1998

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A Homecoming for Murder

Fiction by John Armistead

Dell (Mass Market Paperback, $5.99, ISBN: 0440224357)

Publication date: January 1998

Description:

From the acclaimed author of A Legacy of Vengeance comes an intriguing new mystery set in tranquil Sheffield, Mississippi. The cold-blooded murder of one of the high school’s most respected teachers jerks Sheriff Grover Bramlett into a Byzantine web of deceit, forbidden love, and bank accounts, when his grandson encounters the killer face to face in the cemetery.

Uncle Jed’s Barbershop

Juvenile Fiction by Margaree King Mitchell

Aladdin (Paperback, $5.99, ISBN: 0689819137)

Publication date: January 1998

Description:

In the segregated South of the 1920s, Uncle Jed was the only black barber in a county of sharecroppers. He always dreamed of owning his own barbershop, but his generous heart and some bad luck during the Depression forced him to defer that dream for years. Finally, on his 79th birthday, Uncle Jed opened the doors of his new shop. A Coretta Scott King Honor Book. An ALA Notable Children’s Book. Full color. Ages 4-7.

Landscapes of the Heart: A Memoir

By Elizabeth Spencer

Random House (Hardcover, $24.00, ISBN: 0679457399)

Publication date: January 1998

Description:

Conveying a unique sense of history and place, Southern novelist Elizabeth Spencer (The Salt Line, Light in the Piazza) tells of her youth in Carrollton, Mississippi, a time preserved in amber, then moves to Italy, Canada, and finally back “home” to North Carolina. Along the way, she recalls friendships with Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren, plus encounters with many others, including William Faulkner and Saul Bellow.

The Last Gentleman

Fiction by Walker Percy

Modern Library (Hardcover, $18.50, ISBN: 0679602720)

Publication date: January 1998

Description:

An inquisitive young Southerner—with a special gift for cultivating life’s possibilities—lives with the secret suspicion that the great world catastrophe that everyone fears will happen has already happened.

Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story

Autobiography by Charles Evers

John Wiley & Sons (Mass Market Paperback, $5.99, ISBN: 0471246921)

Publication date: January 1998

Description:

Charles Evers’s voice resonates from the pages of his autobiography, recounting his unique perspective on America from the beginnings of the civil rights movement to recent events in American history. Evers describes his early life in the South amid the injustices of racism and the outrages of segregation. He recounts the details of the 1963 murder of his younger brother Medgar, a field secretary for the NAACP in Mississippi, and the 30 years and three trials it took to bring his murderer to justice. He tells his own stories of the movement in plain-speaking terms, giving frank assessments of characters ranging from Stokely Carmichael to George Wallace. Evers drives home his thoughts on the promises of opportunity in America and the importance of commercial success and describes his accomplishments as mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, and as an independent businessman. His memoir is an exuberant display of his triumphant character as well as an interesting perspective on the civil rights movement in America.

And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New

Poems by Angela Jackson

Triquarterly Books (Paperback, $14.95, ISBN: 0810150778;

Hardcover, $39.95, ISBN: 081015076X)

Publication date: January 1998

Description:

As Angela Jackson has developed as a poet, her poetry has engaged various artistic perspectives, yet always maintains a characteristic combination of compassion, grace, and daring. Jackson moves with ease from the personal to the historical—filled alternately with wonder, righteous anger, tenderness, and a tangible intensity. Her verse is rich and passionate and brimming with poetic surprises.

Drawing from earlier works contained in the chapbooks VooDoo/Love Magic, The Greenville Club, Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E, and The Man with the White Liver, And All These Roads Be Luminous is filled with an impressive variety of characters engaged in compelling explorations of identity, creativity, spiritual experience, and the rites and rituals of race and sexuality. Jackson moves with ease from the personal to the historical: filled alternately with wonder, righteous anger, tenderness, and a tangible intensity, Jackson’s is rich and passionate verse brimming with poetic surprises.

Crimes of the Heart

A play by Beth Henley

Dramatists Play Service (Paperback, $5.95, ISBN: 0822202506)

Publication date: January 1998

Description from The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature:

Drama in three acts by Beth Henley, produced in 1979 and published in 1982. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981. Set in a small Mississippi town, the play examines the lives of three quirky sisters who have gathered at the home of the youngest. During the course of the work the sisters unearth grudges, criticize each other, reminisce about their family life, and attempt to understand their mother’s suicide years earlier.

The New Regionalism: Essays and Commentaries

Edited by Charles Reagan Wilson

University Press of Mississippi (Hardcover; $40.00; ISBN: 1578060133)

Publication date: October 1998

Description from the publisher:

A DIALOGUE AMONG SCHOLARS THAT REVEALS ISSUES AND ATTITUDES IN THE CONTEMPORARY RENAISSANCE OF REGIONAL STUDIES

Interest in American regions has undergone a revival since the 1970s. This book presents views of key interpreters of the South, the West, New England, and the Midwest. Although they choose differing approaches and methodologies, they collectively explore the landscapes and peoples of regional cultures that long have been a significant factor in understanding American culture.

The dynamic subject of regionalism fostered a popular and intellectual movement in the period between the world wars. Such notable figures as the sociologist Howard Odum, the historian Walter Prescott Webb, and the urban planner Lewis Mumford proposed theoretical bases for regional study and aspired to shape public policy in the New Deal era. These modernists were aware of the cultural crisis that shook western civilization after World War I. They saw regional cultures as models of the well-integrated communities that might offer hope to their disenchanted contemporaries. However, interest in regionalism declined in the 1950s, as the decade concerned itself with the view that consensus and homogenization would destroy regional identity.

Through films, television, and novels set in different regions, American popular culture kept regional cultures in the national spotlight. By the 1970s, it was clear that regions not only had survived but also continued to play a prominent role in the shaping of cultural attitudes and political thought and behavior.

The essays in this volume, papers presented at the Porter L. Fortune History Symposium at the University of Mississippi in 1993, are products of this new wave of scholarship. The New Regionalism the scholars discuss here focuses on the geography of place, the local context of differing physical environments, and the centrality of social relations that includes attention to the key concerns of race, class, and gender.

Familiar Fire

By Caroline Burnes (Carolyn Haines)

Harlequin (Paperback, ISBN: 0373224524)

Publication date: January 1998

Dead Over Heels

By Charlaine Harris

Harlequin (Paperback, ISBN: 0373262604)

Publication date: January 1998

Description:

Soon after happily married Aurora Teagarden discovers her husband’s shady past, the dead body of Detective Sergeant Jack Burns is unceremoniously dumped in her backyard by a small plane and she cannot help but wonder if it is related to Martin’s secrets.

The Ghosts of Medgar Evers: A Tale of Race, Murder, Mississippi, and Hollywood

Nonfiction by Willie Morris

Random House (Paperback, $23.00, ISBN: 0679459561)

Publication date: February 1998

Description from Booklist (1 January 1998):

Everyone is a critic, except the occasional saint. The professional or citizen critic whose opinions are well publicized wields power that can be capricious, even deadly. Morris, former editor in chief of Harper’s, has written a multilayered study of the critical reception of the film Ghosts of Mississippi. Rob Reiner’s film, based on fact, is about Mississippi assistant D.A. Bobby DeLaughter (Alec Baldwin) reopening the case against Byron de la Beckwith (James Woods) for the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and, with the aid of the widow Evers (Whoopi Goldberg), bringing the murderer to justice. The book reads like a series of long magazine articles. The first is a paean to a place that lives in other people’s infamy, and here Mississippian Morris introduces the idea of the subjective nature of opinion, carried through in the other “articles” about the actual filming in Mississippi and the special previews around the U.S. Finally, enter the critics. Apparently, the Variety critic was appalled at the filmmakers for making a film based on an actual event: “When future generations turn to this era’s movies for an account of the struggles for racial justice in America, they’ll learn the surprising lesson that such battles were fought and won by square-jawed white boys.” Morris writes, “Soon Rob Reiner would be like Brer Rabbit getting stuck in the Tar Baby.” Spike Lee went to the mat in protest of the “white heroes.” Roger Ebert couldn’t believe that Myrlie Evers wasn’t the star. In the end, the film failed at the box office, and Morris haunts the film’s Mississippi locations, pondering the ghosts of racial healing and progress. —Copyright © 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved

Real Power: Lessons for Business from the Tao Te Ching

By James A. Autry and Stephen Mitchell

Riverhead Books (Hardcover, ISBN: 1573220892)

Publication date: February 1998

Blues Boy: The Life and Music of B.B. King

(American Made Music Series)

By Sebastian Danchin

University Press of Mississippi (Hardcover, $28.00 ISBN: 1578060176)

Publication date: February 1998

The Street Lawyer

A Novel by John Grisham

Doubleday (Hardcover, $27.95, ISBN: 0385490992)

Publication date: February 1998

Description:

John Grisham is back with his latest courtroom conundrum, The Street Lawyer. This time the lord of legal thrillers dives deep into the world of the homeless, particularly their barely audible legal voice in a world dominated by large, all-powerful law firms. Our hero, Michael Brock, is on the fast track to partnership at D.C.’s premier law firm, Sweeny & Drake. His dream of someday raking in a million-plus a year is finally within reach. Nothing can stop him, not even 90-hour workweeks and a failing marriage—until he meets DeVon Hardy, a.k.a. “Mister,” a Vietnam vet with a grudge against his landlord—and a few lawyers to fry. Hardy, with no clear motive, takes Brock and eight of his colleagues hostage in a boardroom, demanding their tax returns and interrogating them with a conviction that would have put perpetrators of the Spanish Inquisition to shame. Hardy, a man of few words and a lot of ammunition, mumbles cryptically, “Who are the evictors?” as he points a .44 automatic within inches of Brock’s face. The violent outcome of the hostage situation triggers an abrupt soul-searching for the young lawyer, and Hardy’s mysterious question continues to haunt him. Brock learns that Hardy had been in and out of homeless shelters most of his life, but he had recently begun paying rent in a rundown building; that means he has legal recourse when a big money-making outfit such as Sweeny & Drake boots him with no warning. When Brock realizes that his profession caters to the morally challenged, he sets out on an aimless search through the dicier side of D.C., ending up at the 14th Street Legal Clinic. The clinic’s director, a gargantuan man named Mordecai Green, woos Brock to the clinic with a $90,000 cut in pay and the chance to redeem his soul. Brock takes it—and some of the story’s credibility along with it; it’s hard to believe that a Yale graduate who sacrificed everything—including his marriage—to succeed in the legal profession would quickly jump at the opportunity for low-paying, charitable work. However, Brock’s search for corruption in the swanky upper echelons of Sweeny & Drake (via the toughest streets of D.C.) is filled with colorful characters and realistic, gritty descriptions. In The Street Lawyer, Grisham once again defends the voiceless and powerless. In the words of Mordecai Green, “That’s justice, Michael. That’s what street law is all about. Dignity.”

The Partner

A Novel by John Grisham

Dell (Paperback, $7.99, ISBN: 0440224764)

Publication date: February 1998

Description:

Patrick Lanigan had a bright future as a young partner in a prominent Southern law firm. Then one cold winter night, he was trapped in a burning car and died a horrible death; the casket they buried held nothing but his ashes. A short distance away, Patrick watched his own burial, then fled. A fortune was stolen from his ex-firm’s offshore account. Patrick ran, covering his tracks the whole way—but not far enough or fast enough. It began when he disappeared. But it really didn’t start until they found him.

Mortal Fear

A Novel by Greg Iles

Signet (Paperback, $6.99, ISBN: 0451180410)

Publication date: February 1998

Description:

Harper Cole’s a hacker at heart, and indulges a number of vices at once by running an erotic electronic bulletin board from his country home on the Mississippi Delta. Unfortunately, a serial killer is also indulging himself—and using Harper’s service to find his victims. When Harper discovers that a woman who stopped logging on to his board has been brutally murdered in New Orleans, he goes to the police, only to find that several other former users have also died violently. Under suspicion himself, Harper must use all the online wizardry at his disposal to trick and capture a brilliant, kinky killer.

Success for Dummies

By Zig Ziglar

IDG Books Worldwide (Paperback, $19.99, ISBN: 0764550616)

Publication date: February 1998

Description:

This inspirational guide offers down-to-earth advice for measuring success in all areas—at home, work, in relationships, and more. Popular motivational speaker and author Zig Ziglar tells readers how to take a personal inventory of their accomplishments and determine their next set of goals. Readers benefit from simple, practical tips on improving their lives and feeling great. Cartoon illustrations.

The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems

By Turner Cassity

Ohio University Press (Hardcover, $29.95, ISBN: 0821412213)

Publication date: February 1998

Watching Our Crops Come In

Nonfiction by Clifton L. Taulbert

Penguing (Paperback, $9.95, ISBN: 0140244344)

Publication date: February 1998

Description from Kirkus Reviews (1 December 1996):

A tepid recollection of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War from a man who watched both primarily from the sidelines. The third of Taulbert’s memoirs (When We Were Colored, 1989; The Last Train North, 1992), this entry follows him through the 1960s, when as an enlistee in the US Air Force, he was saved by a special assignment from having to serve in Vietnam; he was equally, he claims, “prohibited by [his] uniform from joining the fight for freedom back home.” Taulbert left the Mississippi Delta at the age of 17 to join his father in St. Louis. He joined the Air Force in 1964 and was given a “classified position” in data processing at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, D.C. From that vantage point he watched “scores of airmen shipped off to a war … to ensure democracy, even though,” he notes, “it was not fully realized here at home.” During his years in the nation’s capital, he closely observed the marches and riots that tore apart the country and noted the changes wrought by the movement on his own hometown. He was astonished to see “blacks and whites working together for social change.” His mother, Mary, became the director of the local Head Start project; family members and friends became activists. An admirer of Dr. Martin Luther King, Taulbert stubbornly dismisses black power leaders such as H. Rap Brown as “northern cousins” who “had not marched in Selma or faced the dogs in Montgomery.” Well, neither did he, and his lack of involvement waters down his occasional perceptive observations. Disillusioned by the assassinations of King and Robert F. Kennedy, Taulbert regarded the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign as a grave disappointment. His lack of real engagement, his repeated references to “coloreds,” and his attribution of Brer Rabbit dialect to residents of his hometown (“ther wuz angels coming ... more than I could eber count”) will not play well with most readers. —Copyright © 1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The Friendship

By Mildred D. Taylor

Puffin (Paperback, $4.99, ISBN: 0140389644)

Publication date: February 1998 (reprint edition)

Description from Horn Book Magazine:

Eloquent in both its brevity and understatement, the story underlines the author’s skill in drawing from her family’s experiences to enlarge her readers’ understanding of a dark and still unresolved heritage.

The Gold Cadillac: A Fancy New Car and an Unforgettable Drive

By Mildred D. Taylor

Puffin (Paperback, $4.99, ISBN: 0140389636)

Publication date: February 1998 (reprint edition)

Description from Ingram:

Lois and Wilma are proud of their father’s brand-new gold Cadillac, and excited that the family will be driving in it all the way from Ohio to Mississippi. But as they travel deeper into the rural South, there are no admiring glances for the shiny new car—only suspicion and anger for the black man behind the wheel. Black & white illustrations.

A Corpse by Any Other Name: A Stokes Moran Mystery

Fiction by Neil McGaughey

Scribner (Hardcover; $22.00; ISBN: 0684197626 )

Publication date: March 1998

Description:

As Kyle Malachi prepares for impending fatherhood, his growing alienation toward his better known alter ego Stokes Moran leads him into a rash act—he decides to kill off his fictitious rival. Everything seems fine until an actual corpse turns up with Stokes Moran’s identity. And Kyle—to keep himself out of jail for a crime he didn’t commit—must put a name to the corpse.

A name other than Stokes Moran. Any other name.

The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War

A Novel by Howard Bahr

Henry Holt (Paperback, $12.00, ISBN: 0805054456)

Publication date: March 1998

Description:

One of the most riveting Civil War novels since Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels, this powerful book tells the story of a young Confederate rifleman who comes under the care of a young Southern woman who, even in the midst of battle and defeat, manages to find ways to express her love. Kirkus Reviews calls Bahr’s book “an impressive debut with a haunting tale of a brief but bloody encounter on the road to Nashville…. A bleakly effective and economical account of men and women caught up in a bestial conflict.”

Listening to the Voices: Stories from the Flannery O’Connor Award

Edited by Charles East

University of Georgia Press (Paperback, $15.95, ISBN: 0820319945)

Publication date: March 1998

Blind Descent

A Novel by Nevada Barr

Putnam (Hardcover, $22.95, ISBN: 0399143718)

Publication date: March 1998

Description:

In Barr’s gripping new novel, park ranger Anna Pigeon faces personal demons as well as life-threatening dangers in an untamed underground wilderness. When a fellow ranger is injured in a caving accident, Anna swallows her paralyzing fear of small spaces and descends into Lechuguilla Cavern to help a friend in need.

The Glass Menagerie

A Play by Tennessee Williams

Buccaneer Books (Hardcover, ISBN: 1568496389)

Publication date: March 1998 (Reprint Edition)

Ornate with Smoke

Poems by Sterling Plumpp

Third World Press (Paperback, $12.95, ISBN: 0883781980)

Publication date: March 1998

The Beginning

By Patrick D. Smith
Reprint Edition (Originally published 1967)

Pineapple Press (Hardcover, $17.95, ISBN: 1561641529)

Publication date: March 1998

Description:

Just as the blacks and whites of a small Southern town think they’re moving toward racial equality, civil rights workers arrive and violence erupts. Patrick D. Smith, award-winning author, wrote The Beginning in the 1960s at the height of the Civil Rights movement. He offered an inside perspective on its effect on the people, both black and white, caught in the upheaval of the changing South. Thirty years have passed and it is time to bring this novel back to a new generation of readers to reassess the times and the decisions of those who lived through them.

Real Power: Lessons for Business from the Tao Te Ching

Nonfiction by James A. Autry and Stephen Mitchell

Putnam (Hardcover, $23.95, ISBN: 1573220892)

Publication date: April 1998

African American Inventors

By Otha Richard Sullivan

John Wiley (Library binding, $24.95, ISBN: 0471148040)

Reading level: Ages 9-12

Publication date: April 1998

Description from Booklist:

Although some of these inventors have had individual books written about them (Benjamin Banneker) and others have been included in other collective biographies (especially Madame C. J. Walker), there is enough variety and range to make this a worthwhile purchase. It is also a particularly engaging book to read; Sullivan highlights those aspects of the subjects’ lives that will interest readers the most and writes about them with insight. The book is attractive, too, with lots of historical engravings and photographs. Among the people profiled in the two-or three-page spreads are Garrett Morgan, who invented the gas mask; Dr. Charles Drew, who did pioneering research in blood donation; and John Moon, who developed floppy disks. Chronology; notes; bibliography. —Ilene Cooper.

The Blackgod

A Novel by J. Gregory Keyes

Ballantine (Mass Market Paperback, $6.99, ISBN: 0345418808)

Publication date: May 1998

Description from Kirkus Reviews (15 February 1997):

Sequel to The Waterborn (1996), Keyes’s fantasy about water-gods, magic, and destiny. The Changeling is the god of the River and the city Nhol with its royal family. Though most of the time slumbering, he wakes occasionally to arrange for the breeding of a human whose body he can inhabit. That body is presently occupied also by young Princess Hezhi of Nhol, but she’s fled to the horse-warrior Mang, along with her protector, Perkar, and his magic sword, Harka. Hezhi’s only hope of long-term survival is to kill the River, but to do this she must reach his source beneath the remote mountain She’leng; offering assistance is the powerful but untrustworthy Blackgod. The River, however, is determined to recapture Hezhi and send forth Ghe, an assassin once slain by Perkar, now reanimated and given magic powers to absorb ghosts and gods. To complicate matters, other parties have their own agendas. Eventually, She’leng is the scene of a mighty but baffling struggle in which various entities die, though some come back to life, and everything is resolved—to the author’s satisfaction if not the reader’s. An often strikingly imaginative but unedifyingly overcomplicated yarn that could’ve used a vigorous pruning and a stiff dose of logic; still, Waterborn fans will be jubilant. —Copyright © 1997 Kirkus Associates, LP.

The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

Letters by Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, Edited by Jay Tolson

W.W. Norton (Paperback, $14.00, ISBN: 0393317684)

Publication date: May 1998

Description:

In the late 1940s, Percy and Foote, friends since their teenage years in Greenville, Mississippi, began a correspondence that would last until Percy’s death in 1990. For this volume, Jay Tolson has selected, edited, and annotated the letters of these two remarkable writers to shed light on their relationship and their literary careers.

Geronimo Rex

A Novel by Barry Hannah

Grove Press (Paperback, $12.00, ISBN: 0802135692)

Publication date: May 1998

Description:

Barry Hannah’s first novel, Geronimo Rex, was awarded the William Faulkner Prize and nominated for the National Book Award. The novel depicts the life story of its main character, Harriman Monroe, from age 8 in Dream of Pines, Louisiana, to age 23, when he is newly married and enrolled in the graduate English program at the University of Arkansas. Inspired by the great Geronimo’s brash, outrageous rampage through the Old West, Harry takes on the American South of the 1950s and ’60s. Alongside the sex, love, lies, and lunacies of adolescent awakening, Harry also faces a world plagued by violent reality and giddy—like Harry himself—with a sense of unlimited possibility.

Endangered Species

A Novel by Nevada Barr

Avon (Paperback, $6.99, ISBN: 0380725835)

Publication date: May 1998

Description from Booklist (February 15, 1997):

Barr’s tough, likable park ranger heroine, Anna Pigeon, is back in another high-spirited outdoors adventure/mystery. Sent to isolated Cumberland Island National Seashore off the coast of Georgia on summer fire patrol, Anna is bored despite the natural beauty of the area. Then the seashore’s local ranger and his pilot are killed when their small plane crashes on the island. When Anna and her crew investigate, they find the plane was sabotaged. Anna develops a list of possible suspects, including some of her own crew. When the killer is finally revealed, even the usually unflappable Anna is shocked by the desperate cold-bloodedness of the crime. Anna’s no-nonsense view of life, unorthodox career, strong opinions, secret vulnerability, and soft heart make her unique among today’s current crop of female sleuths. Readers like Anna, and they like Barr’s engaging mysteries, which are as entertaining and thought provoking as they are fun to read. —Copyright © 1997 American Library Assocation.

The Moviegoer

A Novel by Walker Percy

Vintage (Paperback, $12.00, ISBN: 0375701966)

Publication date: May 1998

Description:

A winner of the National Book Award, this tale of a small-time stockbroker in search of something more—a “certifed reality” that eludes him everywhere except at the movies—established Percy as an insightful and grimly humorous storyteller. This elegantly written account of a young man’s search for signs of purpose in the universe is one of the great existential texts of the postwar era and is really funny besides. Binx Bolling, inveterate cinemaphile, contemplative rake and man of the periphery, tries hedonism and tries doing the right thing, but ultimately finds redemption (or at least the prospect of it) by taking a leap of faith and quite literally embracing what only seems irrational.

Have No Fear: The Charles Evers Story

Nonfiction by Charles Evers

John Wiley & Sons (Paperback, $12.95, ISBN: 0471296945)

Publication date: May 1998

Description from Booklist (1 September 1996)

The night in 1963 when Medgar Evers was shot was also the night John Kennedy gave perhaps his most powerful televised speech on civil rights. Evers’ murder made him a civil rights hero only slightly less well remembered than Martin and Malcolm, though it took more than 30 years and three trials to convict shooter Byron de la Beckwith. Older brother Charles shared Medgar’s commitment and activism but was also, as this memoir reveals, a businessman and sometime hustler interested in making lots of money; Medgar’s idealism often would have left his family short of cash without Charles’ help. Charles Evers’ entrepreneurial activities, legal and illegal, may explain his support for GOP solutions to many social problems. In addition, relationships he developed, as an activist and as the first African American mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, with presidents and other politicians may also have pushed him in this direction. Now past 70, Evers delivers his strong opinions as a talk radio host and, in Have No Fear, tells the story of his life, which is also inevitably a portrait of his martyred brother, of the Mississippi civil rights movement, and of the nation itself. —Copyright © 1996 American Library Association.

Newton’s Cannon

A Novel by J. Gregory Keyes

The Age of Unreason, Book One

Del Rey (Paperback, $14.00, ISBN: 0345406052)

Publication date: May 1998

Description from Kirkus Reviews:

First of a new fantasy series: In this alternate 1715, both science and alchemy work; young Ben Franklin, apprenticed to his printer brother James in Boston, begins to study the various alchemical devices—lights, weapons, faxes, and so on—that Isaac Newton has invented. Ben accidentally intercepts a communication on the “aether-schreiber”’ and helps solve the mathematical problem posed therein by an unknown scientist.

Soon, however, Ben’s being haunted by a weird, insubstantial demon that demands he cease his researches. Britain and France, meanwhile, fight a war using alchemical weapons. In France, Louis XIV, having taken an immortality serum and survived an assassination attempt, has been taken over by a demon, or malakus, like Ben’s. Nicolas Fatio de Duillier, a vengeful ex-student of Newton’s, uses Ben’s formula to alchemically attract a comet from space towards London. Scientific genius Adrienne de Montchevreuil, forced to become the king’s mistress, and helped by a secret society of women, labors to discover what Fatio has done.

Ben, threatened by his malakus, flees to London to warn Newton; the latter, preoccupied with unmasking a traitor, can’t stop or divert the comet. London is annihilated after a hasty evacuation, Ben becomes Newton’s apprentice, and Louis’s malakus moves on to beguile Czar Peter of Russia.

Keyes’s yarn (The Blackgod, 1997, etc.) is colorful, intriguing, and well handled, if somewhat difficult to swallow: Its hard to see how alchemy and science could both work. —Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Women with Men: Three Stories

By Richard Ford

Vintage (Paperback, $12.00, ISBN: 0679776680)

Publication date: May 1998

Description from Kirkus Reviews (15 May 1997):

A reader meeting Ford via these three pieces might wonder why laurels of the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner kind have befallen this (The Sportswriter, 1986; Independence Day, 1995) particular writer. He here offers two grinding tales of distasteful Americans in Paris and one clone-of-Hemingway story about a boyhood in Montana. In “The Womanizer,” Martin Austin, married but childless, becomes interested in a Frenchwoman named Josephine when he’s in Paris on business. The difficulty is—for Austin and for the reader—that he seems not to know what he wants either with her or from her, with the result that Ford offers page after page of clunky vacuity as if simply to put something between start and the end of the story (“He wasn’t looking for a better life. He wasn’t looking for anything. He loved his wife, and he hoped to present to Josephine Belliard a different human perspective from the ones she might be used to”). More revelatory in this unrelenting non-tale is what Ford says of Austin later—that “very little pleased him much at all.” The main character in “Occidentals” is, if anything, even more dreary than Austin. Ex-academic Charley Matthews has written a novel about his divorce and is now quite joylessly in Paris—with mistress Helen—to meet his French publisher and translator. Trouble is, as he quickly discovers, both are out of town for a few days, so he’ll have to wait. Helen—a lively ex-dancer who’s suffering from cancer—tries to cheer him up; he grows only more hatefully dour, though, until she takes things—perhaps believably to some—into her own hands. “Jealousy” makes for a breath of fresh air with its Montana landscape and Hemingway-esque economies—as a boy, accompanied by his attractive young aunt, witnesses a saloon killing on a snowy night before catching a train to Seattle. Scraps and leavings, seemingly, caught between the labored and the imitated. —Copyright © 1997, Kirkus Associates, LP.

Cruel as the Grave: A Sheriff Bramlett Mystery

A Novel by John Armistead

Dell (Paperback, $5.99, ISBN: 0440224373)

Publication date: June 1998

Description:

Bramlett keeps tabs on the country roads of Chakchiuma County, rich folks as well as poor, white as well as black. When a salesman is gunned down in the sleepy town of Sheffield, the sheriff digs into clues that connect the victim to an unsolved murder case that has perplexed Bramlett for three years. Digging deeper into witnesses’ memories, Bramlett heads for the dangerous territory where race, passion, and hatred meet and a ruthless killer awaits.

Breaking Through to the Next Level

Nonfiction by Zig Ziglar

Honor Books (Paperback, $6.99, ISBN: 1562924958)

Publication date: June 1998

Dreamer: A Novel

By Jack Butler

Knopf (Hardcover, $25.00, ISBN: 0679446656)

Publication date: June 1998

Description from Kirkus Reviews (May 11, 1998):

The author of two send-ups of southern politics, Jujitsu for Christ (1986) and Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock (1993), as well as a well-received SF novel, Nightshade (1989), makes another departure: a thriller centered on dream research. With a little help from a pharmaceutical company, Jody Nightwood has set up her dream research lab with her old friend Toni in Santa Fe. The two treat sleep disorders such as apnea and insomnia by day, while Jody records and analyzes dreams by night—her own dreams included. She hopes to develop a sort of unified field theory of dreaming, finally dislodging Freud’s notions that dreams have to do with the issues facing us while we are awake, and also that they’re mostly about sex. Jung’s archetypes and idea of a collective unconscious enjoy more successful currency in trendy Santa Fe, and Butler has a good time satirizing not only Jung but regressive therapy, channeling, militant vegetarianism, Carlos Casteñeda, and language poetry. Much of what Butler has to say about dreams is compelling, and when malevolent aspects of Jody’s dreams begin to dominate even her waking life, every reader will be intrigued. Unfortunately, though, Butler also layers on a trite thriller plot in which a CIA maverick, Benjamin George, assigns two klutzy gay men to tail Jody and invade her computer files, etc., because Benjamin has a theory that true artificial intelligence will be achieved once dreams can be programmed into it. Meanwhile, a rival set of spies bump into Benjamin’s own, but it’s hard to care, since these are only stock characters and Benjamin’s theory never seemed plausible in the first place. Anyone drawn to Butler’s sometimes poetic considerations of dreaming will simply be irritated. The espionage plot, which Butler handles poorly, doesn’t graft well with his novel of ideas, which he handles well. Copyright © 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP.

Not About Nightingales

A Play by Tennessee Williams, edited by Allean Hale

New Directions (Paperback, $10.95, ISBN: 0811213803)

Publication date: June 1998

A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Nonfiction by Jimmy Buffett

Random House (Hardcover, $24.95, ISBN: 0679435271)

Publication date: June 1998

Description from Kirkus Reviews (15 June 1998):

This first nonfiction outing from singer/songwriter Buffett (Where Is Joe Merchant?, 1992, etc.) is more food for his Parrothead fans, but there is some fine writing along with the self-revelation. Half autobiography and half travelogue, this volume recounts a trip by Buffett and his family to the Caribbean over one Christmas holiday to celebrate the writer’s 50th birthday. Buffett is a licensed pilot, and his personal weakness is for seaplanes, so it’s primarily in this sort of craft that the family’s journey takes place. While giving beautiful descriptions of the locales to which he travels (including a very attractive portrait of Key West, from which he sets out), Buffett intersperses recollections of his first, short-lived marriage, his experiences in college and avoiding the Vietnam draft, and his brief employment at Billboard magazine’s Nashville bureau before becoming a professional musician. In the meantime, he carries his reader seamlessly through the Cayman Islands, Costa Rica, Colombia, the Amazon basin, and Trinidad and Tobago. Buffett shows that he is a keen observer of Latin American culture and also that he can “pass in these surroundings when he needs to. It’s perhaps on this latter point that this book finds its principal weakness. Buffett tends toward preachiness in addressing his mostly landlubber readers, as when he decries the seeming American inability to learn a second language while most Caribbeans can speak English; elsewhere he attacks “ugly Americans out there making it harder for us more-connected-to-the-local-culture types. On the other hand, he seems right on the money when he observes that the drug war of the 1980s did little to stop trafficking in the area and that turning wetlands into helicopter pads for drug agents isn’t going to offer any additional help. Both Parrotheads and those with a taste for the Caribbean find something for their palates here. Copyright © 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

When First We Deceive

A Novel by Charles Wilson

Leisure Books (Paperback, $4.50, ISBN: 0843944013)

Publication date: June 1998 (Reprint Edition)

Where the Sea Used to Be

A Novel by Rick Bass

Houghton Mifflin (Hardcover, $25.00, ISBN: 0395770157)

Publication date: June 1998

Description from Kirkus Reviews:

In sensuous descriptive prose whose incantatory rhythms invite comparison with both Lawrence and Faulkner, Bass tells a take of familial, sexual, and in a way, fraternal conflict among four uneasily related characters who are, simultaneously, denizens, preservers, and destroyers of Montana’s north country near the Canadian border. Old Dudley is a veteran oil driller who sends Wallis, a young geologist in his employ, to that wilderness to seek oil. It’s an expression of Dudley’s power, as is well known by his 40ish daughter Mel, a schoolteacher and naturalist who “follows the lives of wolves, and by Wallis’s predecessor (and Mel’s former lover) Matthew — and as will be learned by Wallis, a young Texan still mourning the deaths of his loved ones. Though the wary relationship of Wallis and Mel (his host, and mentor in this strange new world) is delineated with great skill, and though the story of their slowly developing closeness is punctuated by vividly rendered episodes (digging a limousine out of the snow, observing a summer drought and an ensuing forest fire), the story is essentially an extended meditation on the prickly, necessary interrelationship of man and the natural world. Variety is provided by a handful of lively townspeople (reminiscent of TV’s Northern Exposure) and by lengthy excerpts from old Dudley’s notebooks (as Wallis reads them), which comprise an almost mystical interpretation of how the earth’s physical features were formed (“It’s kind of like the Bible, Dudley explains). But one reads this novel for such descriptive passages as this: “Flaming trees and burning snags and limbs...falling like swords with whiffs of sound like the cutting of paper with sharp scissors.”

The story’s drama builds not through action per se, but from the intensity of its characters’ observations of themselves and of the exterior world that nutures, tests, and reshapes them. Read it slowly, and it won’t let go of you.

Jackson: The Good Life

By Walt Grayson

Towery (Hardcover, $44.95, ISBN: 1881096572)

Publication date: June 1998

Description:

“When pressed by the question, ‘Well, what is so great about Jackson?’ we’re stuck for superlatives. We don’t have the South’s tallest buildings or the largest population or the most money. Yet, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of things about this town that we like, or we wouldn’t bother to live here.”

So says our storyteller and broadcaster Walt Grayson in Jackson: The Good Life as he sets out to name a few of the many elements that make his adopted hometown such a fascinating place. It’s a crossroads city, where cultures merge and creative forces are born. It’s also the state capital, with all the power and prestige that comes with being the seat of Mississippi’s government.

Put these forces together, writes Grayson, and you end up with a city that is rich and diverse—“a big old country town” that is quickly outgrowing its Deep South roots to become one of the New South’s most desirable locales.

Aided by hundreds of outstanding images collected by photography editor Gib Ford, Grayson creates a mosaic of tales and images that help define what makes Jackson such a special place to call home.

“Only when you put all of the parts together does a total picture emerge.” Grayson concludes, “It’s like experiencing a kaleidoscope: It’s the overall pattern formed from all of the many changing colors that you’re really seeing.” Take a closer look, and you too can experience the good life that Grayson and his fellow Jacksonians already know so well.

Pioneer Women: The Lives of Women on the Frontier

Nonfiction by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith

University of Oklahoma Press (Paperback, $16.05, ISBN: 0806130547)

Publication date: June 1998

Description from Booklist :

The rarely seen and startlingly vital black-and-white photographs in this volume capture the fortitude and pride of the clear-eyed women of the frontier, women who had to practice all the tender arts of nurturing a family under the most rugged of circumstances. Peavy and Smith cut through all the myths of frontier life in their frank and engaging commentary, getting down to the cold, gritty facts under such headings as “Keeping Spirits Up,” “Night Fears,” “Warding Off Insects and Animals,” and “Little Ones Lost.” This litany alludes to the loneliness and isolation of pioneer existence, where every act, from securing clean drinking water to making clothes, required long, hard labor, and where pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood often involved as much tragedy as joy. Little-discussed issues, such as marriages between Anglo men and Indian and Hispanic women, are examined, as are the lives of women who found employment outside the homestead as teachers, physicians, businesswomen, journalists, and even prostitutes. A book as fresh and inspiring as a bright, breezy day on the plains. —Donna Seaman

Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading

Edited by David Galef

Wayne State University Press (Paperback, $24.95, ISBN: 0814326471)

Publication date: July 1998

Description:

How does our perspective change after the first reading? What distortions emerge through repetition? How do we determine what's worth rereading, and what is the role of such repetition in our lives? What are the gains and losses? Second Thoughts answers these questions and investigates the phenomenon of rereading narrative texts from various genres. Contributors of this volume explore rereading children's literature, rereading Proust, how rereading functions in the oral tradition, and why so many people reread romances. Essays range from rereading Shakespeare and Spenser to rereading on a desert island and the rereading of hypertext.

Divorce Boxing

Poetry by David Chapman Berry

Eastern Washington University Press (Hardcover, ISBN: 0910055432)

Publication date: July 1998

Auqustus Baldwin Longstreet’s ‘Georgia Scenes’ Completed

Edited by David Rachels

University of Georgia Press (Paperback, $19.95, ISBN: 0820320196)

Publication date: August 1998

Confessions of a Grieving Christian

By Zig Ziglar

Thomas Nelson (Hardcover, $17.99, ISBN: 0840791828)

Publication date: August 1998

Description:

Bestselling author Zig Ziglar tells his personal story of loss, grief, and renewal in this comforting and encouraging book.

A Land Remembered

By Patrick D. Smith

Reprint Edition (Originally published 1984)

Pineapple Press (Paperback, $12.95, ISBN: 1561641162)

Publication date: August 1998

Description:

In this best-selling novel, now accessible to young readers, Patrick Smith tells the story of three generations of the MacIveys, a Florida family who battle the hardships of the frontier to rise from a dirt-poor Cracker life to the wealth and standing of real estate tycoons. The story opens in 1858, when Tobias MacIvey arrives in the Florida wilderness to start a new life, and ends in 1968 with Solomon MacIvey, who realizes that the land has been exploited far beyond human need. Between is a sweeping story rich in Florida history.

A teacher’s manual is available for using A Land Remembered to teach language arts, social studies, and science coordinated with the Sunshine State Standards of the Florida Department of Education.

Forever Island and Allapattah

By Patrick D. Smith
Reprint Edition (Originally published 1973, 1979)

Pineapple Press (Hardcover, $18.95, ISBN: 0910923426)

Publication date: August 1998

Description:

Turning Japanese

A Novel by David Galef

Permanent Press (Hardcover, $24, ISBN: 1579620108)

Publication date: September 1998

Description from Booklist (19 August 1998):

Spending a year in Japan after graduating from Cornell in the late 1970s was Cricket Collins’ plan. But the year stretched to almost five because it was all so seductive: the work (teaching conversational English) was plentiful and profitable; the controlled society (which allowed foreigners a certain latitude) was appealing; and he liked the food. Increasingly immersed in a culture so different from his own, Collins eventually fits in neither. The problem with viewing the expatriate experience through the lens of this protagonist is that Collins is less than stable to begin with. He grew up solitary, the only child of a mother who died when he was nine and a distant father, and in Japan he commits acts of petty theft, hears—and answers—voices in his head of persons living and dead, and finally shouts insults at his students. So it is no surprise that his story turns dark. Interesting from a cross-cultural standpoint but ultimately lacking uplift. Review By Michele Leber. —Copyright © 1998, American Library Association. All rights reserved.

The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

Fiction by Rick Bass

Mariner Books (Paperback, $12.00, ISBN: 0395924758)

Publication date: September 1998

Description:

About the wilderness, I need some persuading. Yet at their best the three novellas in The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness provide that persuasion. Varied in their settings and characters, unified in their mood and central concerns, they offer an unsentimental but ecstatic portrayal of the physical world. (Michael Gorra, The New York Times Book Review)

The three novellas that constitute The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness resonate with the myriad links, like perceptions of space and time, that connect viewer and viewed, subject and object, and persistently complicate such points of view. Each link is only relative, but each represents on an elemental level an attempt to bridge the gap between the ineffable awe and apartness that nature invokes…. In this poignant meditation, Bass has carved a curious and meaningful niche for himself among nature writers. (Thomas Curwen, The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review)

Divorce Boxing

Poetry by David Chapman Berry

University of Washington Press (Paperback, $14.00, ISBN: 0910055432)

Publication date: September 1998

My Brother Bill

Biography by John Faulkner

Hill Street Press (Paperback, $16.50, ISBN: 1892514001)

Publication date: September 1998 (Reprint Edition)

Sarah Conley: A Novel

Fiction by Ellen Gilchrist

Little Brown & Company (Paperback, $13.00, ISBN: 0316314927)

Publication date: September 1998

Description:

In her 15th book, Ellen Gilchrist offers the story of a woman charting the middle passages of a rich and turbulent life. Sarah Conley is an editor at Time magazine and a successful novelist, but her progress is checked by her unresolved past: as the novel opens, an old love for her best friend’s husband is rekindled.... Unfortunately, while Gilchrist raises themes worthy of good fiction, she develops them with strategies better suited to soap opera. (Patrick Giles, The New York Times Book Review)

Flights of Angels

Short stories by Ellen Gilchrist

Little, Brown, & Company (Hardcover, $24.00, ISBN: 0316314862)

Publication date: September 1998

Description from Kirkus Reviews (15 August 1998):

Gilchrist rounds up the usual suspects “and a few newcomers” in an uneven but always readable eighth collection. Yes, Rhoda, many of the other Mannings, and their various cousins are back: since In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), they have provided Gilchrist with a convenient, semi-autobiographical framework through which to explore both the madness of family ties and the violent yet homey atmosphere of the American South. But a number of new, generally younger characters give the collection this time a shot in the arm: Gilchrist displays a nice grasp of the apprehensive yet anticipatory, all-possibilities-are-open attitude of young adults in “Excitement at Drake Field,” “The Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor,” and a series of stories about teenager Aurora Harris, though she can’t resist immersing these people too in intricate family and social networks. (Southerners like Gilchrist, it seems, don’t do alienation “just the mingled security and oppression of an omnipresent support/undermine system.”) The author’s political opinions, more openly displayed than usual, also give bite to some lazy writing. Gilchrist slings adjectives with abandon (“fine young smooth thick golden beloved skin”), and the impact of a tough, uncompromising lie about Aurora’s decision to have an abortion (“The Triumph of Reason”) is blunted “for the attentive reader” by the fact that the subsequent linked story is dated three months earlier in 1997 but, by internal evidence, takes place ten months later. Too bad, because “Have a Wonderful Nice Walk” has some delicious humor and a vintage Gilchrist line: “Well, that’s the past and the past is a swamp where we wander at our peril.” Nonetheless, her characters wander there frequently, and for the most part we’re glad they do. Gilchrist has always excelled in delineating smart, sexy, crazy people struggling to come to terms with a legacy of beloved, bewildering progenitors. A mixed bag, but Gilchrist’s emotional candor and gift for storytelling make it appealing. —Copyright © 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mule Trader: Ray Lum’s Tales of Horses, Mules and Men

By William R. Ferris, foreword by Eudora Welty

University Press of Mississippi (Paperback, $16.00, ISBN: 1578060869)

Publication date: September 1998

Description:

First published in 1992 as You Live and Learn. Then You Die and Forget It All, Mule Trader preserves the true story of Ray Lum (1891-1979), a mule skinner, a livestock trader, an auctioneer, and an American original. Recorded over several years, the book captures Lum’s colorful folk dialect as well as Lum’s natural storytelling technique.

Veneer: Stories

Fiction by Steve Yarbrough

University of Missouri Press (Paperback, $17.95, ISBN: 0826211852)

Publication date: September 1998

Description:

Fellow Mississippi writer Lewis Nordan writes, “Steve Yarbrough’s work dazzles me in every way. The Mississippi that he writes about is not one of racist sheriffs and magnolias but of offshore gambling and movie stars and forty-dollar steaks; its veneer is no less glittering than the California he writes about with equal skill and insight, and what is revealed beneath these American surfaces is the sad depths of our common humanity. Yarbrough is a thoroughly American writer, and the news of his superior talent needs to be heralded throughout this land that he writes of with such compassion and love.”

Eudora Welty: Complete Novels

Fiction by Eudora Welty, edited by Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling

Library of America (Hardcover, $35.00, ISBN: 188301154X)

Publication date: September 1998

Description:

This two-volume collection reveals the singular imaginative power of one of America’s most admired Southern writers. Complete Novels gathers all of Welty’s longer fiction, from The Robber Bridegroom (1942) to her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Optimist’s Daughter (1972).

Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays and Memoir

Fiction by Eudora Welty, edited by Richard Ford and Michael Kreyling

Library of America (Hardcover, $35, ISBN: 1883011558)

Publication date: September 1998

Description from Kirkus Reviews: (June 15, 1998)

The Library’s first publication of the work of a living author efficiently showcases the universally praised fiction of a southern regionalist whose early stories were championed by such notable contemporaries as Katherine Anne Porter and Robert Penn Warren. The Stories volume includes 41 pungent and resonant tales (counting as individual stories the seven chapters of Welty’s 1949 masterpiece, The Golden Apples) that unforgettably display their creator’s sure grasp of racy local idiom and color (“Why I Live at the P.O.,” “Powerhouse”), compassionate scrutiny of social inequity and racist violence (the fable-like “A Worn Path” and the furious “Where is the Voice Coming From?”), and mischievous inventive power (“Petrified Man,” “The Wide Net”). The compan