The most recommended books about Georgia (USA)

Focusing on Georgia, this study answers the question of just what rich Confederates were doing during the Civil War. It turns out that they were not sacrificing all for the Confederate cause but pursuing their self-interests by continuing to grow cotton, speculating in goods, and finding ways to use their class position to stay out of Confederate armies. By so doing, they aroused the class resentments of the plain folk who increasingly turned against the Confederate cause.

When you live in Columbus, Georgia, this one takes on special meaning. During an eight-month period in 1977 and 1978, Columbus was terrorized by a mysterious serial killer who raped and ritualistically strangled seven elderly women in one of the community’s finer neighborhoods.

Despite intensive efforts on the part of the police, who proved to be incompetent, the Stocking Strangler, as he came to be known, managed to elude capture. After the last murder in April 1978, the case went cold. In the spring of 1984, a series of fortuitous events connected to an unrelated murder and a stolen pistol led to the capture of Carlton Gary, who had recently escaped from a South Carolina prison.

Following a dramatic trial in August 1986, Gary was convicted of three of the seven Columbus murders and sentenced to death, a penalty that would not be carried out until March 2018.

This convoluted… show more.

The New York Times called Janisse Ray the Rachel Carson of her native South Georgia. Indeed, her descriptions of the region’s low- and tall-growing plants and the crawling, flying, stalking, burrowing, nesting, and denning creatures bring to life the pine-and-scrub woodland that circumscribed her years growing up. Part memoir and part nature study, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood pays tribute to the region’s cathedral-esque longleaf pines, pillars of a sylvan ecosystem that once ranged across the Southeast. Their environment is now as rare as the Packards and Ramblers that once littered her father’s auto junkyard, hidden from the road by ragweed and dog fennel and backdropped by pines. Reading Ecology is the next best thing to experiencing the sights, sounds, and smells of the woodland that Ray writes so lovingly about. 

Doctor Sarah Linton, the star of an earlier series before this one, is now a medical examiner and her partner is Will Trent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. When a group of domestic terrorists and survivalists bomb two hospitals and the office of the Center for Disease Control, Sarah rushes to the scene to help. The group kidnaps her and she’s forced into a male-dominated commune where she has to rely on her wits and her acting skills to survive, while trying to get word out to Will and his colleagues where the group is hiding…hopefully, before they strike again to unleash an environmental disaster that will kill millions of people. 

This book provides an excellent overview of Atlanta’s rise from humble beginnings as a rail hub before the Civil War to a thriving commercial center by the end of the century. Russell argues that the war accelerated Atlanta’s commercial and industrial development, but its path was already set before General William T. Sherman’s army arrived during the Civil War. White business elites dominated city politics until the election of Atlanta’s first Black mayor, Maynard Jackson, in 1973.

The rise of the right was in many ways a southern phenomenon as the Old South transformed into the Sun Belt. White Flight explores how white supremacy and fears over desegregation propelled the conservative movement in Atlanta and on the national stage. As federal initiatives spelled the end for segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, southern whites managed to preserve racial discrimination through more subtle avenues. Whites fled Atlanta’s urban core for its suburbs where they reformed the world of white supremacy, giving birth to new causes such as tax revolts, tuition vouchers, and the privatization of public services.

Carter has written a huge number of books, including a historical novel and a volume of poetry, but this one is definitely his best. Like Coolidge's, it’s simple, detail-driven, and always personal, capturing Carter's Georgia childhood and connecting it to bigger issues like the Great Depression and the Jim Crow South. There's a handful of shorter, more intimate books by ex-presidents—not only Carter’s but also Harry Truman’s Mr. Citizen and Dwight Eisenhower’s At Ease—and these books always read better and reveal more than their authors’ official presidential memoirs. I wish more ex-presidents would follow Coolidge in writing that punchy and personal book first, about their White House years. If they tried this approach, they would find that it makes everyone a winner—not just the presidents but also their readers.

The 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition, a seminal moment in Atlanta’s history, is best remembered as the setting for Booker T. Washington’s opening day address in which he suggested that the races could be “as separate as the fingers” in “all things social.” Theda Perdue considers the white supremacist attitudes of the fair’s organizers and the ways in which people of color were represented. The designated Negro Building allowed Black educators and artists to showcase their accomplishments in a segregated setting, but exhibits about Native Americans by the Smithsonian and Office of Indian Affairs treated them as ancient cultures of the past and not as vibrant cultures of the present.

If you’ve ever stood behind your mother in the line at a grocery store and cringed because she was talking too much to a stranger, imagine if she was wearing smeared lipstick and a tiara.

That’s CeeCee Honeycutt’s mother, who also happens to be obsessed with the fact that she was once the Vidalia Onion Queen. Not that it matters anymore, Camille is dead, and CeeCee is moving in with her great-aunt Tootie.

Now that she’s no longer dealing with burnt mac-and-cheese and an alcohol-scented mother, CeeCee has to learn how to live with blue bloods, prosperity, and a whole new set of rules.

Set in Savannah, Saving CeeCee Honeycutt has the kind of stick-to-itiveness and familial-love-despite-dynamics that the best Southern books embody. 

One of the things I love most about this book is how much Georgia learns about herself by raising an autistic daughter.

I have found the same to be true as my wife and I are raising an autistic son. The more I learn about him, the more I learn about myself. It is a wonderful experience to see myself mirrored in a character. Though Georgia and Lauren face many obstacles, Georgia’s daughter, Hannah, keeps pulling them back together.

I am a sucker for a cute kid who knows more about what the grownups in their lives need than they do. 

Set in the depression era in North Carolina’s turpentine pine forests, Rae Lynn Cobb learns a Tar Heel’s dangerous work. After life in an orphanage, she appreciates the work, a home of her own, and her loving husband. When he dies, with her grief-stricken help, she cuts her hair and flees dressed in his clothes and driving his rattle-trap truck. As a man, she works in a hazardous and treacherous turpentine labor camp and becomes indebted to the company-owned commissary. Like most labor camps, the owners have ways to keep indebted workers from running – dogs and guns. She gets locked in a sweatbox by a scheming man and survives, runs again, and finds peace. Rae does what is necessary with quiet grit and determination. For me, this book exemplifies what is missing in our world—personal responsibility—and I couldn't quit cheering for the heroine. A beautiful historical novel.

This story starts with Harper getting kicked out of a foster home before being sent off to the spooky Shadowford Home for Girls in the fictional town of Peachville, Georgia. Things go from bad to worse when a local cheerleader is found dead, and Harper gets sucked into a small-town mystery.

The book reads like a paranormal detective story, with a touch of romance. Harper is no P.I., but she is magic, and the twin mysteries of her origins and the town’s history dovetail nicely as the story progresses.

I particularly sympathized with the heroine’s plight as an outsider at a new school, something I’ve experienced many a time myself. The good thing about it is, it makes for some moving storytelling.

Because Mr. Newcomb’s book (above) covers only herbs, shrubs, and vines, the survival student needs a good tree identifier (field guide) to cover “the standing people.” (The Cherokee name for “trees.”) Because I live in Georgia, this book serves me well. If you live outside of the Southeast, you’ll want to find a book germane to your area. Trees of Georgia contains good photographs of leaves, bark, flowers, buds, and fruits of over 200 species.

Cold Sassy Tree is unabashedly naughty and funny and innocent all at the same time. Will comes of age in the early 1900s, and along the way we’re introduced to his family and friends who see him through exploits that rival anything Mark Twain ever cooked up for Tom Sawyer. It’s cooky, crazy, and completely enchanting. This is the spot-on antidote to a crummy week. We all have ‘em, so keep this special novel handy and pick it up when you most need to smile. It will bring you happiness as it does me.

This novel takes place in Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958. The darkest child is Tangy Mae Quinn who is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and considered the ugliest by her mother, who is light-skinned, but she is the brightest and has been selected to be part of the first integrated class at a nearby White high school.

This book looks at Atlanta’s role in the emergence of a “New South” and the way that journalist and civic leader Henry Grady used the story of Atlanta’s wartime burning and destruction and its postwar rebuilding to rebrand the city. While supporting segregation in the South, Grady urged northern Whites to invest in the New South economy and denied that the region had a race problem. Black Atlantans presented an alternate narrative, one that emphasized the war as a first step in the fight for freedom and equality. The Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 left Grady’s New South concept “tattered and frayed”; the term was seldom used after that.

A beautiful manuscript documenting the overall racial tension between Indigenous, enslaved Africans, and Europeans is superbly described by Dr. Miles in all aspects. The undertones of admiration and challenges between all three racial groups is eloquently pictured in the relationship between Shoeboots, a prominent Cherokee Champion and farmer, and Doll, his companion and enslaved African woman. The three-decade depiction of Shoeboot’s and Doll’s lives together and Doll’s petition to the federal government requesting Shoe Boot’s pension as his widow is beyond historic. Ties that Bind is a true testament to the enslaved Africans tribal experience before, during, and after slavery; it is essential to one’s book collection.  

This intricately written story sparked my interest from the very first page. Every time the author introduced a clue to the plot, I immediately wanted to know what it meant and what was coming. I was “chomping at the bit” as they say, and there was never one moment where the story lagged. Every single sentence needed to be there and the mystery had layer after layer with no way to ever predict what would happen. This is a historical fiction writer who definitely understands how to weave a top-notch suspenseful tale, and that’s what this is. 

A Thousand Naked Strangers is the definitive book about life on an ambulance. I’ve never read another book about this or any other topic for that matter, which made me think, “Yes! Exactly, you get me!” When anyone asks me—and they never do—what is it really like working on an ambulance? this is the book I point to.

Not only is A Thousand Naked Strangers full of great stories from the author’s time on the bus, but Kevin Hazzard, is also a journalist and it shows. This book is fast-paced, funny, and authentic.

Some people hate the idea of combining bloggers and zombies, but I loved that it was something different and new. But what I loved most about this series is that it offered us a glimpse into a world after the zombie apocalypse. The first book is the best but the whole series is worth reading.