No comments about Bibb County, Alabama: The First Hundred Years.

1 comments about The Seventeenth Alabama Infantry: A Regimental History and Roster.

1. Illene Thompson and her husband, the late Wilbur Thompson of Huntsville, Alabama, worked years researching Confederate soldiers who served in the 17th Alabama Infantry during the American Civil War, 1861-1865. The biographical sections on each soldier reflect extensive research in original sources and great attention to detail. Each soldier's entry may include alternate names and initials; dates and places of birth, death and burial; military service such as whether wounded, hospitalized, reported missing, captured, killed in action or death from other causes, and more. For anyone researching families in Butler, Lowndes and Montgomery counties and the surrounding south Alabama area who had men serving in the Confederacy, this is a great source book. For those of you interested in military history, the accounts of orders and deployments, leaders and soldiers, camps, marches, skirmishes and battles involving the 17th Alabama provide fascinating eye-witness history with quotes from original letters, diaries and other contemporary documents.

1 comments about Creek Indian History: A Historical Narrative of the Genealogy, Traditions and Downfall of the Ispocoga or Creek Indian Tribe of Indians by One of the Tribe, George Stiggins (1788-1845).

1. For a good primary source document of the Creek Nation from one of their own, this is an excellent source. There is a discussion not only of their customs in Alabama, but also of the events of Creek Wars, including a mention of Fort Mims. Unfortunately as a genealogical resource for those of the Tensaw area, this is somewhat lacking (though it was never intended for that purpose).
   
   
   Maybe I'm partial, because I'm a descendant of Mr. Stiggins. ;)

No comments about Caring, Curing, Coping: Nurse, Physician, and Patient Relationships.

No comments about Love and Duty: Amelia and Josiah Gorgas and Their Family.

No comments about First Alabama Cavalry, USA: Homage to Patriotism.

No comments about Florida Place-Names of Indian Origin and Seminole Personal Names (Alabama Fire Ant).

No comments about Researching African American Genealogy in Alabama.

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. This book is an amazing work of art. At times it's baffling, and at times almost impertinent--like when the author decides to describe every object in an entire home, and yet in all these things and in all the conflicting emotions it evokes, it creates a mood and a feeling and a setting that will seep into your skin and fog your brain for months.
   The writing is beautiful, the story it tells--of poor, sharecropping, depression-era families--is heartbreaking, and the experience of reading about it all is like a baptism by fire. This book just might re-wire your brain.
   I think this is a much better read than Agee's "A Death in the Family," and that one won the Pulitzer Prize. Read this, for sure.
   I read it on a bus trip across Guatemala, and the way Agee's descriptions of the old southern poverty fit the poor little towns full of Guatemalan coffee pickers was uncanny.
   Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and let us start with James Agee.
   
   UPDATE: It's years later, and this book has never stopped haunting me. I think of it almost daily. If I were to review it today, I would definitely give it Five Stars.



2. The eloquence of composition surely necessitated infinite use of superlatives and verbs, resulting in a requisite painstaking remostrance to the reader, thus fettering the effusion and disembogulation of the document. In other words, wouldn't it have been better to just leave all of the fluff out of the book and just write as if the reader is someone other than the Queen of England? If you can weed through all of excessive use poems and verbs, it's a halfway decent book



3. 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?



4. James Agee's painstaking and honest masterpiece is an exercise in empathy. It is a beautiful, tortured writing that speaks to both the deplorable conditions of the Depression-era souther sharecropper and the humanity of trying to present them in a favorable light.
   
   Agee's writing style is at times erratic-- which helps to give the book its character. It is often self-doubting, as Agee calls himself a spy and frequently second guesses his role in accurately reporting the families' lives. Beautifully done and a groundbreaking classic in ethnographic fieldwork-- a must read!



5. 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.