3 comments about Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama.

1. Dr. Jackson has put together a great all-around volume on four of the major rivers in Alabama. The Alabma River system played a major role in the settlement and development of the territory and the state. This is a highly readable volume that should be in the library of those interested in Alabama history and culture. Perhaps the best volume on Alabama that I have read.



2. This well-written book is a superb rendering of history and southern landscapes. Mr. Jackson synthesizes a vast amount of material in a seamless narrative that flows as strong and unimpeded as Alabama's once wild rivers. The chapters on frontier Alabama are especially good. You come away from this fine work with a keener sense of loss but also with a deeper understanding of this place we call the South, and you want to fight to help save and restore the best of it.



3. I learned to swim in the Cahaba River in the 60's, what wonderful childhood memories I have from that river. Dr. Jackson has written an interesting, readable history of the Alabama and Coosa Rivers. However, very little text is given to the Tallapoosa, and even less to the Cahaba. That said, I still enjoyed the book and I agree with the other reviews. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Alabama history.

No comments about Marriage & Deaths Notices from Barbour and Henry Counties, Alabama Newspapers 1846-1890.

3 comments about Early Settlers of Alabama: With Notes & Genealogies Parts 1 & 2.

1. This book is a valuable resource for anyone doing research on the lives and culture of early Alabamians up until the late 1800s. Unfortunately, the publisher of this edition used an incredibly tiny font size - the smallest that I have seen other than that on a legal document - making the text almost impossible to read without some type of magnifying device. Even with strong light and eye glasses, the words soon begin to blur and the reader quickly tires from the effort. If the costlier editions use a more readable font, I'd advise spending the extra money, thereby preserving the reader's eyes and good nature.



2. Great for searching of ancestors. Book is well made, arrived on time in new condition. Very pleased.



3. The print is very small, as other reviews have noted. However, there is nice detail about the families covered. For relatives of these early settlers, this is a valuable reference for exploring the family tree.

No comments about Historic Indian Towns in Alabama, 1540-1838.

No comments about Hanson, Henson, Hinson, Hynson: And Allied Family Names : Early Records of the Southeast United States (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, & Mississippi).

No comments about Fort Toulouse: The French Outpost at the Alabamas on the Coosa (Library Alabama Classics).

No comments about Alabama and Mississippi Connections.

1 comments about Researching African American Genealogy in Alabama.

1. This genealogy was well worth the price, actually a bargin. The information was indept and accurate. The seller was swift with the product.

3 comments about Tracing Your Alabama Past.

1. This book is great for the true researcher.
   It gives the years in which each County conatins what records which will save a lot of phone calls & trips.
   It refers to other wonderful books that one can get to trace something inparticular. It also refers to finding Alabama research in other States which I found most helpful.



2. Awesome book with tons of information.
   This book lists numerous books, areas of research, where and how to search Alabama records.
   This book will save you alot of leg work. Tells how and where to look for Alabama info. A must have if you are a serious Alabama reasearcher.



3. This is an excellent resource for anybody intending to do genealogical research for Alabama roots. Complete guide to finding resources.

5 comments about Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

1. Let us Now Praise Famous Men, in all its poetry and prose, reminds me of an epic, like the Hindu Mahabharata or Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The lyrical narrative reveals just as much, if not more about Agee, than his subjects. His writing style excludes his subjects as readers.
   
   His prose, which tends to be lofty and cerebral, is also beautiful and brilliant. But, I often wondered, who he was
   writing for? The New Yorker audience? The distance in his observations often left me feeling cold. I imagine these hardworking sharecroppers exhibiting some joy, some evidence of warmth, of hope. But I had difficulty finding it in Agee's voice.
   
   The length of Agee's sentences and paragraphs were long, each containing an entire scene, and I labored through them, hoping sleep would not steal me from a passage I might not finish. It was as though Agee too, was afraid sleep would come and steal him from his mission, and so kept hacking away at each sentence, adding commas and colons and semi-colons, lingering his thoughts across the page.
   
   Whatever level of consciousness Agee existed, I could not hang with him for any more than a couple of sentences, as I would fall off the page and have to find my way back into the scene. Where was I? You get the picture...
   
   Agee also uses parenthesis and colons, often not giving his parenthesis a mate: (This struck me as rather unusual and often, cold and detached--more like a voyeur. Did he fabricate his own method of communication using punctuation or was this being done elsewhere at the time? I felt left out of his thoughts when he did this, like when two people are communicating via sign language and you can't make out a word they're saying. Was he doing this in a way to urge us to "think," to stretch beyond the ordinary conventions and try something on that is foreign and unfamiliar, like his subjects and their hardship?



2. So many words written about this wonderful evocation of rural hardship, need I add more. A dab of Whitmanesque enthusiasm, a nother of Joycean stream of cosciousness(replete with a'Molly Bloom' sense of 'yea saying' in the final paragraph) There's a poignancy to the descriptive powers of the author that beckons the photos. It's as if the prints of the day's photography had arrived and Agee had paused over them before committing his pen to his diary. Regrettably, the photo section of my volume too easily broke from the spine of the book on opening it for the first time. However good these photos are, in a sense, they are made subsidiary to the marvels of the written word, demonstrating the power of an awesomely equipped author over the visual artist. He rambles, he meditates, he anguishes over his imposition as outsider author,and its this close to the bone marriage of inspection to introspection which will take hold of a suitably sympathetic reader until the book's final breath(check the ruminations on the patterns of a cross-cut saw on woodgrain on p 128. Admittedly there are ethical questions regarding this anthropological enterprise, but he chooses to absolve his anguish about them by raphsodising and elevating the stricken mood of the place and the people; canononizing them in ways the photos never reach for. This is accomplished by bringing an attentiveness to every scent and scratch in such tedious detail that no casual user or rural occupant would contemplate. Such slumming in the poverty zone would rankle political correctness these days, especially given the supple muscle of enriched vocabulary far beyond the comprehension and scope of his subjects. But, in literary terms, if p.c were to censor such a voice, all of us would be impoverished.



3. Yes, their assignment was to document depression era sharecroppers, but that's not why you should read it. You should read it because James Agee, uniquely in my experience, gets drunk on American language the same way the Delphic sibyl got drunk on methane and babbled worship worthy Greek. I first fell in love with him through Barber's setting of Knoxville, Summer 1915, then I read his posthumous novel (which won him the Pulitzer) A Death in the Family. No other American writer writes like this. It is seductive, it is teasing, it s sometimes so convoluted and knotted it gives Henry James AND William Faulkner a run for their money. But in the end, the poetry blazes with a fierceness and an honest that makes me forget to breathe. Many reviewers refer to what they felt the book was trying to get them to do, as if it were, somehow, coercive. I just hear the great poet and the great poetry of Knoxville, Summer of 1915 coming, twenty years away, with such a deafening roar that I'm glad I'm alive, if only for the privilege of dying in the presence of such American greatness.



4. Other reviewers have done a fine job describing this book. It is an often difficult (for several reasons) but I think important text that will be enjoyed by fans of history, sociology, literature, or art.
   
   I wanted to suggest two sites that have additional information that readers may enjoy and find valuable:
   The first is a 2005 article from Fortune (The Most Famous Story We Never Told) that follows up with Charles Burroughs (Burt Gudger)and Laura Minnie Lee Tengle (Flora Merry Lee Ricketts). It sheds some light on how the families perceived the assignment and book.
   The second is the Library of Congress FSA-OWI collection ([...]) from which Evans's photographs are taken. Do a search on Hale County, AL and you'll find several dozen photos of the families including more candids and more smiles.



5. When I was in university in the 1960s for about year I carried this book around in my back pocket, being whimsically obnoxious to my friends by pulling it out and reading from it. For me these reviews are about the confusion about the place of this book in literature (a confusion which is correctly noted by these thoughtful reviewers) but I think they will make more sense if we quote Agee himself on his book:
   
   "It is simply an effort to use words in such a way that they will tell as much as I want to and can make them tell of a thing which has happened and which, of course, you have no other way of knowing. It is in some degree worth your knowing what you can, not because you have any interest in me but simply as the small part it is of human experience in general. It is one way of telling the truth: the only way possible of telling the kind of truth I am here most interested to tell."
   
   Like Finnegans Wake, this book is a never ending adventure in itself.