See you in 2014!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

We're giving away advance reader copies of BREAKING GROUND! To enter, click on the "Enter to win" button below or look under the giveaways section on Goodreads. Winners will be selected at the end of January. Good luck!

The compelling life's story of a towering champion of higher education, medicine, and accessible health care for all.

"I don't think I really appreciated the man Louis Sullivan is until I read BREAKING GROUND. He is a true American hero, and Barbara and I are proud we have played a small part in his life's journey."--President George H.W. Bush

BREAKING GROUND is not just an autobiography of Dr. Louis W. Sullivan. It is also a history of how the south has changed, as well as an inspirational story for future generations of all backgrounds. Sullivan began his path to becoming the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary as a young boy growing up in Jim Crow south Georgia. He was HHS secretary during the George H. W. Bush administration, and, during that time, he made efforts to push through comprehensive health care reform decades before the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Sullivan’s life—from Morehouse to the White House and his ongoing work with medical students in South Africa—is the embodiment of the hopes and progress that the civil rights movement fought to achieve.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Breaking Ground

by Louis W. Sullivan

Giveaway ends January 31, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Spring 2014 titles announced

The spring 2014 seasonal catalog is now available on our website. It features titles that will be published from February 2014 through August 2014. We have an exciting range of new books in the categories of history, African American studies, international relations, literary & cultural studies, environmental studies, women's studies, art & architecture, food studies, and creative writing.


Highlights include:

• For nearly ten years, John Griswold has been publishing his essays in Inside Higher Ed, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Brevity, Ninth Letter, and Adjunct Advocate, many under the pen name Oronte Churm. His new book, PIRATES YOU DON’T KNOW AND OTHER ADVENTURES IN THE EXAMINED LIFE is a funny, poignant, bittersweet, and sometimes snarky account of everything ranging from creative writing to babies, and from race issues in a university town to crocodiles.


•  Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry’s SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN SAVANNAH is a richly illustrated, accessibly written book modeled on the very successful SLAVERY IN NEW YORK, a volume Harris coedited with Ira Berlin.


• BREAKING GROUND by Dr. Louis W. Sullivan with David Chanoff and featuring a foreword by Ambassador Andrew Young is the compelling life’s story of a towering champion of higher education, medicine, and accessible health care for all. Sullivan was Health and Human Services secretary during the George H. W. Bush administration, and, during that time, he made efforts to push through comprehensive health care reform decades before the Affordable Care Act (ACA).


• Kate Sweeney’s AMERICAN AFTERLIFE is not a grief handbook, comprehensive history, or survey of all death practices in America today. Instead, AMERICAN AFTERLIFE relates the odd, tragic, poignant, and at times even humorous stories of how we “do” death today, in a time and place when there is no one right way to do it. 


• Perhaps the most famous nineteenth-century American that almost no one has heard of, Civil War corporal James Tanner fought at the Second Battle at Manassas, was injured, and lost both of his legs above the knees. He later served as stenographer at Abraham Lincoln's deathbed. AMERICA'S CORPORAL by James Marten is both a biography of James Tanner, as well as a historiography of the Civil War.


• The first in the new The South on Screen series, Tison Pugh’s TRUMAN CAPOTE reveals Capote’s literary works to be not merely coincident to film but integral to their mutual creation, paying keen attention to the ways in which Capote’s identity as a gay southerner influenced his and others’ perceptions of his literature and its adaptations.

Short Takes

Congratulations, E.J. Levy! Her book, LOVE, IN THEORY, is one of the Best Indie Books of 2013 according to Kirkus Reviews.

The Georgia Writers Hall of Fame has announced the 2014 inductees! UGA Press author Mary Hood is one of the three new members. The Press published her short story collection, HOW FAR SHE WENT, in the second year of the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award in 1984, followed by AND VENUS IS BLUE in 2001.

The New York Times Disunion blog recently featured a post on author Ambrose Bierce. Apparently, "Bierce was the only major author to have actually been a front-line soldier in the Civil War." Bierce is the author of THE UNABRIDGED DEVIL'S DICTIONARY, which is available from UGA Press.

Although he had managed to survive the war, Bierce knew, as did most of his comrades, that his experience of “seeing the elephant” had permanently damaged him. As he wrote years later, “When I ask myself what has become of Ambrose Bierce the youth, who fought at Chickamauga, I am bound to answer that he is dead.”
Bierce did, however, use his experiences to write some of the finest short fiction of the later 19th century. Usually autobiographical, these narratives of warfare are typically told from a cynical, world-weary point of view that makes clear its author’s skepticism that anything good resides in the human heart. Because of these stories, as well as his acerbic satire “The Devil’s Dictionary,” he became known as “Bitter Bierce.”

Did you miss the Donald L. Hollowell: Foot Soldier for Equal Justice documentary that aired on WUGA-TV this past Sunday? Or, did you see it and want to watch it again? Be sure to mark your calendar and catch one (or more) of these other showings:
December 21 at 4:00pm
December 23 at 5:00pm
December 24 at 8:00pm
December 27 at 10:00am
December 29 at 2:00pm
December 30 at 4:00pm
January 1 at 12:00pm
While you are at it, be sure to pick up a copy of Maurice C. Daniels' new book, SAVING THE SOUL OF GEORGIA: DONALD L. HOLLOWELL AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS.

Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, author of the forthcoming BREAKING GROUND: MY LIFE IN MEDICINE, argues that the U.S. should continue efforts to strengthen health care in developing countries in a recent op-ed on Nelson Mandela for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Upcoming events
Friday, January 10

THE VIEWING ROOM by Jacquelin Gorman
Location: Johann Fust Community Library, Boca Grande, FL
Description: Talk and signing

Wednesday, January 22

THE CLOUD THAT CONTAINED THE LIGHTNING by Cynthia Lowen
Location: Greenlight Books, Brooklyn, NY
Description: Talk and signing 

Spring 2014 Sneak Peak 5

University of Georgia Press is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Leslie M. Harris and Daina Ramey Berry’s new book, SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN SAVANNAH. The book is scheduled for publication on February 15, 2014, and will be out just in time to celebrate Black History Month 2014. The theme for 2014 focuses on civil rights in America and the great strides that have been made by individuals and groups throughout history. To learn more about Black History Month click here.

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN SAVANNAH is a richly illustrated, accessibly written book modeled on the very successful Slavery in New York, a volume Leslie Harris coedited with Ira Berlin. Here Harris and Daina Ramey Berry have collected a variety of perspectives on slavery, emancipation, and black life in Savannah from the city’s founding to the early twentieth century. Written by leading historians of Savannah, Georgia and the South, the volume includes a mix of longer thematic essays and shorter sidebars focusing on individual people, events, and places.

Tourists from all over the world come to visit Savannah, the state’s oldest city, which has been hailed as a model for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city planning. In fact, during 2011 approximately 12 million people visited the city. Yet, cities such as Savannah hold in their physical structures clues to their early history that have sometimes been overlooked. Bringing together the latest scholarship on one of the most important port cities of the South, this book positions slavery, emancipation, and their aftermath as a central set of events that left no one in Savannah untouched. African Americans in Savannah were central to the creation of the city, and to its political, cultural and economic life. The stories of enslaved workers, slave rebels, religious leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, politicians, and many more, reveal the incredible diversity of experiences among African American Savannahians.

The story of slavery in Savannah may seem to be an outlier, given how strongly most people associate slavery with rural plantations. But as Harris, Berry, and the other contributors point out, urban slavery was instrumental to the slave-based economy of North America. Ports like Savannah served as both an entry point for slaves and as a point of departure for goods produced by slave labor in the hinterlands. Moreover, Savannah’s connection to slavery was not simply abstract. The system of slavery as experienced by African Americans and enforced by whites influenced the very shape of the city, from the building of its infrastructure; the legal system created to support it; and the economic life of the city and its rural surroundings. SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN SAVANNAH restores the urban African American population and the urban context of slavery, Civil War, and emancipation to its rightful place, and it deepens our understanding of the economic, social and political fabric of the U.S. South.

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM IN SAVANNAH is published in cooperation with the Owens-Thomas House, an historic site that is part of Telfair Museums. Telfair Museums, as one of the leading cultural institutions in Savannah, has committed to reinterpreting the social history of all who lived at the Owens-Thomas, free and enslaved, and to fostering knowledge about the city of Savannah, to understand the history of all of the city’s residents. The history of the Owens-Thomas House reveals the multifaceted interracial relationships that were part of life in Savannah.

The authors have released a few other publications and spend most of their time teaching at their respective institutions. Leslie M. Harris is associate professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta. She is the author of In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 and coeditor of Slavery in New York. Daina Ramey Berry is associate professor of history and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is coeditor of Enslaved Women in America: An Encyclopedia.

Keep an eye out for the latest updates for the book from the UGA Press website and put it on your calendar the release date is February 15, 2014.

Short Takes

NPR Books rounds up a list of the 200 titles that stood out in 2013 for its "Guide to 2013's Great Reads." Book critic and author Jane Ciabattari selects Tom Kealey's THIEVES I'VE KNOWN, saying that "Kealey honors these marginal and troubled young Americans with fierce honesty."

WUGA-TV will air the documentary Donald L. Hollowell: Foot Soldier for Equal Justice on December 15, 2013 at 7:00pm. This broadcast coincides with the release of Maurice C. Daniels' new book, SAVING THE SOUL OF GEORGIA: DONALD L. HOLLOWELL AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS.

Atlanta Magazine picks two UGA Press books for its "Top Ten Books of the Year" list. EAT DRINK DELTA is "immensely satisfying" and "unforgettable ramble through the soul of the Mississippi Delta." ISLAND TIME "tells the spellbinding history of Saint Simons Island."

Northeast Georgia Living also has a review of ISLAND TIME in its latest issue:

Jingle Davis has given us a thorough and engaging history of this much-loved Georgia island, and photographer Benjamin Galland brings this unique place to life with his exquisite photographs. . . . The care and depth of knowledge of both Davis and Galland is much in evidence and their insights intuitive. . . . You might think this sounds like another coffee table book to gift to a relative to enjoy for an hour or so and then be laid to rest to collect dust. It is not. . . . It will be hard for a visitor to drive across that causeway ever again and not see the island with a more respectful understanding of its story, and, now vulnerability.

Kate Sweeney has shared on her blog the launch event information for her forthcoming book, AMERICAN AFTERLIFE:

Mark your calendar for Friday, March 14th at 7:30 pm, and come on down to Manual’s Tavern in Atlanta for live music, raconteurs from Carapace, Atlanta’s amazing storytelling outfit; and more. A Capella Books will be selling brand-spankin’ new copies of AMERICAN AFTERLIFE.

Make sure to attend!

Spring 2014 Sneak Peak 4

We were all saddened to hear of Nelson Mandela's passing last week. At the age of 95, Mandela lived a long life that impacted many, both in South Africa and the rest of the world. In a televised address Thursday night, President Jacob Zuma said, "Our nation has lost its greatest son." The video of the address is available here from the New York Times. On the Nelson Mandela Foundation website, Mandela's biography is summed up like this: "Nelson Mandela never wavered in his devotion to democracy, equality and learning. Despite terrible provocation, he never answered racism with racism. His life has been an inspiration to all who are oppressed and deprived, to all who are opposed to oppression and deprivation."

In her forthcoming book, RETHINKING THE SOUTH AFRICAN CRISIS: NATIONALISM, POPULISM, HEGEMONY, Gillian Hart's insightful study of the ongoing social, political, and economic struggles in post-apartheid South Africa gives much attention to Mandela and his efforts.

Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become an extreme yet unexceptional embodiment of forces at play in many other regions of the world: intensifying inequality alongside "wageless life," proliferating forms of protest and populist politics that move in different directions, and official efforts at containment ranging from liberal interventions targeting specific populations to increasingly common police brutality.

RETHINKING THE SOUTH AFRICAN CRISIS revisits long-standing debates to shed new light on the transition from apartheid. Drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnographic research, Hart argues that local government has become the key site of contradictions. Local practices, conflicts, and struggles in the arenas of everyday life feed into and are shaped by simultaneous processes of de-nationalization and re-nationalization. Together they are key to understanding the erosion of African National Congress hegemony and the proliferation of populist politics.

The problem, however, with the question of ‘how to move beyond Mandela without becoming [Robert] Mugabe’ is who is to decide where ‘politics proper’ begins, and what form will it take. Clearly, there has been considerable movement beyond Mandela’s brand of liberalism, but it has gone in different directions. A key implication of taking passive revolution seriously is that any political strategy to confront the brutalities of the present and construct a different future has to begin with actually existing practices and meanings in the arenas of everyday life, while also stretching out to forge relations and connections with forces at play elsewhere.
(excerpt from RETHINKING THE SOUTH AFRICAN CRISIS)

This book provides an innovative analysis of the ongoing, unstable, and unresolved crisis in South Africa today. It also suggests how Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, adapted and translated for present circumstances with the help of Martinique-born French psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon, can do useful analytical and political work in South Africa and beyond. 

Short Takes

The Slate Book Review names Frank X Walker's TURN ME LOOSE as one of the ten Best Books Poetry Books of 2013. "Walker’s ability to create a human voice of inhumanity—and to place it alongside other voices that struggle to remain human in the face of such devastation—revitalizes our history at a time when too many want us to live as though it were merely a thing of the past."

The Day has an article about Jacquelin Gorman and her new short story collection, THE VIEWING ROOM. In the article, Wally Lamb praises Gorman and THE VIEWING ROOM, saying:

I loved working with Jacquelin Gorman in the Praiano writers' group and was blown away when I read her unforgettable story collection, THE VIEWING ROOM. How did she do it? How did Jackie craft fiction about death and dying that is triumphantly life-affirming? I marvel at her achievement and hope that THE VIEWING ROOM finds the wide audience it deserves.

Publishers Weekly describes the poems in THE CLOUD THAT CONTAINED THE LIGHTNING as being "expertly crafted and chiseled to a brittle, often stinging essence. . . . Reading this book against the contemporary backdrop of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster and worries about mass destruction falling into the wrong hands gives the poems a deep resonance."

THE SMALL HEART OF THINGS is "remarkable," according to ForeWord. THE SMALL HEART OF THINGS is number four in ForeWord's list of top ten university press picks. Hoffman is "an intensely focused, curious, tireless, supremely gifted writer."

The Rumpus also praises THE SMALL HEART OF THINGS:

The book’s gift is its ability to capture a moment, to let the particulars contain the whole. If being present is the ultimate end, then it’s appropriate to stay lost in the forest. The focus of each essay is on the observed, not the observer. This isn’t a re-telling but a telling. And that’s Hoffman’s knack. He’s able to create a moment that feels like one. . . . THE SMALL HEART OF THINGS is a celebration of spaces and the hidden, miraculous lives within them, but it’s a quiet celebration, the pause after you open a gift, truly surprised, and inhabit a speechless moment.

"PROPERTIES OF VIOLENCE is an excellent example of good scholarship. . . . Overall, Correia did an excellent job. Geographers, historians, and land use scholars with a focus on New Mexico and/or the American Southwest will find much to get excited about in this book. Perhaps the few ethical land and water attorneys, as well as the numerous unethical ones, will also find the book helpful in their practices."—Journal of Historical Geography

Terrain.org describes the strengths of THE INVISIBLES author Hugh Sheehy as "a combination of plotting and prose styling. . . . It’s a complicated, character-based tale, much more than a simple whodunit. What underlies the plotting is a well-crafted prose, a styling that feels, for the most part, crafted with the care a carpenter’s chisel: a word here, a word there, shaving by shaving until we’re just plumb."

The ideas of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington may have differed, but each made key contributions to the pan-Africanist project. In a recent interview on KPFA's "Against the Grain," IN SEARCH OF BRIGHTEST AFRICA author Jeannette Eileen Jones describes how these thinkers and others viewed Africa, and what role they saw blacks in the West playing in Africa's liberation and advancement. Also, Davarian Baldwin discusses the volume in which Jones's essay appears. Listen to the interview here.  

Congratulations, Marc Sommers! His book, STUCK, received an Honorable Mention award for the Bethwell A. Ogot Book Prize from the African Studies Association, which ended its assessment of the book in the annual meeting program as follows: "This is an incisive, eloquent and pioneering work on Rwanda's youth that shows them as a demographic majority, but unvalued and marginalized."

In this excerpt of his speech "U.S. Diplomacy in the Age of Obama," Ronald Angelo Johnson uses research findings from his forthcoming book DIPLOMACY IN BLACK AND WHITE to discuss exceptional early American diplomacy.

Toasting to the 80th Anniversary of Prohibition’s Repeal

Taking effect on January 17, 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment, or National Prohibition Act, banned the sale of alcohol in the United States for well over a decade. Additionally, it introduced penalties for the production and distribution of the alcoholic substances. Contrary to its intention, the act led to much criminal activity with the illegal production of alcoholic beverages, numerous speakeasies, as well as much gangland violence. Prohibition came to an end with the ratification of the 21st Amendment on December 5, 1933. With that, we celebrate the 80th year anniversary of the prohibition repeal today. Check out more details and pictures of the American prohibition at the LIFE website.

Dating back to as early as 1821, University of Georgia Press author Lee L Willis documents the prohibition experience for those in the south in his book SOUTHERN PROHIBITION. The book examines political culture and reform through the evolving temperance and prohibition movements in Middle Florida. Scholars have long held that liquor reform was largely a northern and mid-Atlantic phe-nomenon before the Civil War. Willis takes a close look at the Florida plantation belt to reveal that the campaign against alcohol had a dramatic impact on public life in this portion of the South as early as the 1840s.

To celebrate national Repeal Day, check out the following drink recipes from University of Georgia Press author and veteran food journalist Susan Puckett. In EAT DRINK DELTA, Puckett (with photographs by Delta resident Langdon Clay) reveals a region shaped by slavery, civil rights, amazing wealth, abject deprivation, the Civil War, a flood of biblical proportions, and—above all—an overarching urge to get down and party with a full table and an open bar. Throughout the pages, she shares a myriad of delicious mixed drinks from across the southern United States.

Compliments of the Peabody Memphis Grand Lobby Bar in Memphis, Tenn., the drinks dubbed Peabody Hotel Blue Suede Shoes Martini and The Presbyterian are certainly worth writing home about.

Recipes from Eat Drink Delta

The Germantown Commissary also serves a sweet mixed drink known as the Pink Panty Pull-Downs.

Recipe from Eat Drink Delta

Earlier this morning, TIME posted an article entitled 80 Reasons Why Drinking Alcohol is Great. Some of our favorites include having a celebration, beneficial health reasons, and social bonding. For whatever reason you may chose, remember to be safe and responsible. Lastly, need inspiration on choosing a good drink? Be sure to check out more cookbooks from the University of Georgia Press on our website.

Need a new book bag? We "totes" have you covered!

Before the UGA Press Tote, you either carried your books in bulky boxes, flimsy plastic bags, or in large, loose stacks:

With the UGA Press Tote, you will look stylish, and your arms will thank you.

To order your very own UGA Press Tote, simply visit our website and add one (or more) to your shopping cart. You will be sure to reuse this bag over and over to carry books, groceries, homework, etc. Pick up one today for only $10!

 

• Made of heavy black cotton cloth
• Printed in white on one side
• Measures 18" x 14.5" x 3"
• 25" triple-stitched cotton carrying straps