Here are 100 books that The Most Southern Place on Earth fans have personally recommended if you like
The Most Southern Place on Earth.
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Since childhood, I have been fascinated by the culture and stories of my place, the Mississippi Delta. I began my education in the beauty shop, where my mother “fixed” hair six days a week. I continued my education in the pool hall when I was 13 or 14, listening to the braggarts and fools who pontificated about every subject under the sun. I escaped to Memphis in the late 60s and became a hippie, drinking in the experience of Memphis’ electric streets. These experiences informed my thinking and helped me become a writer and filmmaker.
This is a comprehensive history of the Mississippi River in general and the Flood of 1927 in particular. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, it was incredibly insightful and full of context, especially about the relations between the ruling-class planters and their African American workers. The influx of Italian, Lebanese, and Chinese immigrants is detailed and explains much of the Delta's cultural diversity.
The book also tells the story of the government’s response to the devastating flood, ultimately propelling Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to the presidency in 1928.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lillian Smith Award.
An American epic of science, politics, race, honor, high society, and the Mississippi River, Rising Tide tells the riveting and nearly forgotten story of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The river inundated the homes of almost one million people, helped elect Huey Long governor and made Herbert Hoover president, drove hundreds of thousands of African Americans north, and transformed American society and politics forever.
The flood brought with it a human storm: white and black collided, honor…
Since childhood, I have been fascinated by the culture and stories of my place, the Mississippi Delta. I began my education in the beauty shop, where my mother “fixed” hair six days a week. I continued my education in the pool hall when I was 13 or 14, listening to the braggarts and fools who pontificated about every subject under the sun. I escaped to Memphis in the late 60s and became a hippie, drinking in the experience of Memphis’ electric streets. These experiences informed my thinking and helped me become a writer and filmmaker.
The story of American music is laid out in a fascinating series of stories by musicologist and former New York Times music critic Robert Palmer. Palmer used interviews with Muddy Waters and many other bluesmen to explain how this music traveled from Africa to the American South and then up to Chicago, Detroit, and other northern cities.
It is an in-depth look at the stories and myths of the South and the people who made their escape from the brutal cotton fields and racial segregation of the times. This book is a must for anyone wanting to know the beginnings and significance of American music.
Blues is the cornerstone of American popular music, the bedrock of rock and roll. In this extraordinary musical and social history, Robert Palmer traces the odyssey of the blues from its rural beginnings, to the steamy bars of Chicago's South Side, to international popularity, recognition, and imitation. Palmer tells the story of the blues through the lives of its greatest practitioners: Robert Johnson, who sang of being pursued by the hounds of hell; Muddy Waters, who electrified Delta blues and gave the music its rock beat; Robert Lockwood and Sonny Boy Williamson, who launched the King Biscuit Time radio show…
Since childhood, I have been fascinated by the culture and stories of my place, the Mississippi Delta. I began my education in the beauty shop, where my mother “fixed” hair six days a week. I continued my education in the pool hall when I was 13 or 14, listening to the braggarts and fools who pontificated about every subject under the sun. I escaped to Memphis in the late 60s and became a hippie, drinking in the experience of Memphis’ electric streets. These experiences informed my thinking and helped me become a writer and filmmaker.
Even though this is a collection of short stories, it tells the story of Mississippi and the South in a way few have captured. I have recommended this book to dozens of people over the years who were looking to begin reading Mr. Faulkner’s work.
The stories about Native American culture (Red Leaves, A Justice, and Lo) are insightful and completely changed my thinking about that culture. The stories of small-town life come alive in unique and disturbing ways, but they are always inventive and deep. I love these stories and the fact that even after eighty or ninety years, they continue to introduce one of the greatest writers in the English language to the people of the world.
This is a collection of the very best of William Faulkner's short stories. Included are classics of short-form fiction such as 'A Bear Hunt', 'A Rose for Emily', 'Two Soldiers' and 'The Brooch'. Faulkner's ability to compress his epic vision into narratives of such grace and tragic intensity defines him as one of the finest and most original writers America has ever produced.
Since childhood, I have been fascinated by the culture and stories of my place, the Mississippi Delta. I began my education in the beauty shop, where my mother “fixed” hair six days a week. I continued my education in the pool hall when I was 13 or 14, listening to the braggarts and fools who pontificated about every subject under the sun. I escaped to Memphis in the late 60s and became a hippie, drinking in the experience of Memphis’ electric streets. These experiences informed my thinking and helped me become a writer and filmmaker.
William Alexander Percy was an enigma. He was an attorney, a published poet, a World War I hero, and a ruling member of the planter class during his life in the Mississippi Delta (1885-1942). His father was a United States Senator, and his mother was French Catholic, a fact that riled the KKK members in 1920s Mississippi.
Percy is recognized as a godfather to the Southern Agrarians Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate. This is a look back to a strange time in America. Some of the languages, especially those discussing race, are hard to read, but at the time, they were considered ultra-liberal. This book sets up much of the context needed to understand the significance of the Mississippi Delta.
Born and raised in Greenville, Mississippi, within the shelter of old traditions, aristocratic in the best sense, William Alexander Percy in his lifetime (1885--1942) was brought face to face with the convulsions of a changing world. Lanterns on the Levee is his memorial to the South of his youth and young manhood. In describing life in the Mississippi Delta, Percy bridges the interval between the semifeudal South of the 1800s and the anxious South of the early 1940s. The rare qualities of this classic memoir lie not in what Will Percy did in his life -- although his life was…
I am an avid lover of all cultures, especially travel memoirs. I had a goal to travel to 30 countries in 30 years, and I wrote a memoir, Traveling in Wonder. I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting both the author and side characters in all of these books, as each brings something extraordinary to the story. I also loved the descriptions in these memoirs, which brought me back to my memories!
Eric does a fantastic job of connecting Nordic and Scandinavian cultures with the Minnesotan and American cultures within my state. Living in Minnesota, I’m always interested in books that discuss cultural or societal norms like the ones I interact with on a daily basis.
I truly enjoyed broadening my knowledge on this search!
Growing up with Swedish and Norwegian grandparents with a dash of Danish thrown in for balance, Eric Dregni thought Scandinavians were perfectly normal. Who doesn't enjoy a good, healthy salad (Jell-O packed with canned fruit, colored marshmallows, and pretzels) or perhaps some cod soaked in drain cleaner as the highlights of Christmas? Only later did it dawn on him that perhaps this was just a little strange, but by then it was far too late: he was hooked and a dyed-in-the-wool Scandinavian himself.
But what does it actually mean to grow up Scandinavian-American or to live with these Norwegians, Swedes,…
I’ve been traveling since age seventeen when I boarded a plane and headed to Europe on my own. Over the next three years I lived in London, took weekend jaunts across the continent, and became completely bitten by the travel bug. Since then, I’ve traveled to more than 95 countries. I’ve lost and gained friends and lovers and made a radical career change so that I could afford my travel addiction. Like my readers, I am an ordinary person. Through travel I’ve learned courage and risk-taking and succeeded at things I didn’t know I could do. My goal in writing is to inspire others to take off and explore the world.
Shortly after it was first published, I picked this book up in the bookstore at Heathrow on my way home from a business trip. I spent the entire flight glued to it and laughing out loud.
This was Bryson’s first travel book and one that changed my perception of what travel writing could be. It is perceptive, irreverent, and focuses on the small, often quirky, details that make travel so interesting. I am now a huge fan of all of Bryson’s books, but this was the one that got me hooked.
In 1995, before leaving his much-loved home in North Yorkshire to move back to the States for a few years with his family, Bill Bryson insisted on taking one last trip around Britain, a sort of valedictory tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home. His aim was to take stock of the nation's public face and private parts (as it were), and to analyse what precisely it was he loved so much about a country that had produced Marmite; a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named…
I’m a historian who loves watching the Founding Fathers do not-so-Founding-Fatherish things, like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson bonding over how awful Alexander Hamilton was, James Madison reporting how the king of Spain liked to relieve himself daily by the same oak tree, and George Washington losing his temper, asking his cousin to look for the teeth he just knew he’d left in his desk drawer, or spinning out a conspiracy theory. It’s details like this that reveal that even the most revealed figures were real people, like us but often very different. Figuring out how it all makes sense is a challenge I enjoy.
A classic statement of the mentality of the men who fought the American Revolution, A Revolutionary People at War documents how the enthusiasm of the war’s early days, the “rage militaire” in Royster’s memorable phrase, waxed and waned during the brutal conflict as soldiers and civilians settled into an uneasy relationship often in danger of collapsing into anarchy or a military despotism as everyone feared. Royster seems to have read every scrap a soldier or officer produced across the war’s 8 years, and researching the book in the 1970s, he someone kept track of everything, deploying a deft quote time after time, without the aid of a computer. How?
In this highly acclaimed book, Charles Royster explores the mental processes and emotional crises that Americans faced in their first national war. He ranges imaginatively outside the traditional techniques of analytical historical exposition to build his portrait of how individuals and a populace at large faced the Revolution and its implications. The book was originally published by UNC Press in 1980.
I’ve been obsessed with Paris since the age of five. For most of my life I’ve travelled there regularly and read every book on the subject I could find. After working as a beauty editor, I decided to try to make my passion my day job. That inspired me to write Paris Dreaming: What the City of Light Taught Me About Life, Love & Lipstick, and launch a travel consultancy business, Paris for Dreamers. I work with like-minded lovers of Paris, who constantly yearn for the city’s beguiling beauty and fascinating history, and who are always planning their next trip—or visiting Paris virtually, through the pages of a book!
If you’re new to the history of Paris, this is an ideal book to start with. It’s a sweeping account of this fabled city’s story, from Roman times to the turn of the twenty-first century, but while lofty in aim it’s charmingly fun to read, the author being adept at packaging wide-ranging information into a fast-paced narrative. One neat feature is the way Jones highlights certain Parisians or Paris locations, giving them breakout sections that allow readers to delve deeper into the likes of Madame de Sévigné, Rose Bertin, and Josephine Baker. You realise that Paris is so much more than the sum of its stones. Yes, it’s about beautiful monuments, but just as much about the people who have breathed such life into Paris that their spirit lives on to this day.
From the Roman Emperor Julian, who waxed rhapsodic about Parisian wine and figs, to Henry Miller, who relished its seductive bohemia, Paris has been a perennial source of fascination for 2,000 years. In this definitive and illuminating history, Colin Jones walks us through the city that was a plague-infested charnel house during the Middle Ages, the bloody epicenter of the French Revolution, the muse of nineteenth-century Impressionist painters, and much more. Jones's masterful narrative is enhanced by numerous photographs and feature boxes-on the Bastille or Josephine Baker, for instance-that complete a colorful and comprehensive portrait of a place that has…
While writing Never a Lovely so Real, I fell into many traps. The Federal Writers Project was one of the deepest. Nelson Algren’s time at the project in Chicago saved him from personal and professional ruin. And I became a bit obsessed with the idea that, during the Great Depression, there had been a government program that hired writers by the hundreds and brought them together to work toward a common goal; one that helped shape a literary generation. As I say though, it was a pitfall. Most of what I learned wouldn’t fit in my book, but I’m grateful for all of the writing my research introduced me to.
Several books focused on the Works Progress Administration (WPA), or discreet parts of it, had been published before Borchert’s was released but this is the best of them. I doubt that any other book will ever tell the story of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) quite so well. On one level, it lays out the project’s scope and walks readers through the politics involved with its creation and continued operation. And on another, it explains what the project meant for the writers it employed and how it influenced their work. Every other book on this list was written by an author employed by the project or another part of the WPA; this book will help you understand them as part of a coherent literary moment in American history.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice | Winner of the New Deal Book Award
An immersive account of the New Deal project that created state-by-state guidebooks to America, in the midst of the Great Depression—and employed some of the biggest names in American letters
The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious—and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then forty-eight states—along with hundreds of other publications dedicated to cities,…
I’m a Professor of English Emeritus at Southern New Hampshire University and author of ten books, including fiction, criticism, memoir, and collected journalism. I was also an inaugural faculty member in the writing workshops at the Norman Mailer Center in Provincetown, MA. I first got into Mailer in the 1970s after reading The Naked and the Dead and Cannibals and Christians. I ended up writing my doctoral dissertation on Mailer, which became my first book,Acts of Regeneration. My second book,Toward A New Synthesis, examined Mailer along with John Fowles and John Gardner as writers who adopted some of the techniques of post-modernism but kept their work firmly tethered to ethical issues.
Mailer published three nonfiction books near the end of his life to lay out his final take on issues he’d been pursuing his entire writing life and as a highly visible, often notorious, public intellectual: On God, Why Are We at War?—echoing his 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam?—and The Big Empty. I chose The Big Empty because the reader comes to understand where Mailer lands finally on so many issues he covered during his decades of political and societal journalism, with a special focus on democracy in America, its potential and its abiding threats.
The book is structured as a series of dialogues with his youngest son, John Buffalo Mailer, who in his introduction argues that such a dialogue with his father represents a necessary conversation among generations. Their topics include, among other pressing intergenerational concerns, the American presidency, endless war, American 21st-century politics,…
Questions are posed, writes Norman Mailer, "in the hope they will open into richer insights, which in turn will bring forth sharper questions. " In this series of conversations, John Buffalo Mailer, 27, poses a series of questions to his father, challenging the reflections and insights of the man who has dominated and defined much of American letters for the past sixty years. Their wide-ranging discussions take place over the course of a year, beginning in July 2004. Set against the backdrop of George W. Bush's re-election campaign and the war in Iraq, each considers what it means to live…