If you’re hitting the road this Labor Day, the Wall Street Journal recommends bringing along a copy of Rheta Grimsley Johnson’s Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming. Enchanted Evening was featured in Danny Heitman’s Friday article about vacation reading, “A Beached Wail — No Time for That Pile of Books.” Heitman noted that “along with her gift for memorable book titles, Ms. Johnson has a commendable knack for writing stuff brief enough to be savored in a sitting or two.”

Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming is a frank, exhilarating, wise, poignant, and brave memoir from Johnson, an award-winning syndicated columnist. In a warm and down-to-earth voice, Johnson reflects on childhood memories of ritual pre-interstate trips in the family station wagon to young-girl fixations on the Barbie dolls of the title. The book is a perfect read for vacation, whether beachside in the summer or fireside in the winter!

And don’t miss Johnson’s two other eminently readable titles, Poor Man’s Provence: Finding Myself in Cajun Louisiana, about Johnson’s unexpected decision to move to a houseboat on the edge of the Atchafalaya Swamp and what she found there; and her newest, Hank Hung the Moon … and Warmed Our Cold, Cold Hearts, and ode to 1950s and ’60s musical staples, and how they’ve touched Johnson’s and others’ lives.

Enchanted Evening Barbie and the Second Coming is available in hardcover and ebook formats direct from NewSouth Books, Amazon or from your favorite bookstore.

As NewSouth prepares for the October release of journalist Geni Certain’s biography of former Congressman Glen Browder, Professor-Politician, we are proud to release two of Browder’s own books in ebook format: The South’s New Racial Politics: Inside the Race Game of Southern History and Stealth Reconstruction: An Untold Story of Racial Politics in Recent Southern History.

Browder is also an ongoing columnist with the Huffington Post “Politics” section.

As Browder described in his Huffington Post column “The New Race Game of Southern Politics: How Does It Work,” his book The South’s New Racial Politics examines how Southern white and black politicians “participate in a process than can be described as biracial accommodation.” In the book, Browder theorizes that while the Southern political system is still constrained by racial problems, the end result of this “race game” is still progress for the South.

Stealth Reconstruction, written by Browder with Professor Artemesia Stanberry, reveals the “unheroic, quiet, practical, [and] biracial” work conducted by politicians during the Civil Rights Movement, which lead to greater equality and the progress in the Southern political system. The authors suggest that the Civil Rights Movement is often viewed as a “monolithic struggle between heroes and villains, depicted … in black and white”; instead they show how legislators of both races came together to move the country forward.

Geni Certain’s Professor-Politician: The Biography of Alabama Congressman Glen Browder will be available in bookstores in November. In the book, Certain recounts Browder’s journey from Alabama legislator and Secretary of State to his role as US Congressman (not to mention his stint as an Atlanta Journal sportswriter!). Certain looks at Browder’s work at that same time as a professor of political science and how this informed Browder’s politics and his work toward “good government.”

Glen Browder’s The South’s New Racial Politics and Stealth Reconstruction are available in print and ebook formats from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore. You can view an archive of Glen Browder’s columns at the Huffington Post website.

On April 13, the Alabama Historical Association honored NewSouth Books authors Dan Haulman and Mary Ann Neeley with awards acknowledging their scholarship and contribution to state history.

Haulman received the Milo B. Howard award for his article “The Tuskegee Airmen and the ‘Never Lost A Bomber’ Myth,’” published in the January 2011 Alabama Review and then released as an ebook by NewSouth Books. Ed Bridges, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, told The Montgomery Advertiser that Haulman was “an amazing researcher.”

In the introduction to his ebook, Haulman discusses how disproving the Airmen’s perfect record initially seemed controversial to other historians, but they came to understand that by verifying the Airmen’s record, history would be better able to appreciate the Airmen’s accomplishments overall.

Neeley received the Clinton Jackson Coley Award for her book The Works of Matthew Blue, Montgomery’s First Historian. She told the Alabama Historical Association’s Martin Olliff in an interview that she finds Matthew Blue an interesting historical figure because it was only after he lost his influential job as Montgomery postmaster that he began documenting the history of the city — Blue’s loss, in essence, was history’s gain.

The Alabama Review’s Leah Rawls Atkins said Neeley’s revival of Blue’s works, extensively annotated in Neeley’s book, “should be in major research libraries in the nation and included in most of Alabama’s public and academic collections.”

Congratulations to both our authors for their accomplishments.

* Mary Ann Neeley’s The Works of Matthew Blue, Montgomery’s First Historian is available in hardcover from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

Books by Dan Haulman:

* The Tuskegee Airmen and the “Never Lost a Bomber” Myth is available in all major ebook formats from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

* The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949, by Haulman, Joe Caver, and Jerome Ennels, is available in hardcover from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

* Eleven Myths about the Tuskegee Airmen is available in paperback and ebook from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

* What Hollywood Got Right and Wrong about the Tuskegee Airmen in the Great New Movie, Red Tails is available in all major ebook formats from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.