Loretta Gillespie of The Decatur Daily has reviewed Poor Man’s Provence, popular syndicated columnist and NewSouth author Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s account of her life in Cajun Louisiana. Gillespie describes Johnson’s storytelling as “both humorous and heartwarming” and praises Johnson’s evocation of the sights, sounds, and “colorful characters” that pepper this text. Gillespie, too, notes the honest quality of Johnson’s narrative.

In the article, Gillespie writes that ”[Johnson] doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that there is much to be improved on in her beloved Henderson, but rather tells the good with the bad, and professes to have learned more about herself than she has about her Cajun friends. She counts it as a privilege to live among them.” Gillespie concludes, “This is a wonderful book, told by a master storyteller, in a manner as down to earth as the people she writes about.”

Read the full review at the Decatur Daily website. Loretta Gillespie’s website is gillespiegardens.blogspot.com.

Poor Man’s Provence is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite online and local booksellers.

NewSouth author Warren Trest and former Alabama Governor John Patterson were featured on the Tapestry radio program on May 29, 2008. They spoke about Trest’s new biography of Patterson Nobody But the People: The Life and Times of Alabama’s Youngest Governor which one reviewer calls “a thoroughly readable and fair-minded account of John Patterson’s career, which was one of the most important in Alabama’s recent history.”

In the interview, Trest describes Patterson’s father, noting that “there was no more principled man than Albert Patterson.” Indeed, Trest focuses in the biography on Albert Patterson’s death as the turning point in both the political and personal life of the former governor.

Also in the interview, Patterson discusses the political and social climate in regards to public school segregation into which he stepped as a political candidate. Moreover, Patterson reflects on his own civil rights record — what he considers to be the greatest failure of his political tenure: “I believe that I was in a position to really do something to bring the black community into the political process to really do something to bring the black community into the political process and by registering people to vote. I believe that I could have done that and I regret very much that I didn’t do that.” Patterson goes on to assert, “If you get the power to vote in the hands of the people, everything else comes along.”

Listen to the full interview at the Tapestry website.

Nobody But the People: The Life and Times of Alabama’s Youngest Governor is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.

One Man’s Lincoln, a one-act, one-man play by NewSouth author Wade Hall is now playing at the Kentucky Repertory Theatre in Horse Cave, Kentucky. One Man’s Lincoln is based on Abraham Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, a biography co-authored by Lincoln’s long-time law partner Billy Henderson shortly after Lincoln’s assassination; the play is told from Henderson’s perspective. The production is being sponsored by the Kentucky Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission as a part of the state’s two-year celebration of the venerated president and will run shows in both 2008 and 2009.

The stage version of Wade Hall’s book Conecuh People is also presented at the Red Door Theater in Union Springs, Alabama, the last weekend in April and the first weekend in May each year. Union Springs offers “Conecuh People … The Experience,” which includes tours, an art exhibit, dinner, and the play, and was chosen as one of the 50 ‘Must See” events by the Alabama Bureau of Tourism & Travel in 2007.

Just as Wade’s book Conecuh People presents an intimate collection of oral history interviews that captures the lives of the residents of Bullock County, Alabama, the play Conecuh People tells of one boy’s coming of age in 1950s Alabama, surrounded by those same residents profiled in the book.

Wade Hall, a retired professor of English, has taught at colleges and universities in Florida and Kentucky and is the author of many books, monographs, poems, and plays about the South and its people. A native of Union Springs, Alabama, he holds degrees from Troy State University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Illinois. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky.

Conecuh People is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.

The Southern Political Report has posted an excerpt of Nobody But The People: The Life and Times of Alabama’s Youngest Governor, Warren Trest’s authorized biography of former Alabama Governor John Patterson. The excerpt recounts the murder of Patterson’s father, attorney Albert Patterson, an event that spurred John Patterson into politics and ultimately to the governorship.

Read the entire excerpt on the Southern Political Report website.

The Washington, D.C.-based Southern Political Report has examined government and political affairs news for thirty years in thirteen states, including Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, and Louisiana.

Nobody But The People: The Life and Times of Alabama’s Youngest Governor is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite online or local book retailer.

Calvin Kytle, author of the Depression-era novel Like a Tree, died June 5, 2008; he was 88.

Kytle was also the author of the young-adult biography Gandhi, Soldier of Nonviolence and Who Runs Georgia? with Congressman James Mackay. He founded Seven Locks Press in 1978, publishing authors including Bill Moyers. He worked as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Calhoun, Ga., Times, as well as an executive for Nationwide Insurance company. Kyle served as deputy director of the US Community Relations Service, created by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, from 1964-1965.

Kytle released his first novel, Like a Tree, at age 87. Like a Tree tells the story of the Krueger family, and how they survived the spirit-breaking years of the 1930s Depression. Foremost among the Krugers is Douglas, who struggles with mental illness throughout his life. Kytle paralleled Douglas’s achievements and setbacks with that of the country’s, fully demonstrating how the fate of the United States and the lives of its people are intertwined.

Like a Tree takes as its focus the South’s often-overlooked white liberal minority, which worked quietly and underground fighting prejudice, segregation, and ignorance. The novel stands as a testament to the perseverance, love, good will, and the fortitude of ordinary human beings. Vernon Jordan called Like a Tree “a sweeping, elegantly crafted story that explores Atlanta’s and the South’s complex racial and social past.”

Calvin Kytle was married for more than sixty years to the former Elizabeth Larisey, also an author. They retired to Carolina Meadows retirement community in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1991.

Like a Tree is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.

Happy Birthday, Ms. Windham! NewSouth joins the over two-hundred people who gathered last Sunday, June 1, at the Selma Public Library in wishing Kathryn Tucker Windham a happy ninetieth birthday. Guests at the library serenaded Alabama’s favorite storyteller with the sound of comb music, played with a comb and wax paper.

As Ms. Windham described, “I’m a great believer in laughter. That’s why I think these comb concerts work, because they make people laugh.”

Click to watch a video of Kathryn Tucker Windham’s birthday party courtesy of the Montgomery Advertiser.

Kathryn Tucker Windham is one of America’s best-loved storytellers. She began writing as one of the first women daily newspaper reporters in Alabama. After a successful career as a journalist, she turned to writing books of ghost stories and folklore. She remains one of the most popular performers at national storytelling festivals and has been a featured commentator on National Public Radio and Alabama Public Radio. She lives in Selma, Alabama.

Ms. Windham’s Alabama, One Big Front Porch, re-released by NewSouth in 2007, is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite local or online book retailer.

Poet David Rigsbee offered this remembrance of Southern novelist and poet George Garrett, who died at the end of May 2008, at 78.

A poet of Jonsonian inclinations—which is to say, classical (in form), sardonic, epigrammatic, and academic (in the best sense), George Garrett found an itinerant sophistication and wordliness sometimes inadequate for coming to terms with the world’s savvy indifference to the characteristics he valued most: sympathy, tenderness, wit, public responsibility, and the sanctity of private passion. But his best poems succeed and are most humanly appealing when, as was not infrequently the case, the most gracious moments were scaled back by modest and witty admissions of his own shortcomings. As a device, being in-the-know serves not only as check against the grandiosity that commonly shadows our ideals, it also configures the speaker in such a way that we stand to calibrate the truth of his expressions against a known measure.

Garrett created an ambient sympathy through the revelation of imperfection, and this creation in turn modeled a larger sympathy—one of his cornerstone themes. Moreover, because the speaker allowed the reader to have something on him, he relinquished the right to put on the kind of rhetorical moves that tempt lesser poets to dispense with the spade work of making meaning. For instance, in “Luck’s Shining Child,” the poet-teacher decompresses both himself and his pedagogy:

When I cross the gravel parking lot
one foot winces

and I have to hop along on the other.
My students believe I am trying
to prove something.

They think I’m being a symbol of
dichotomy, duality, double-dealing,
yin and yang.

I am hopping because it hurts.
Because there is a hole in my shoe.

Of couse the irony is that literature, including this poem, often is a kind of double-dealing, but the further point is that misuse of language, whether via rhetoric or any other linguistic means, was never a right in the first place, particularly for poets. It can never by conferred, accepted, or for that matter, usurped—as a result of which language acquires a sanctity like that of life itself.

There are poets of language and poets of disposition. Garrett’s strength lay in the fact that he often seemed one at the moment when he was most being the other. This trick made him the most Elizabethan of southern poets, and it should come as no surprise that he wrote three best-selling novels about the period, The Death of the Fox (1971), about poet and courtier Sir Walter Ralegh, The Succession, about Elizabeth I (1983), and Entered from the Sun (1990), about the death of poet and playwright Christopher Marlow. Elizabethan richness and the attraction of such a close involvement with prosodic variety—as symbolic of diminishing, but still recoverable (if only quotational or elegiac) harmonies, allowed Garrett to create expectations of fullness and presence that ran counter to postmodern discoveries of emptiness and absence in the same poetic culture.

Interestingly, while circling the English language’s high historical moment by means of its poets (one—Ralegh—a consummate man of letters and the world) and declaring by example his own affiliation with the sympathies and communitarianism created by such an intensity of shared language awareness, Garrett declined to incorporate Shakespeare within this pantheon. In fairness, it should be said that the missing center is less likely to be the postmodernist’s blind spot, aporia, or missing center, than the (always) final destination of a gradus ad parnassum.

David Rigsbee’s poetry collection The Red Tower is forthcoming from NewSouth Books.

Darrell Snodgrass of Checking on the Arts, a WKNO radio program, interviewed NewSouth Books Editor-in-Chief Randall Williams about the memoir Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom. Together, Snodgrass and Williams examine the book and its many facets, from birth of Louis Hughes into slavery in Virginia, to his escape from slavery and career as a nurse. Williams remarks that he’s “published close to three-hundred books now … and I think this is one of the best we’ve ever published … It will open a lot of peoples’ eyes to the realities of what slavery was like.”

Thirty Years a Slave adds to a small but growing number of available slave narratives. “There are the few celebrated [slave narratives] like Frederick Douglas,” Williams notes, “but [Hughes] was an unknown figure, and he gives us this inside look at what the plantation culture and the slave culture was like.”

Lisen to the full interview on the NewSouth Books website.

Hailed by Snodgrass as a “remarkably compelling” narrative, Louis Hughes autobiography Thirty Years a Slave tells in astonishingly vivid detail the fascinating story of slavery in the last decades of the antebellum South from the perspective of a self-educated slave. Hughes moves his readers as he tells about his five attempts at escape, about the time he stood by while watching his wife whipped mercilessly, and the joyous reunion with his brother whom he had not seen since they were slave children in Virginia.

Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, as well as your favorite online and retail booksellers.

Ruth Johnson, wife of Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., died at age 88 Sunday in Montgomery, Alabama. A native of Winston County, Mrs. Johnson attended Haleyville High School, graduated from the University of Alabama and received her Master’s Degree in Education from Alabama State University. She worked as a teacher and librarian at a junior high school and joined the U.S. Navy WAVES during World War II.

Known by many as her husband’s “quiet source of strength,” Mrs. Johnson was described as a woman of character and integrity, having rooted herself in her mother’s teachings. In Frank Sikora’s biography The Judge: The Life and Opinions of Alabama’s Frank M. Johnson, Jr., Mrs. Johnson recalled:

When I was a child, we were very poor. We worried about making the rent payment. During the Depression my mother told us … that if anybody came to the house looking for something to eat, that we were to feed them. And she told us to treat the Negroes the same as the whites. I’ll never forget what she told us one day. She said, “You’re not any better than anyone else. But you’re just as good.” I never forgot that.

Ruth Johnson will be buried next to her husband, Frank Johnson, at Winston Memorial Cemetery in Haleyville. Graveside services are scheduled for 2:00 p.m. Thursday, May 30.

Sikora’s The Judge tells the story of Federal Judge Frank Minis Johnson, Jr., and his crucial role in the success of the Civil Rights Movement via his decisions in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, school desegregation, the Selma-to-Montgomery march, and the Ku Klux Klan conspiracy case in the night rider slaying of Viola Liuzzo. From The Judge:

There has been much said about the role Frank Johnson played in the Civil Rights Movement. In the Civil War, African American slaves were set free by soldiers’ blood. In the Civil Rights Movement, the great-great-grandchildren of slaves were granted the full freedoms of citizenship in large measure by a battery of southern federal judges who wrote opinions ending state-imposed segregation. Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., of Alabama was foremost among them.

Composed largely of direct quotes from Johnson, The Judge is almost autobiographical, and is a must-read for anyone interested in the key judicial decisions made during the Civil Rights Movement.

The Judge is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, as well as your favorite online and retail booksellers.

The Birmingham News has published an editorial by Ibrahim Fawal, author of the award-winning novel On the Hills of God, in their May 18, 2008 edition.

In his editorial, Fawal discusses the displacement of approximately 2.5 million Palestinians by Israeli forces following the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. He examines the controversial settlements built by Israelis in the West Bank, and also the wall erected in Bethlehem. In addition, Fawal touches on his own experiences following the Second World War.

From the editorial:

I was 15 years old in 1948, and not a day goes by that I do not remember the tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees streaming into my hometown of Ramallah, which did not become part of the new Israeli state. The woman who later became my wife, rose Rahib, fled her home in Lydda as a 6-year-old girl. Rose and her family walked in the stifling heat some 30 miles to Ramallah. Her father had been successful in the trucking business and had built his family a fine home. But Israeli soldiers came, stuck guns in their faces and asked the out of that home, saying “go to Abdullah,” meaning to Jordan, which was then ruled by King Abdullah.

… Perhaps it is because of the progress I have seen in the half-century I have lived in Birmingham—a city whose history is so deeply rooted in the civil rights movement—that I am prepared to look forward to a brighter future in which Jews and Palestinians can live side by side as equals. I remain convinced that if Americans truly understood what the Palestinian people have endured at the hands of Israel - in 1948, in 1967 and today - they would strongly disapprove of their government’s financial and diplomatic support of Israel’s systematic discrimination and oppression of Palestinians.

The words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. echo powerfully for me: “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience. And that will be a day not of the white man, not of the black man. That will be the day of man as man.”

Click to read the entire editorial at the Birmingham News.

On the Hills of God Fawal tells the story of a seventeen-year-old Palestinian boy, Yousif Safi, whose life is turned upside down with the founding of Israel in 1947. As the future of Palestine begins to look bleak, Yousif is frustrated by his fellow Arabs’ inability to thwart the Zionist encroachment and by his own inability to prevent the impending marriage of his beloved Salwa to an older suitor chosen by her parents. Despite the monumental odds against him, Yousif vows to win back both his loves—Salwa and Palestine—and create his world anew.

On the Hills of God is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, as well as your favorite online and retail booksellers.