Short Takes

Don't forget:
Our White Sale ends at 12 noon EST, Sunday, September 30.

Recent interviews:
Mort Zachter, author of DOUGH, on NPR.

Riché Richardson, author of BLACK MASCULINITY AND THE U.S. SOUTH on Psychjourney Audio Book Club.

Recent reviews:
PEACHTREE CREEK in Creative Loafing and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

THE RINGING EAR in Rain Taxi: "Offers a consistently strong showcase of Black voices and a compelling and accessible organization, and should persist as an important articulation of the Black experience of the American South . . . The genius of this book and of Cave Canem's importance is obvious."

GOOD OBSERVERS OF NATURE in the Feminist Review.

THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT in Booklist: "Singer’s tremendous debut ... weaves together strands of familial identity, history, and myth to create a fascinating, many-hued narrative fabric."

THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT in Publishers Weekly.

CIRCLING HOME in Booklist: "Lane’s forays took him from a posh country club golf course to the local sewage treatment plant, through an abandoned graveyard, and past a burned-out ironworks. Each locale inspired eloquent and esoteric essays about the archaeological and ecological wonders found beneath his feet. Taken together, his descriptive reports create a painstakingly intricate portrait of the land he lovingly calls home."

DEPTH THEOLOGY in the Modern Review

GEORGIA QUILTS in Southern Living: "It's nice to see what was once dismissed as 'women's work' finally getting it's due . . . GEORGIA QUILTS offers more than quilts. It gives us the women who made them and 200 years of the Georgia in which they lived. It shows that so-called women's work is as much a part of the fabric of our state's heritage as wars and politics. Amen to that."

In the news:
Judson Mitcham, whose latest book is A LITTLE SALVATION, was recently the featured poet on Poetry Daily.

JOHN ASHBERY AND YOU looks at the last twenty years of the mtvU laureate's poetic output.

The Southern Texts Society, whose book series we publish, has a new web site. The most recent volume in the series is MARY TELFAIR TO MARY FEW.

FAVORITE WILDFLOWER WALKS IN GEORGIA gets a nod in this Atlanta Journal-Constitution piece about about wildflowers that bloom in the fall.

Recent awards:
A chapter from Jason Phillips' DIEHARD REBELS will appear in the anthology Best American History Essays 2008. The piece, titled "The Grape Vine Telegraph: Rumors and Confederate Persistence," originally appeared in the Journal of Southern History.

We get blogged:
Recommendation of THE SPIRIT OF ISLAMIC LAW in Islam and Christianity.

Mention of THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN AMERICAN MEMORY in a review of another recent civil rights history on mdot.

Recommendation of WORDS ABOUT PICTURES in One-Minute Book Reviews.

Mention of THE RHETORIC OF EUGENICS IN ANGLO-AMERICAN THOUGHT in The Necromancer.

Who Gets to Be a Millionaire?

Listen to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered this Sunday, September 23, to hear an interview with Mort Zachter, author of DOUGH.

Zachter is a winner of the AWP Creative Nonfiction Award. His memoir centers on a small shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side known in the neighborhood as “the day-old bread store.” It was a bakery where nothing was baked, owned by his two eccentric uncles who referred to their goods as “the merchandise.” Zachter grew up sleeping in the dinette of a leaking Brooklyn tenement. He lived a classic immigrant story—one of a close-knit, working-class family struggling to make it in America. Only they were rich. DOUGH chronicles Zachter's life-altering discovery made at age thirty-six that he was heir to several million dollars his bachelor uncles had secretly amassed in stocks and bonds.

For the interview, NPR host Jacki Lyden went with Zachter to the bakery that defined his family for so many years. They taped the interview inside the small store in an effort to capture the "bakery buzz in the background." NPR producers snapped some pictures while they were there. They will be posted on the NPR website, along with an excerpt from the book, after the interview airs. Check out your local NPR affiliate's web site to find out when Weekend All Things Considered airs in your area.

Images:
Top left: Book jacket for Dough
Bottom left: Uncle Joe and Uncle Harry in their store, 1960s (photo courtesy of the author)
Right: Mort Zachter, photo by David Ticktin

Technorati Tags: npr national public radio

In Memoriam: Edward J. Cashin (1927-2007)

We were saddened to hear that Edward J. Cashin passed away on Saturday, September 8. He was 80 years old. More information can be found in this Associated Press story in the Macon Telegraph.


Cashin, a native of Augusta, was a historian and author of more than thirty books. He had a long career at Augusta State University where he founded the Center for the Study of Georgia History. Cashin's main areas of interest were Georgia and the history of the southern frontier in the 18th century.

The Press published four books by Cashin: LACHLAN McGILLIVRAY, INDIAN TRADER, PATERNALISM IN A SOUTHERN CITY, GOVERNOR HENRY ELLIS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF BRITISH NORTH AMERICA, and THE KING'S RANGER. The Press also recently reissued BERRY BENSON'S CIVIL WAR BOOK, a classic Civil War memoir that was newly edited by Cashin, who also contributed a greatly expanded introduction to the book.

Cashin won numerous awards for his books, including the 1992 Malcolm and Muriel Barrow Bell Award of the Georgia Historical Society for LACHLAN MCGILLIVRAY, INDIAN TRADER and the 1990 Fraunces Tavern Book Award of the American Revolution Round Table for THE KING'S RANGER. He also received the Governor's Award from the Georgia Humanities Council and the 1997 Hugh McCall Award from the Georgia Association of Historians.