Black History Month Reads: A Review of the Past Year's Reads

 

    A review of the black history themed  books that I've read since last February

Kugels and Collards:  Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina.  Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey.  University of South Carolina Press, 2023.  256 pages.

South Carolina became home to some of the first Jews to ever live in North America, with the first recorded Jewish settlers arriving in Charleston in the 1690s.  Over the centuries, more Jews arrived, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, then Germans, Russians, and Eastern Europeans, at the turn of the 20th century and, later, escaping the Holocaust.  Jewish families adapted and blended their traditions and foodways in their new home, influenced by contact with other ethnic groups, black and white, and by new and different ingredients that they found.  The result is this history and cookbook, containing some 80 recipes alongside dozens of stories about their creation and history.  As I've said lots of times in the past, it's hard to go wrong when combining food and history, and this book is a revealing insight into a particular culture.

Five-Carat Soul.  James McBride.  Riverhead Books, 2017.  320 pages.

This is a collection of previously unpublished short stories by one of my favorite writers of fiction, James McBride.  As one familiar with McBride's work would expect, the stories are full of deep insights into human nature and vivid characterizations, and most of them are  history related.  An antiques dealer discovers that a legendary toy commissioned by Civil War General Robert E. Lee now sits in the home of a black minister in Queens. Five strangers find themselves thrown together and face unexpected judgment. An American president draws inspiration from a conversation he overhears in a stable. Members of The Five-Carat Soul Bottom Bone Band recount stories from their own messy and hilarious lives. The final story is set in a zoo, with the animals as the characters grappling with the big questions about life, the natural order of things, and their relationship with the "smellies" - humans.  Each story is a treat.

The Residence:  Inside the Private World of the White House.  Kate Anderson Brower.  Harper, 2015.  320 pages.

If you enjoyed the murder mystery comedy "The Residence"  on Netflix, as I did,  you may have been surprised, as I was, to learn that it was inspired by a nonfiction book, a history of the White House through the eyes and recollections of the men and women who work there daily as maids, butlers, ushers, cooks, plumbers, electricians, engineers, florists, nannies, and even calligraphers and have devoted their lives to serving the nation by saving its First Families, often for decades.  The author interviewed dozens of employees and wrote a truly fascinating account of what goes on behind the scenes and out of sight of the public.  The main focus is on the administrations from Kennedy to Obama, but there are historical tidbits that cover the entire history of the White House, going back to its first occupants, John and Abigail Adams.  Getting the employees to share their experiences was quite a feat.  Only a handful of White House employees have ever published their memoirs, and there is a universal sense of pride and professionalism among the employees of "The House," as they call it, that exists almost nowhere else.  Employees are fiercely protective of the families that employ them and often reveal very little about their work even to friends and family members, sometimes not even revealing to acquaintances where they work.  For many, telling stories in public was unthinkable. Their work is demanding and draining, but they often form deep and lasting relationships with each other and with the Presidents and their families. This was a great read, a very informative and entertaining look at how things work, the people that make it work every day, and the First Families of the past 50 years.  (Readers may be surprised to learn which families, and family members, are the most and least fondly remembered.)

Harriet Tubman Live in Concert.  Bob the Drag Queen.  Gallery Books, 2025.  239 pages.  (Audio version 4hrs, 17 minutes)

Wow!  I had no idea what to expect when I first learned about this book, but I immediately pre-ordered it.  We've been fans of Bob the Drag Queen since his first appearance on "RuPaul's Drag Race" and have seen him on a couple of stand-up comedy tours, but a book about Harriet Tubman?  It blew me away.  Pure creative genius and one of the most original things that I've read in a very long time.

Picture it:  NYC, present day.  People from the past, including many major historical figures have suddenly returned to life.  There's no explanation, almost no attention paid to it in the story.  It's just the mechanism which makes the story possible.  Don't worry about it.  "The Returned" live their lives and integrate into the present.  Cleopatra, for example, becomes a hugely successful makeup and fashion Instagram influencer.  Harriet Tubman, and several of the people she led to freedom on the Underground Railroad, have returned, and she's on a mission, again - a mission from God.  She contacts Darnell Williams, a once-hot hip-hop writer and producer whose music career is struggling, and tells him that God has chosen him to assist in her mission.  While one might deny God, nobody dares to say No to Harriet Tubman!  Her mission:  create an epic hip-hop album and stage show, a la "Hamilton."  In her first life, Tubman freed about 700 people from physical chains, and many more indirectly.  Now, she's back to free millions from metaphorical chains of all sorts.  Darnell has his own metaphorical chains to break, and he goes to work, with Harriet's guidance, to break free into his own authentic self.  This is a fantastic work, and I so hope that Bob is actively working to create a real album and show; it could be bigger than "Hamilton."  I highly recommend the audio version.  Not only is Bob the reader, but it also includes two of the show's songs at the end.  (NOTE:  The photo above was generated using AI.  There is no known photo of Harriet Tubman spittin' fire.)

A Perfect Frenzy:  A Royal Governor, His Black Allies and the Crisis That Spurred the American Revolution.  Andrew Lawler.  Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025.  544 pages.   

While the American Revolution officially began in April 1775 at Lexington and Concord, two major events occurred in January 1776 that were pivotal in fueling the Patriot cause.  Thomas Paine published his pamphlet "Common Sense" laying out the arguments for independence.  The other event is perhaps less known today, but it was perhaps even more effective:  On January 1, 1776, the city of Norfolk, Virginia was burned to the ground.  No other American city in history has been completely and utterly destroyed as Norfolk was.  Twenty years later, visitors were still stunned by the vast ruins and fields of debris.  For 250 years, the Norfolk fire has been blamed on the British, specifically the royal governor Lord Dunmore.  As a result of the fire, Dunmore was vilified on both sides of the Atlantic and labeled a war criminal.  Patriot propaganda painted him as a cruel and witless libertine who hosted huge orgies with enslaved women in the Governor's Palace when he wasn't wantonly destroying the lives of his subjects.  Following the Norfolk fire, Dunmore was even shunned by his peers in the House of Lords who believed that he had gone too far.  Dunmore died in a state of ignominy, and his family was reduced to relative poverty, ostracized by the British upper class.  

The kicker?  Dunmore and the British didn't destroy Norfolk.  THE PATRIOTS INTENTIONALLY BURNED THE CITY TO THE GROUND, and this fact was always known.  The Patriot propaganda machine used the destruction to maximum advantage to stir patriotic fervor. The fact is that Norfolk was a Loyalist stronghold, and British warships did destroy a few dozen structures, mainly warehouses and docks, but 95% of the buildings destroyed were intentionally ignited by Patriot troops under orders from Patriot officers and political figures. Why? They wanted to punish Norfolk for being strongly Loyalist, and Dunmore, once extremely popular and respected governor among the landed gentry and yeoman farmers alike, had crossed the line.  He recruited and armed free and enslaved black Virginians to fight for Britain, promising freedom in return.  This book tells a great, formerly untold, story and illustrates that history is extremely complicated and never just black and white.  In this situation, you have black and white Patriots wearing engraved brass breastplates or embroidered shirts saying "Liberty or Death" going into battle against Dunmore's black Ethiopian Regiment troops wearing breastplates engraved with "Liberty For Slaves."

The Vice President's Black Wife:  The Untold Life of Julia Chinn.  Amrita Chakrabati Myers.  The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.  296 pages.

Even the buffest of history buffs outside of Kentucky have probably never heard of Richard Mentor Johnson, the ninth Vice President of the United States and presidential contender who was a US Representative and Senator for years and whose political career was enhanced by stories that he was the man who killed Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames. His family was among the first white settlers of Kentucky and was a prominent family in the area of Georgetown for decades.  However, Johnson's story goes much deeper, and it is an incredibly important and quintessential part of southern history and the legacy of slavery.   

For six months each year, Johnson lived in a boarding house in Washington while doing the young nation's business by day and attending the young society's most exclusive society affairs by night.  As far as Washingtonians knew, he was a lifelong bachelor.  His Kentucky neighbors knew different, and, later, political opponents used that knowledge to tarnish his career and to thwart his presidential aspirations.  The secret?   He was married.  To an enslaved woman that he "owned," a woman named Julia Chinn.  He and Julia had two daughters who were legally his property as well.  He never officially freed wither Julia or his daughters.  Julia died enslaved, and her daughters weren't freed until the ratification of the 13th amendment.  That doesn't make Johnson that unique.  The history of American slavery is the history of interracial sex, consensual and not consensual.  Slaveowners viewed enslaved women as their sexual property, and that view was universally accepted even if it was not stated aloud.  Slaveowners raped, cajoled, bribed.  Some treated their concubines as wives.  Some freed their lovers and children. Some sold them when there was too much gossip and people started noticing resemblances.  A few left their property to their enslaved or freed wives or children.  

Johnson stands out because he called Julia his wife.  The preacher of the church that Johnson's family co-founded married them.  He gave Julia complete and total authority to run his plantation and the Choctaw Academy (a federally funded school for young Choctaw men that provided a major income for Johnson) that was located on his property.  His daughters married local white men, and they and their descendants have "passed" ever since, with the vast majority of their descendants never knowing their family history until the last few years.  In this book, Myers digs deep to tell Julia's story for the first time.  Because there isn't much of a paper trail,  (Johnson's papers are sparse for such a political man.  It is thought that his brothers destroyed most of his letters and documents upon his death due to shame.), there is a lot of "could have," "probably," "possibly," and the like, and a lot of references to similar stories, but she does an excellent job of telling the important story and bringing it to light.  Important and extraordinarily complicated.  Spoiler alert: don't go thinking Johnson was heroic.

The Inheritors:  An Intimate Portrait of South Africa's Racial Reckoning.  Eve Fairbanks.  Simon & Schuster, 2022. 416 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, South Africa underwent a revolution, scrapping more than a century of harshly enforced racial segregation and minority rule and instantly pivoting to a majority-rule democracy - an unparalleled transformation.  Americans being Americans, and American media being American media, South Africa basically ceased to exist at that point because we have almost no attention span for domestic events in foreign countries, especially African countries.  The Inheritors provides an insight into that transformation for American readers, primarily through the experiences of three South Africans: Dipuo, a young black woman and anti-apartheid organizer, Malaika, her daughter born around the time of the transition, and Christo, a white Afrikaans farm boy who was one of the last South Africans drafted to fight in Angola.  Eve Fairbanks built relationships with the three over the course of a decade, and she basically allows them to tell their stories.  Readers learn about the struggles of the country through the struggles of these individuals as they try to cope with unprecedented change.  It's an extremely moving, enlightening, and thought-provoking book.

She Came To Slay:  The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman.  Erica Armstrong Dunbar.  37 Ink, 2019.  176 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

If any American deserves a fresh, thoroughly researched, well-written, originally illustrated, biography that is equally accessible and enjoyable for everyone from grade school to adulthood, it is Harriet Tubman, and this is the book.  Of course, we all know the basics, that Tubman was the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad who personally escorted hundreds enslaved people to freedom after her own escape.  Some of us may know of her long career as an abolitionist before the Civil War and her service as a spy and nurse during the Civil War.  Fewer know that she became the first woman to lead an armed combat mission - a very consequential mission.  Even after the war, she never stopped, becoming an active suffragist and an advocate for veterans and for the aged.  Tubman's always been near the top of my list of greatest Americans, and this biography is great introduction to her life for yourself and for any younger readers in your life.  

The Fifties:  An Underground History.  James R. Gaines.  Simon & Schuster, 2023.  288 pages.  Thanks to Simon & Schuster for the review copy.

Too many people think of the 1950s as a decade of conformity and complacency, picturing sock hops, soda fountains, and poodle skirts, but, as I tried to impress upon my students each year, there was always turbulence under that placid surface.  There was the rise of rock and roll and teenage rebellion which shocked older generations.  Beatniks challenged middle-class norms.  Artists shook up the art world.  The Red Scare and the Lavender Scare sent shock waves through government and society.  The civil rights and feminist movements started ramping up.  There was a lot of angst, anger, confusion, and conflict.  This book celebrates several individuals who were brave enough to stand - often alone - on their principles and lead fights that they believed needed fighting.  In particular, Gaines selects gay rights, feminism, civil rights, and environmental movements.  A couple of the people discussed are familiar names, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, and Rachel Carson for example, but the others aren't nearly as well known, or as celebrated as they should be.  There's Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and computer scientist who is considered the father of cybernetics, the forerunner of Artificial Intelligence.  There's Harry Hay who first envisioned a national gay rights movement in the 1940s.  There's Pauli Murray whose law school thesis provided much of the legal basis for Thurgood Marshall's arguments in Brown vs Board of Education and whose legal work made sexual discrimination unconstitutional. Gerda Lerner pioneered the concept of women's history as an academic field, despite being told by superiors and colleagues that there wasn't enough material to study.  Isaac Woodard was a black WWII veteran who was blinded by a South Carolina sheriff because he dared to look him in the eye.  These are all important stories that should be shared.  This book should be widely read.  Almost makes me wish that I was back in the classroom in order to share them. ... Almost.

Ring Shout.  P. Djeli Clark.  Tor Nightfire, 2025 (paperback, originally 2020).  192 pages.

If you liked the movie "Sinners," or other horror films by directors like Ryan Coogler and Jordan Peele, then this is the book for you.  It's horror, fantasy, and history all wrapped in one virtually non-stop action package.  The setting is 1922 in Macon and Stone Mountain Georgia.  The Ku Klux Klan has been reborn following the release of the movie "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915.  As black veterans returned from World War I and started standing up for their civil rights in Jim Crow America, the Klan mobilized and ramped up violence in response.  The Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, and a spike in lynchings are just some of the events referenced in this book.  In Clark's re-imagining, the KKK actually consists of two factions, the Klan, comprising the average American racists, and the Ku Kluxes who are actually demonic monsters created and fed by hate and who only exist by stirring and escalating hate.  A small band of women forms for the purpose of destroying the Ku Kluxes.  There's Maryse, armed with a magical sword gifted to her by three spiritual aunties who appear to her in visions, Sadie, a sharpshooter, and Chef, who disguised herself as a man and fought as a Harlem Hellfighter in WWI.  They're aided by Maryse's spiritual advisor Nana Jean and Molly, a self-taught Choctaw scientist and engineer who devises weapons and strategies along with her female apprentices, and Emma, a German Jewish social revolutionary communist.  Following some skirmishes and a major Klux attack on a juke joint in Macon, everybody heads to Stone Mountain, the site where the Klan was reborn and the first crosses were burned, for the final apocalyptic, the-fate-of-the-world-hangs-in-the-balance battle.   Clark blends history and horror with Gullah, African, and Caribbean folklore and delivers a very creative and original read and a great ride from beginning to end.

Forgotten Souls:  The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen.  Cheryl W.  Thompson.  Dafina/Kensington Books, to be published January 27, 2026.  240 pages.  Thanks to Kensington Books for the free advance readers copy for review.

It's taken far too long for the Tuskegee Airmen to get their just due for their service as the nation's first black military pilots and for their legendary record of achievements in World War II, but, at least in the past few decades, the veterans and their stories have been recognized.  Unfortunately, not all survived long enough to see it.  In fact, 27  of the over 1,000 Airmen were lost during the war, and their service and sacrifice was forgotten to all but their family. Cheryl W. Thompson, an investigative journalist and the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman herself, set out to uncover and tell the stories of those missing men.  The result is a really great history of the unit and the men who comprised it, and now, after 80 years, those 27 missing men are getting at least some of the respect they deserve.

Recipes From the American South.  Michael Twitty.  Phaidon Press, 2025.  432 pages.

This book is a must-have addition to any cookbook or southern history or southern food library.  It's the southern version of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in terms of scope and importance.  Michael Twitty has become one of America's greatest culinary historians.  He started out as a re-enactor, researching and demonstrating the foods and foodways of the American South that resulted from the blending of West African, Caribbean, Native American, and European cultures that resulted from the African diaspora and slavery.  His work illustrates both the importance of food history and the power of food to cross boundaries, erase differences, and unite people.  However, the region is vast, and even southern food is not monolithic.  Twitty presents 260 recipes that cover the entire breadth of southern cuisine.  The recipes are tested and prove, the photos are beautiful, and there are short histories of each dish.  Cooks will discover familiar recipes for dishes that their families have made for generations, but they will also discover new recipes and learn things about the old and the new in the process.  I've made some of the recipes and I will be making more, and the book has already become a first reference for me.  It is definitely a classic that should be on any southern cook's shelf.

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.  Wright Thompson.  Penguin Press, 2024.  448 pages.  

Place.  It is one of the most vital elements of the study of history.  It acts as a physical, emotional, and cognitive anchor, a three-dimensional primary document that transforms abstract events from the distant past into tangible, relatable experiences, providing invaluable context to the events that happened upon it and to the lives of the people who lived there, worked there, fought there, loved there, and died there. "Place" provides a connection that is not possible otherwise.  Think about the feeling you have on a battlefield or in a home or site, when your senses take it all in and  often both a new understanding and a new curiosity arise.   I've read very few books in my life that capture place as well as this book does.  Wright Thompson has mastered the craft and can teach lessons on the subject.  I've had this book ever since it was released, but I've only read it in the past few days.  After all, I knew the story of Emmett Till, I taught the story of Emmett Till every year, and  I knew it would be a tough read emotionally.  And it definitely is. It makes you despair and lose all hope for humanity (if you had any at the start).  If you know it, it makes you hear Nina Simone's song "Mississippi G*****n" on a constant loop in your head, and makes you believe that the world and country would be much better off if Mississippi had never existed, or at least hadn't been settled by any new humans after 1600, that Mississippi is hell on earth, populated by the moat deranged and depraved "people" in history.  (And when a native Georgian now living in Florida  says that, that's saying something.)  It is not all depravity, however.  The reader is introduced to some truly brave and heroic people that are usually not a part of the story:  friends and relatives of Emmett and his mother, witnesses who were previously ignored by the law and by the media, and people who have devoted their lives to keeping the story alive in the 7 decades since. This is not only a new history of the kidnapping and murder of a 15-year old boy and the intense and coordinated effort throughout the state over the ensuing decades to erase it from history and from the minds of white and black Mississippians, but it is also a history of Mississippi, the place, going back to before European contact and encompassing every aspect of its history.  The barn in which Till was tortured, mutilated, and murdered is like an epicenter of that history.  The Delta Blues were born, King Cotton thrived and collapsed, Indian villages were decimated, and the Archie Manning football dynasty was born, all within a few miles of the nondescript farm shed.  All of that comes to life in this book.  This book should be the required textbook for Mississippi state history classes. It should be required reading for all Americans.  

Shelved: Books Read and Reviewed in January 2026

 

Stranger in a Strange Land: The Controversy

Stranger in a Strange Land.  Robert A. Heinlein.  G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1961.  408 pages. 

My first finished book of 2026 is a classic.  Published in 1961,  Stranger in a Strange Land  is an iconic science fiction novel that has had a huge influence on modern culture and has been a subject of controversy ever since its publication.  It was awarded the Hugo Prize for best science fiction novel in 1962, it became the first the first sci-fi novel to enter the New York Times Book Review's best seller list, and it has been included as a "Book That Shaped America" by the Library of Congress.  I'm pretty sure my ninth grade English teacher recommended it, and I was a huge sci-fi reader throughout high school, but I'm not sure if I read it then.  It's one of the oldest stories known to man:  the fish out of water, a strange innocent who is thrust into a wicked world, observes the foibles and follies of humanity, is changed by humanity, acquires followers and admirers, and is then destroyed by the world, leaving the possibility of a better world in his wake.  The story's been told a million times, including in the New Testament.  In this case, the Christ figure is Valentine Michael Smith, a human survivor of a Mars expedition as a baby that was raised by the Martians and returned to Earth as a spy, but  a spy with tremendous powers of the mind including telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation, just to name a few.  After his tutelage under a surrogate father figure, Valentine begins his transformation into a kind of messiah. His exceptional abilities lead him to become many things to many people: freak, scam artist, media commodity, searcher, free love pioneer, neon evangelist, and martyr. Controversy? First, there were objections to the perceived attacks on religion in general and Christianity in particular.  Second, it was one of the first mainstream sci-fi novels to include sex, and not just sex, but lots of nudity and free love,  Finally, there were rumors that the book was a huge influence on Charles Manson and his murderous Family, and these rumors led to the book being removed from libraries across the country.  (Although Manson did make himself into a messiah who demanded free love and group sex for his followers, it is unlikely that he ever read the book since he was functionally illiterate.  However, it is quite probable that some of his better-educated followers had read it, and they used the word "grok" - a word created by Heinlein  for the book to mean a thorough and complete understanding or grasping of a concept.  More recently, Elon Musk decided to name his artificial intelligence app "Grok" - for whatever reasons.)  Some sixty years later, the book is controversial for another reason:  sexism, based on its portrayal of women and relationships.  Sure, but I would argue that you have to look at the time it was published.  Second wave feminism was just blossoming with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem still unknown. The sexual revolution was just underway with sexologists like Kinsey, Masters, and Johnson becoming public figures, Hugh Hefner was attempting to create a Playboy world, and the birth control pill was first used in 1960. Sex was emerging into public discourse like never before.   Actually, I think the portrayal of women and sex in the book is very progressive for the time, and, in many ways, women enjoy a state of equality in Heinlein's world that did not exist in 1961 America.  The book is a deeply insightful and thought provoking take on America and American institutions.  

Double Whammy.  Carl Hiaasen.  Putnam, 1988.  320 pages.  Book 1 of 7 in Skink series.

If there was a Mount Rushmore of writers of the "Florida Man" genre of fiction, the faces would be those of Tim Dorsey, Carl Hiaasen, Dave Berry, and Randy Wayne White, authors who excel at creating incredibly ridiculous and exciting stories about heroic, but flawed, Floridians and the assorted crazies that complicate their lives and threaten their friends.  Their stories are all based in and inspired by real events and real history that can only have happened in the Sunshine State, and then they add their own brand of twisted elaboration that makes the genre so unique.  This Hiaasen novel is the first to recount the adventures of private detective R.J. Decker and his partner Skink, a 6' 6 " tall bearded misanthropic hermit who lives in the Florida Everglades and subsists on a diet of roadkill.  While Skink is a legendary character in his neck of the woods, almost no one knows that Skink was actually once the Governor of Florida, Clinton Tyree, the most honest man ever to be governor of any state, so honest, in fact, that he couldn't take the pressure of politics, snapped, and ran away from office to become a crusading environmentalist, carrying on a one-man fight against evil developers.  Skink and Decker find themselves entangled in the dangerous, high-money-stakes, life or death world of professional bass fishing.  A major cheating scandal turns deadly, and bodies pile up/  Oh, and there's a murderer who talks to the dead head of a pet bull that is clamped to his right arm.  Insanity.  Or just another Florida Man story.

Caravaggio Documentary

Caravaggio:  A Life Sacred and Profane.  Andrew Graham-Dixon.  W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.  544 pages.

Inspired by a great exhibition focusing on Caravaggio and baroque art at St. Petersburg's (Florida) Museum of Fine Arts, I purchased this biography and found it to be a truly great one.  Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, usually known simply as Caravaggio, was, and is, the greatest artist of the baroque, and his influence continues to resonate throughout the artistic world.  Filmmaker Martin Scorsese recognizes often describes the huge influence Caravaggio is on his own films with the look, the stories, and the characters very visibly reflecting elements of the painter's life and world. Caravaggio pioneered the use of light and dark as key elements in his work, and his paintings are full of life, action, and vibrancy. The paintings all tell vivid stories.  Since his patrons were often Catholic Church officials who sought to use the power of art as propaganda, designed to win the hearts and devotion of the people who might otherwise be tempted by the Protestant Reformation, he often painted gritty, often bloody, scenes of Old Testament battles and violence and of the horrific martyrdoms of saints murdered for spreading the gospels of the New Testament, often shocking his patrons and other viewers with their graphic brutality.  His personal life was equally profane.  He was either homosexual or bisexual at a time when that was punishable by death.  He was known for engaging in drunken, violent brawls, roaming the city with like-minded young troublemakers, and associating with prostitutes and pimps.  Sentenced to banishment and death for killing a rival in a duel, he was forced to live a life on the run, before he himself died, under mysterious circumstances, at a very early age.  He still managed to create a revolutionary body of work.  This bio covers his life and his works thoroughly and is equally as masterful as his work.  

White Shadow.  Ace Atkins.  Putnam, 2006. 384 pages.

This is the second work of historical fiction based on a real-life crime written by Ace Atkins that I've read.  Devil's Garden was about Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle's trial for the death of a would-be actress in 1921.  White Shadow is about the 1955 murder of Tampa Florida organized crime boss Charlie Wall.  Living in Tampa Bay, this  book is of particular interest because of the connections to history and locations in Ybor City in particular and the area in general.  I've read several books, attended talks, and taken tours on the subject of the organized crime that dominated much of Tampa's 20th century history, so a lot of this book is very familiar, and it's always fun to make historical connections as I travel around the city.  Having read two Atkins books, I've drawn some conclusions.  In Ace Atkins' world, the 1920s and the 1950s were very similar, whether the location was San Francisco or Tampa.  Everybody was always depressed, angry, miserable, and morally ambiguous.  Everybody had lots of really bad and unpleasurable sex with lots of different people, and that sex usually involved tears, violence, and lots and lots of alcohol and/or drugs.  Love doesn't exist, but drugs, alcohol, guns, gambling, prostitution, and many other vices were openly available everywhere.  Everybody talked like Rocky and Mugsy, the gangsters in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, all of the time (In Tampa, though, it was with a Cuban or Italian accent.). I know Atkins is a huge admirer of the detective noir genre and especially Dashiell Hammett, but it's just soooo much for sooooo long -  the books go on and on and on, far too long.  I really want to like his books more than I do.  His most recent book, a Cold War spy thriller, is set in Atlanta in the 1980s.  I haven't decided if I'm up for reading what Atkins does to make that setting depressing for me.  

Author talk

King of Kings:  The Iranian Revolution:  A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation.  Scott Anderson.  Doubleday, 2025. 512 pages.

The Iranian Revolution and the resulting American hostage crisis happened exactly because of the reasons cited in this book's title:  hubris, delusion, and miscalculation. Add stupidity, incompetence, impotence, and entrenched bureaucratic insanity.  Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi  was one of the most ill-suited men ever to be called "King of Kings."  He was not that bright and had led a totally isolated and exalted life from his birth that separated him from reality.  He had almost no competent advisors that ever dared to tell him the truth.  Negative reports and statistics were routinely changed to positive ones before they were presented to him.  He was incapable of making decisions, especially under duress.  Instead, he relied on others to take action and, consequently, to take the blame if the action failed.  Jimmy Carter was an inept, incompetent boob, totally in over his head from the second he stepped into the White House.  Like the Shah, he was far too involved in petty details, didn't have competent and honest advisors, but he was further handicapped by his outsider status that made him the subject of ridicule, mistrust, and derision by the Washington bureaucrats and professional politician class who actively kept information from him and had no interest in carrying out his policies.  Neither man saw the world as it was.  Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a provincial hard-line religious zealot who had no idea about or interest in how a country should be run.  His small group of advisors rallied around him simply because he was a viable alternative for the people's support and ignored his brutal medieval core philosophy.  A coalition of wildly disparate factions including socialists, communists, modernists, republicans, and religious fundamentalists came together, only united by their desire to depose the Shah, and they each thought Khomeini could be used to attain their goal and then discarded, but almost none of them had any real confidence that a revolution would be successful.  The CIA was totally incompetent (as usual), reporting to the White House, even days before the revolution, that the Shah was secure in his position for decades to come.  The US Ambassador to Iran was an idiot, and embassy and consulate officials in Iran were not Iranian experts and couldn't even speak the language, just marking time until their next ill-fitted posting.  They routinely ignored and buried the reports and observations of the one staffer who saw what was happening well before it did, and he was threatened with dismissal and frozen out of any meaningful role within the staff.  Scott Anderson does a fantastic job of explaining what happened and why in this book, and it is incredibly readable.  This is the book to read if you want to know about modern Iranian history and the history of the revolution, the effects of which still resonate almost 50 years later. 

Author Talk

Recipes From the American South.  Michael Twitty.  Phaidon Press, 2025.  432 pages.

This book is a must-have addition to any cookbook or southern history or southern food library.  It's the southern version of Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in terms of scope and importance.  Michael Twitty has become one of America's greatest culinary historians.  He started out as a re-enactor, researching and demonstrating the foods and foodways of the American South that resulted from the blending of West African, Caribbean, Native American, and European cultures that resulted from the African diaspora and slavery.  His work illustrates both the importance of food history and the power of food to cross boundaries, erase differences, and unite people.  However, the region is vast, and even southern food is not monolithic.  Twitty presents 260 recipes that cover the entire breadth of southern cuisine.  The recipes are tested and prove, the photos are beautiful, and there are short histories of each dish.  Cooks will discover familiar recipes for dishes that their families have made for generations, but they will also discover new recipes and learn things about the old and the new in the process.  I've made some of the recipes and I will be making more, and the book has already become a first reference for me.  It is definitely a classic that should be on any southern cook's shelf.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter.  Stephen Graham Jones.  S & S/Saga Press, 2025.  448 pages.

Stephen Graham Jones is apparently a very successful writer of western horror fiction, lauded by authors like Stephen King and Tommy Orange and often compared to Cormac McCarthy, but I had never heard of him until his newest book appeared everywhere, including on practically every "Best of 2025" list that I saw.  A diary written by a Lutheran minister in Montana in 1912 is discovered and examined by an academic who happens to be his direct descendant.  The minister recounts stories told to him by a Blackfoot Indian named Good Stab, stories of a flesh-eating, blood-sucking supernatural vampire roaming the plains out for revenge.  What's not to like, right?  It's my first Did Not Finish of the year, after about a fifth of the way through.  It is - incredibly - mind numbingly BORING.  First of all, it's a story within a story within a story, so there is a huge gulf between the reader and the "action."  Secondly, the language is stilted and tedious.  The creature doesn't just attack and eat animals, it eats "big mouths," "little mouths," "prairie runners," "whitehorns," "blackhorns," "long legs," "dirty faces," "moving shadows," and "wags-his-tails."  What? What's that? Huh?  Finally, its pace is not slow; it's plodding and ponderous, a real slog.  Multiple times, I realized that the creature was eating, and I thought "Wait, what happened?"  I see references in reviews and summaries to extreme violence and gore and found myself in the middle or at the end of such scenes without knowing how I got there.  This is a terrible book.  

Scene from "The Reivers" 1969

The Reivers.  William Faulkner.  Random House, 1962.  320 pages.

The other day, I noticed Turner Classic Movies was airing 1969's "The Reivers" starring Steve McQueen, and I tuned in for a few minutes.  I decided to make the book my second classic read of the year.  Published by William Faulkner in 1962, it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1963, making Faulkner only the fourth author to win two Pulitzers.  I've read a few Faulkner classics, and admire his work, but The Reivers  is different.  Perhaps Faulkner's most accessible book, it's a comedy, a picaresque novel, that is an adventure story in which a naive or roguish, or both, hero goes on an adventure, encountering unusual characters and real world issues and corruption along the way.  In this case, it's 11-year old Lucius Priest, a resident of  Faulkner's Yokanaptawpha County Mississippi, who unwittingly gets dragged into Boon Hogganbeck's crazy scheme.  Boon works for Lucius' grandfather, but one day he decides to steal or borrow the grandfather's car, one of the only cars in town at the time, and go to Memphis.  A few miles out of town, they discover that Ned McCaslin, a black man and fellow employee of the grandfather and an actual blood relative of Lucius, had stowed away in the car.  Together, they head off to Memphis, landing at a brothel run by Miss Reba, and Boon gets reacquainted with his favorite girl, Miss Corrie.  Long story short, Ned trades the car for a race horse, and they plan to run a race in order to win the car back.  Hijinks ensue.  It's not a bad story and a very different side of Faulkner.  Probably 3 or 3.5 out of 5 for me, mainly because I 'm not really a fan of  horse racing.

CBS Sunday Morning segment

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.  Wright Thompson.  Penguin Press, 2024.  448 pages.  

Place.  It is one of the most vital elements of the study of history.  It acts as a physical, emotional, and cognitive anchor, a three-dimensional primary document that transforms abstract events from the distant past into tangible, relatable experiences, providing invaluable context to the events that happened upon it and to the lives of the people who lived there, worked there, fought there, loved there, and died there. "Place" provides a connection that is not possible otherwise.  Think about the feeling you have on a battlefield or in a home or site, when your senses take it all in and  often both a new understanding and a new curiosity arise.   I've read very few books in my life that capture place as well as this book does.  Wright Thompson has mastered the craft and can teach lessons on the subject.  I've had this book ever since it was released, but I've only read it in the past few days.  After all, I knew the story of Emmett Till, I taught the story of Emmett Till every year, and  I knew it would be a tough read emotionally.  And it definitely is. It makes you despair and lose all hope for humanity (if you had any at the start).  If you know it, it makes you hear Nina Simone's song "Mississippi G*****n" on a constant loop in your head, and makes you believe that the world and country would be much better off if Mississippi had never existed, or at least hadn't been settled by any new humans after 1600, that Mississippi is hell on earth, populated by the moat deranged and depraved "people" in history.  (And when a native Georgian now living in Florida  says that, that's saying something.)  It is not all depravity, however.  The reader is introduced to some truly brave and heroic people that are usually not a part of the story:  friends and relatives of Emmett and his mother, witnesses who were previously ignored by the law and by the media, and people who have devoted their lives to keeping the story alive in the 7 decades since. This is not only a new history of the kidnapping and murder of a 15-year old boy and the intense and coordinated effort throughout the state over the ensuing decades to erase it from history and from the minds of white and black Mississippians, but it is also a history of Mississippi, the place, going back to before European contact and encompassing every aspect of its history.  The barn in which Till was tortured, mutilated, and murdered is like an epicenter of that history.  The Delta Blues were born, King Cotton thrived and collapsed, Indian villages were decimated, and the Archie Manning football dynasty was born, all within a few miles of the nondescript farm shed.  All of that comes to life in this book.  This book should be the required textbook for Mississippi state history classes. It should be required reading for all Americans.