrations of botanical wonders – I cannot remember ever seeing them before. Carver’s rise to national respect and prominence is a testament to the power of resiliency, intellect, and personal grace, a trinity of Carver’s many gifts effectively conveyed by Ms. Bolden. Hardcover, $18.95
In 1991 Mary Hoffman’s charming Amazing Grace hit the shelves, and became a bestseller for us. To our recollection it was the first picture book that featured an African-American child on the cover that sold across all cultural lines. (Don Freeman’s Corduroy came to mind as well, but that was before our time and the child in that book was not on the cover). Imagine how delighted we are, after all these years, that Ms. Hoffman’s equally engaging Princess Grace has been newly published. Grace wants nothing more than to be a pink-frocked princess in a school parade. Her quest to find out what a princess actually does leads her to discover that throughout history princesses have been warriors, athletes, scientists, and brave spies! Her Nana encourages her to shake the idea of all the pink fluff and pattern her costume after kente-clad African princesses. Her enthusiasm for learning about the royalty of her own culture inspires her classmates from all backgrounds to do likewise, and the class parade becomes something much more interesting and exciting for all the children – even the boys. Illustrations by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa Hu add joy and richness to this most likable story. Hardcover, $16.99
Julian Houston’s beautifully written New Boy succeeds both as riveting
coming-of-age story and a thoughtful and understated account of one young
man’s evolution from nervous schoolboy to Civil Rights’
activist. When Rob Garrett is sent from
his home in
While doing research for this column I attempted to find the name of the first book written by an African-American author for African-American children, and while that eludes me even now I did discover that one of the first was Langston Hughes’ collection of poetry, The Dream Keeper, published in 1932, and now available in a 75th anniversary edition handsomely illustrated by African-American artist Brian Pinkney. Hardcover, $16.99
Finally, I was delighted to discover while researching Black History Month that there is a most useful website – The Brown Bookshelf - which celebrates African-American authors with a heart for children’s’ literature. There’s a link to it on our website, or just google “The Brown Bookshelf.”
Your
Favorite 2007 Reads
Here are your Favorite Reads of 2007, or at least a very small sampling of them. We can fit only about 700 words into this column, but you submitted over 15,000 words about the books you liked and didn’t like during 2007. For the whole report, visit our website.
The Yiddish
Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon.
It’s a murder mystery, social commentary, and love story in one
thought-provoking package. I can’t stop thinking about it! (Alice
Wertheim,
Pickett’s History of Alabama by Albert J. Pickett. I have read this book once a year since college graduation in 1991. (David Ward)
Wolf of the Deep
by Stephen Fox. The personal story of Raphael Semmes and his exciting, dramatic
years as captain of the ship
The Everyman’s Library Edition of History Of My Life by Giacomo Casanova.
Diplomat, priest, flim flam man, politician, gambler,
investor, prisoner, escape artist, tutor, father, and lover, Casanova was
(actually) not more scandalous than most young and talented men in 18th
century
The
Seasons of
The Tin Roof Blowdown by James Lee Burke. As a resident of the
Rhett Butler’s
People by Donald McCaig ended up being quite a
surprising read. The story of Rhett Butler’s childhood and all the things
he did that were not mentioned in Gone
With the Wind made for fascinating reading. I truly loved the book, and
have been recommending it to all my friends. (Laura W.,
A book I hated was What Happened Before He Shot Her by one of my favorite writers, Elizabeth George. Not that I won’t buy her next book, however! (Sunshine Huff)
The Religion by
Tim Willocks. The protagonist, a soldier of fortune,
is an adventurer and arms dealer by trade, and agrees to help a French countess
find her 10 year old son, whom she has never seen, and whose name she
doesn’t know, in the midst of the siege of
The Fifth Woman
by Henning Mankell. If you are a mystery lover and
are looking for something different, Mankell is your
man. His novels are set in and around
The Book Thief by
Markus Zusak. The tale of a German girl during World
War II. Told in mesmerizing fashion by Death himself, the characters shine
brightly and tales of bravery and humanity (even by Hitler’s staunchest
followers) are an everyday occurrence. (Amanda Cullum,
Valley,
Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
is the first two
novels of what Nemirovsky planned to be a series of
five on the topic of the German occupation of
Suddenly They Heard
Footsteps: Storytelling For The Twenty-First Century by Dan Yashinsky. It has great stories about telling stories,
along with great stories. (Madelyn Dinnerstein,
The Year
in Review
First, a true story. Unlike the major TV networks, and the
big city newspapers, and even this very newspaper, we believe that if
you’re going to do a “Year in Review” story you ought to wait
until the whole year is over, just in case something big happens right there at
the very end. So this column is being written at
For Christmas a friend gave us a whole box of fortune cookies, and since there
was no Chinese food in our dining plans for the holidays, we decided we’d
just wait and open our first fortune cookie just before midnight on New
Year’s Eve, just so we’d know what to expect in 2008, and we did,
and here’s what it said, really: “Treat yourself to a good book for
a needed rest and escape.” Now, you may say that’s more an
“advice” cookie that an actual “fortune” cookie, but
still we took it as a sign that perhaps we’re on the right path, and so
we’ve decided to keep on keeping on in the book business, and hope that
all of you will take our cookie’s advice for 2008, and beyond.
And now, a quick look back at 2007. We sold 6,072 separate titles during the
year. That sounds like a lot, and it is, but 3,641 of those titles sold only
one copy each. Our bestselling book was a David Baldacci’s Wish You
Well. We sold 942 copies of that one, but only because several cities chose
it as their Community Read of the Year, and then waited too late to order the
book, and at the last minute had to turn to us to round up as many copies as we
could find, and we found 942 of them, some as far away as Oregon.
Our bestselling nonfiction title was a cookbook, Frank Stitt’s
Southern Table. We found a special buy on that one, and gambled on a very
large purchase, and it paid off, as we sold 311 copies. And here are some other
highlights:
Most Titles Sold, One Author: Kathryn Tucker Windham, 18 titles,
including some audio.
Title Most Fun To Sell: Jaws dropped when we showed folks the
children’s book Gallop! It’s a whole new kind of book. The
pictures move!
Most Disappointing Sales: We loved the PBS series, but we just
couldn’t sell Ken Burns’s companion book The War. Runner-up:
Narnia pop-up book by the usually dependable
master Robert sabuda. Also, even though it made our
Top 5 Bestseller List, Donald McCaig’s Rhett
Butler’s People was not the mega-seller we’d hoped for.
Most Surprisingly Good Sales: Lots of them this year,
including Timeless Landscape Design by Hugh and Mary Palmer Dargan, Wolf of the Deep by Stephen Fox, and Jacob’s
Ladder by Donald McCaig.
National Top 10 Books on Our Top 10 List: Only one, Harry Potter and
The Deathly Hallows.
Best Writer We Discovered. Susan Hill. Not a new writer, but new to us. Complex, contemporary English mysteries.
Our Annual Request: Write the next column for us! Email your Favorite
and Least Favorite Reads of 2007 to capitolbook@knology.net.
All our columns from
1999-2007 are also available. Just click HERE.
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