77 books like Land of the South

Much of this book by two psychologists covers familiar ground and some may find their explanation for what they found unpersuasive, but get this: When they brought white male undergraduates into the laboratory on a pretext and called them "asshole," Northern subjects laughed it off or ignored it, but Southern ones bristled. Subsequent tests showed that the Southerners had heightened blood levels of stress-related hormones and testosterone, but the Northerners did not. Moving the study of the South’s “culture of violence” to the physiological level was a remarkable achievement, but hardly anyone seems to have noticed.

This magnificent history of the South’s landscape, an unexpected one-off from a historian of military medicine, looks at how humans have shaped the Southern land and vice versa. It debunks the romantic view of pre-Columbian Indians as “natural ecologists” living in harmony with nature, showing how they radically altered their environment by hunting and burning. Europeans were even more exploitative and brought with them diseases that loved their new home. Later developments like flood control, wildlife protection, and anti-pollution measures have had profound and sometimes unanticipated consequences. The book is richly detailed and unusually well-written—not surprising, since Cowdrey has also written award-winning science fiction and fantasy. 

Smith, professor of communications at the University of Arkansas, examines the stories that Southerners have told about themselves—the “myths” of the South. The Old South/Lost Cause/New South myths “controlled Southern culture and Southern rhetoric for one hundred fifty years,” he argues, but by the mid-twentieth century, the strain between myth and reality finally became too great and “a period of mythic confusion,” ensued. By the 1970s, however, Southern artists, scholars, journalists, politicians, and preachers—both Black and white—had forged a new myth, based on the themes of distinctiveness, racial civility, and community. When Smith wrote, he was confident that there will always be some myth of the South, that it won’t become a mere quadrant of the U.S. with a "dysfunctional amythic culture." We shall see.

My grandfather hunted squirrels to put in the stew pot, raised turnips and mustard greens, and shared all that he had with family and neighbors. Joe Gray Taylor’s book takes us back to the beginnings of the cuisine and hospitality of the American South where folks made the most of the natural environment and its riches. This book also describes the way people “visited” in the South, sometimes staying with relatives or friends for weeks or months on end, the hosts accepting them naturally, adding places at the table. Taylor covers Southern hospitality from the days of the frontier through the antebellum and Civil War years and Reconstruction, including the richest and the most impoverished populations, reminding me that I myself am just one generation removed from living off the land.

I love this book for many reasons—its rural Southern setting, its lawyer/judge protagonist Deborah Knott, its twisty mystery. But I was particularly intrigued when author Margaret Maron told me that the spark for the book was a real unsolved murder near her North Carolina home. I wrote about the real case when it was finally solved in Triangle True Crime, but Margaret’s version of what might have happened is so much more interesting.

The Great Santini is a biography/memoir of author Patrick Conroy’s father, a Marine pilot – I recommend this book because I think it is such an accurate illustration of military family life and life with a career military man. Especially accurate to me are the struggles it illustrates between husband and wife and father and children. For me, too, it was an interesting coincidence that I substitute taught at the same school in North Carolina (though a different decade) as the author attended as a child when his father was stationed at MCAS Cherry Point.

In its ambition and sweep across time and political upheavals as well as musical styles, this book may have been the closest thing I had to a model for my book.

Part musical memoir and part capsule history of the American South’s era of integration, Dixie Lullaby was written by longtime music journalist Mark Kemp – a man who grew up in Asheboro, North Carolina in the 1960s and ’70s and has the Lynyrd Skynyrd and Allman Brothers records to prove it.

In her Seaside Café Mysteries, Bree Baker has conjured a thoroughly modern tea shop with Surf, Sand, and Tea, a business located in an old Victorian home on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Everly Swan (fun name!) has lots of varieties of iced tea on offer, and two elderly aunts bring some well-plotted family history into the mix. This series gives a modern-day spin to the tearoom enterprise, and this seven-book series ended far too soon for my taste.

As a leader in autobiographical fiction, Wolfe writes of a large family dominated by an alcoholic, authoritarian father who is highly dramatic in words and behavior.

His wife’s determination to survive by running a boarding house and investing in real estate leaves little time for parental attention to the needs of their children.

While most grow to repeat the dysfunctional family habits that hinder healthy development, the youngest child, with the help of his teachers, struggles enough to finally take steps away from the pain, and out of the cycle, as I did with my own life.

Caroline Todd was born and raised in North Carolina, and Charles lived much of his adult life there. We love the Tarheel state, and Ingles Fletcher exposed us to the history of our home! It, too, speaks to my love of the ocean and the Outer Banks. Inglis Fletcher wrote the almost-forgotten Carolina Series, an early history of the coast of North Carolina, carrying it from its development through the Revolutionary War, with such a wealth of rich detail and a mixture of real people and well-drawn characters that the reader knows them intimately. The story begins with Roanoke Hundred, continuing through Men of Albemarle and Raleigh’s Eden, to The Scotswoman, which tells the story of Flora MacDonald’s years in the state after the Stuart Rebellion.