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JOE LOUIS, MY CHAMPION By William Miller. Illustrated by Rodney S. Pate. Lee & Low Books. 32 pages, paperback. $8.95.

Reviewed by Kathleen Lunsford
Kathleen Lunsford is a Roanoke artist, mother and first-grade teacher.

This short, fictional story about an African-American boy living in the rural South in 1937 gives a picture of how Joe Louis was idolized. He was a role model to young people and gave them a sense of pride and hope. The story is told from the point of view of Sammy, who lives on a farm and wants desperately to be a boxer just like Louis. His friend Ernie gives him boxing lessons in return for Sammy’s help with schoolwork. In the end Sammy’s father helps him see that he can be great at something, just like Joe Louis.

This story has rich, realistic illustrations. The author has written more books about other African-Americans who broke color barriers. He gives historical information about Louis in the back of the book.

Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia. By Ann Smart Martin. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 288 pages. $55

Reviewed by Mary Ferrari
Mary Ferrari is an associate professor of History at Radford University specializing in Colonial and Revolutionary America.

Through a shopkeeper’s records and creative methodology, “Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia” sheds new light on the Virginia backcountry, especially Franklin and Bedford counties during and after the American Revolution. Based on the records of John Hook, who owned stores in the two counties between the 1760s and 1800s, this is a broad study of the world of goods and the people who purchased them. The focus is on the types of goods sold, sales strategies of the time, and the desires and culture of consumers. But the work is so much more than a study of goods.

Those who shopped at Hook’s store, most of whom are not included in the standard history books, come alive. The book offers detailed descriptions of what backcountry Virginians drank, ate and wore. For example, by looking at the goods purchased by slaves, the author attempts to reconstruct slave households’ clothing and religious practices.

The book reflects not only a unique mixture of methodologies, but also a broad range of research. Just a few months of Hook’s account books detail more than 4,000 purchases, which the author analyzes in order to find patterns and larger cultural meaning.

Each chapter ends with an in-depth analysis of one item purchased, such as a clock or mirror, that supports the author’s point.

The book also is a biography of John Hook as he progresses from a young man who sweeps floors to a local plantation owner whose loyalist tendencies and complex personality make him a difficult neighbor.

The writing is lively and easily understandable, and the mixture of methods used to study the accounts of Hook and the vast variety of topics addressed result in a book that would have broad appeal to antique and historic house enthusiasts, re-enactors and local historians.

VIRGINIA’S MONTGOMERY COUNTY Mary Elizabeth Lindon, editor. Montgomery Museum and Lewis Miller Regional Art Center. 772 pages. $65

Reviewed by George Kegley
GEORGE KEGLEY is editor of the Journal of the Historical Society of Southwest Virginia in Roanoke.

“The New River Valley has long been fertile ground for oral history, folklore and just plain foolishness,” said Jimmie Price, a historian and minister who lives at Prices Fork, near Blacksburg.
His stories appear among the works of a team of 18 writers who have produced a monumental account of the 233 years of Montgomery County. They wrote in great detail, recording what has happened in that big county since frontier times.

Their huge book, weighing more than 5 pounds, is almost an encyclopedia of people and events. The 18 chapters tell all that anyone would want to know about Montgomery’s mountains, valleys and rivers, American Indians, exploration, settlers, frontier life, formation of towns and counties, transportation, agriculture, industry, springs resorts, the Civil War, literature, education, religion and legends from oral history interviews.

Legends are explored at length. Stories about the association of Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett and George Washington with Montgomery County have been told for years, but little evidence has been found. Records do show that Washington inspected Fort Vause at Shawsville, and a court document men inspected Fort Vause at Shawsville, and a court document mentions Boone.

The writers, most from a historical background, have supplemented their knowledge from a wide array of Southwest Virginia publications, court records and other documents to give a complete picture of their county. They have enlarged upon earlier, shorter histories of Christiansburg, Blacksburg and the county.

A valuable feature is a chapter on Lewis Miller, a folk artist and “chronicler of the 19th century,” by Su Clauson-Wicker. Miller’s sketches of everyday life and rural scenery in the late 1800s appear throughout the book. Miller, whose work is celebrated nationally, came from Pennsylvania to live in Christiansburg and left his name with the museum that published the history.

Among the many glimpses of Montgomery County gleaned from the book:
* In 1826, a visitor wrote that a fox hunter’s horn replaced a church bell on the Sabbath, “a day for visiting and pleasure.”
* Among the early villages were Carnegie City, once Big Spring and later Elliston; Rough and Ready; Five Forks, later called Auburn and then Riner; and Lovely Mount, later Radford.
* Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College, forerunner of Virginia Tech, was established in 1872, and its farm campus was purchased in 1896.
* The Radford Army Ammunition Plant, built at the outset of World War II, employed more than 23,000 people in construction. Its operational work force of a peak of 15,000 came from 45 states; five daily trains carried Roanoke area workers to the plant.

The history has a striking cover, featuring “The Great Road,” a mural painted under a federal art program and installed in the Christiansburg post office in 1939. The oil painting illustrates county scenes.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY AND SEA MONSTERS By Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters. Quirk Books. 344 pages. $12.95

Reviewed by Kelly Short

Kelly Short is a freelance writer and editor, and student.

If you enjoyed the “Naked Gun” movies, you’ll love “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”
In “Sea Monsters,” Jane Austen supplies the highbrow, upper-lip angst, and Ben H. Winters keeps the gags and hilarity flowing.

As in the Austen original, this new book follows the stories and love lives of sisters Marianne and Elinor Dashwood. However, in “Sea Monsters,” the Dashwoods live in a different world, a world in which creatures of the sea attack and devour humans mercilessly and endlessly.
Sounds grim, right? Wrong. It’s funny.  The book’s magic stems from the absurd juxtapositions of English gentility and giant octopi.

Forget Marianne and Elinor Dashwood for a moment. Two characters, Lady Middleton and her mother, Mrs. Jennings, steal the show. These two alone make the book worth reading. They are natives of a far-flung atoll and were kidnapped by adventurers. How they deal with it is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.

Take this paragraph: “Lady Middleton piqued herself upon the elegance and extravagance of her table, and of all her domestic arrangements; she loved to surprise her English visitors with displays of hospitality native to her homeland, such as flavoring her soups with monkey urine and not telling anyone she had done so until the bowl had been drained.”

And as for Mrs. Jennings: “Mrs. Jennings was a widow, her husband and male children having been ruthlessly slaughtered in the same raid during which she and her daughters were carried off in a sack by Sir John and his men. She had now, therefore, nothing to do but marry all the rest of the world.”
Go on. Read the book. Just make sure you don’t read in a place where you’re supposed to be quiet.

Given the recent minor uproar over this book, I felt as our Books editor I should give it a read and make comment on it. The day the story printed I tried to get a copy at several local bookstores and found they were sold out. (As columnist Dan Casey did as well, among, I'm sure, many others.) I finally found the last copy at Books-a-million and while there I mentioned that they should probably order more given that when you tell a person not to do something it only makes them want to do it more, and I knew we were running more print on the subject, putting it out there in the public eye. People will be curious. Upon further exploration of the book’s availability in the area I found through one of our editors that the local public libraries reported copies missing or lost. I spoke with Franklin County libraries who told me that their one copy in circulation was long overdue and likely will be listed as lost as well. My copy is now making the rounds through several of my friends and co-workers who want to know what the fuss is all about. (The book can be read for free online, and as a parent, teacher, principal, librarian, or curious citizen, I hope everyone who intends to talk about it will actually read it. ) Personally, I don’t see much to make a fuss over. As you can read in my review below, the topics in the book are reality. As the mother of two teenagers, I wouldn’t forbid them from reading it. There is nothing in the book that cannot be seen in real life, on television, on the internet, or in our own neighborhoods. I found it amazingly ironic that throughout the book, the main character's English teacher, Bill, gives him copies of extra-curricular reading material, most of which has been at one time or another on the ALA’s collected list of banned or challenged books. (Such as The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.) Go Bill! Should we all have a teacher like you to encourage reading outside of our comfort levels.
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky
MTV Publishing
224 pages
$14.
Published February 1, 1999

Reviewed by Heather Brush Froeschl

Charlie is the main character of "The Perks of Being a Wallflower", a 15-year-old boy, writing letters to someone, describing his life in 1991-92. It’s his first year of high school and he’s scared. His friend had killed himself in the previous spring, and Charlie reacted. The new school year is beginning now; he has anxiety attacks of a kind, and tries to stop them but can’t always do it. He makes friends with some older kids and from this safety net he observes life and starts to find out who he is. And in bits and pieces, through the letters, the reader finds out too. But does Charlie experience living or is he more like a shadow on the wall?

While growing up in the suburbs of a city, Charlie doesn’t lead a sheltered life. He is witness to explicit sex, implied sexual acts, domestic abuse, drugs and alcohol. He is also witness to emotional pain, heartbreak, confusion, deception, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. He is a giving, loving friend who is agreeable and selfless, to a fault. But is he on the receiving end of being those things? He doesn’t stand up for himself; he stands up for others. He is a teenager in a time when children grow up too quickly, just five years younger than I was during that year, I can attest to that. What Charlie witnessed was an unfortunate reality, a culture that was harsher and more in-your-face than what his own parents grew up in. His letters though, explain happenings like they were sock hops and drive-in movies. He accepts his reality and shares it through his words. It is his world and he is on it, not knowing any better, like it or not.

Charlie’s brother goes away to college on a football scholarship and is the family’s hero; Charlie’s sister takes it when her boyfriend hits her, and Charlie takes it all in. His father works hard and is a good man, while his mother cooks favorite meals and packs lunches. He has one teacher, Bill, who really seems to care. Bill gives Charlie extra books to read and write essays on. For the most part the books have young protagonists who learn lessons about life; Charlie can relate. His writing improves, his analytical thinking improves, his letter writing continues, and sometimes he hides in his reading, away from the world, away from his own problems. There are tragic moments and with his reactions to them, Charlie pulls into himself so much that he needs professional help. He is hospitalized and starts seeing a psychiatrist who keeps asking Charlie about his earliest memories. There must be a reason why.

The voice of Charlie is precisely right as that of a 15 -16 year old. The letters don’t offer flowery details but let the reader see Charlie’s world as this young man would. Some letters are written in scattered, drug or alcohol influenced language, others in stone cold sober sadness. Given that his is the only perspective in the book, the reader isn’t fully aware of what his friends and family members see or understand about him and this not knowing is like Charlie’s own. His truth is revealed to the reader and himself at the same time. Chbosky is a talented writer who has taken teen angst and emotion, inner conflict and outer emotional attack and ripped the proverbial towel away to bare it all. He presents a coming of age tale with a depth of raw emotion. Adult readers will look back at their own teen years while readers Charlie’s age see themselves too. "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" depicts the moment in life when we learn to be proactive rather than reactive, passionate rather than reflexive, and how someone who’d gone through trauma can still do that. And if Charlie can, we all can. This book is a gem… an uncut, unset priceless precious stone. That teacher Bill? He said it best, though he was talking about the book "The Stranger" when he said it's, "very easy to read, but very hard to read well."

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor will be Roanoke College's featured speaker for Constitution Day on September 17. The first woman to serve on the Supreme Court, she was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and served until her retirement in 2006. O'Connor's address will focus on judicial independence and will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the College's Bast Center.

Interest in this event has been significant. Roanoke students, faculty and staff can reserve tickets by logging in to www.roanoke.edu/tickets. The tickets allotted for alumni/general public have already been distributed. More tickets may be released to alumni and the general public after distribution to Roanoke students and faculty. **UPDATE** There are no more tickets available.

Another option to get your O'Connor fill, should you be unable to attend this event, can be found in the pages of a children's book. Authored by O'Connor and released in June,  “Finding Susie” is about the longing to have a pet. What follows is a review of the title.

"Finding Susie" by Sandra Day O’Conner
Illustrated by Tom Pohrt
Knopf Books for Young Readers
40 pages. $16.99. Ages 4 - 8.

Reviewed by Kathleen Lunsford

Yes this is the Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner. This is her second children’s book about her childhood growing up on a 300 square mile ranch in Arizona. In this true story Sandra longs for a pet which is hard to imagine living on a ranch. But she was never allowed to have her own little pet. She had a horse and there were lots of animals around but none were pets she could love and hold in her lap. Life on this ranch was somewhat lonely for Sandra when school was not in session. The story is about several of her attempts to keep a wild animal for a pet. She tries a turtle, and a rabbit and a coyote. None of these lasted very long. Her most successful attempt was a bobcat named Bob who stayed for a couple of years before he ran away. Sandra finally gets a stray dog named Susie.

“Finding Susie” is realistically illustrated and well done. It is a book that a child will love looking at especially one that loves pets. The entire book has a special beauty about it. I particularly like the monotone photos of the ranch and young Sandra on the inside cover. The book offers a good opportunity to talk about the Supreme Court and the first female justice. While written for elementary age children it is a book that would be useful for older children because of the author and the Court.

Woodstock:  The Oral History. By Joel Makower.
Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press
$19.95, 361 pages

Reviewed by Cyndi Young-Preston
 
It was supposed to be a music, arts and crafts festival drawing 50-75,000 people.  It morphed into a 500,000-person rock behemoth and spawned a legend that’s still fresh 40 years later. Woodstock. Also called the Aquarian Exposition. August 15-17, 1969.

It inspired movies, books, music.  In fact, Makower’s book was originally published in 1989; this is the updated 40th anniversary edition about the mega-concert that almost didn’t happen because site after site fell through.  Then the concert moved to the farm of Max and Miriam Yasger in Bethel, New York.

This story of Woodstock is told through the words of people who planned the concert, played in it, worked for it, attended it and tried to block it.  There’s no narrative at all ... just dialogue that tells the complete story of how two rich guys, a druggie and a record producer somehow got together to put on a show in a field.

The real Woodstock was a financial disaster, a drugfest, an orgy and a rain-drenched mess.  But the aura of Woodstock ... the essence of it ... has never been forgotten or surpassed.
The subject matter and the language in Woodstock:  The Oral History are frequently coarse and explicit.  A couple of the pictures are not for young eyes.  Regardless, this book is a superb vehicle to visit (or revisit) a sensation that defined the Sixties and changed a generation forever.

"Supreme Conflict: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court"
by Jan Crawford Greenburg
Penguin, 368 pages, $16

Reviewed by Lenny LaRose

Lenny LaRose lives in Roanoke County and works in Customer Service for a local company.

Jan Crawford Greenburg is well-qualified to deliver an intriguing account of the inner workings of the United States Supreme Court, and in this vivid exposé has certainly done so.  I never imagined the extent to which personality and politics influence the Court’s decisions.

Defining the beginning of each daily session.  The precise start time of 10 a.m., never early or late, the solemnity of the Chief Justice as he emerges from his chambers to join the other justices, the single-file procession of the associate justices following their leader to wait behind the red velvet curtains that lead to the courtroom, and the formal announcement of their entrance by the court’s marshal.

Chapter one portrays the friendship between Sandra Day O’Connor and William Rehnquist from their days as classmates at Stanford University Law School.  It discusses their similarities and their differences, and reveals how Rehnquist convinced O’Connor to retire so that he could serve one more year as Chief Justice in spite of his debilitating illness.

The second chapter illustrates why President Reagan had to settle for Anthony Kennedy after Robert Bork’s nomination met overwhelming resistance from his many critics and ultimately redefined the Senate confirmation process. The conservative Kennedy was soon to learn how vicious criticism from special-interest groups,  powerful editorial pages, and even other justices, clearly define the partisan lines along which interpretations of law are drawn.

Much is told about the eccentricities of the Justices, such as Sandra Day O’Connor’s desire to create a filing system by which she could organize petitions in sequence by case numbers (an endeavor that proved to be useless), or Justice Harry Blackmun’s refusal to join any opinion in which a certain word appeared. 

This is a book about humanity as much as it is about the modus operandi of our highest court.  It is a story of passions, and the lengths to which people will go to promote their own beliefs and ideologies.

"Kill For Me" by Karen Rose, is the third in a series of thrillers. Our reviewer found it lacking; his review follows. For another take on the same book, click here.  

"Kill for Me"
by Karen Rose
Grand Central Publishing
432 pages, $16.99

Reviewed by Charles Shea LeMone

The sheer number of flashbacks that take place in the beginning of this novel is mind boggling without the aide of an extensive glossary as a reference source. Long before the main characters, Susannah and Luke, completely take center stage, the author informs us of a group of prominent gentlemen who, while in their teens, were guilty of secretly raping a number of young girls from the area. Now as adults, this private club, including a doctor and a judge, are involved in the business of kidnapping young girls--lured from their homes via the Internet. The victims are then rented to high paying customers and subjected to sessions of severe physical abuse until they are worthless sacks of skin and bone and have to be replaced with fresh meat.

While building on this lurid premise, there is also a funeral for one of the ringleaders and a shoot-out in which several new bodies, good guys and bad, turn up dead or bullet ridden. One of the injured federal agents is Susannah’s brother who is also Luke’s partner and a crucial memory link to a dark secret Susannah decides to make public. All of this and more--enough to fill a sizable prequel--compete with the present action; five kidnapped girls held as sex slaves are rushed to a new location, two of them manage to escape; a couple of prime witnesses must be silenced; and a host of agents, lawyers, crime scene experts, etc., begin the task of putting all the pieces together in the name of justice.

In the intervening time, the author gives few physical details about the ever-present parade of new characters that stream across the pages. Consequently, as the novel progresses, rather than experience a sense of heightening drama or intrigue, I felt continually challenged to assimilate all the facts as the action played hopscotch from one new crisis to the next. As an outline this novel may have offered the promise of being a real thriller. However, without skilled craftsmanship, and proper plot building, the author failed to deliver a compelling story. Instead, it’s more like a dish into which a chef tosses everything in the kitchen, holding nothing back, stirs it all up in a huge pot and serves it as a main course without realizing sometimes less is more.

TRESPASS: LIVING AT THE EDGE OF THE PROMISED LAND
By Amy Irvine
North Point Press
363 pages. $15

Reviewed by Lynn M. Davis
Who has been on the Colorado Plateau

Articulate as they come, a word-picture poet at heart, intense philosophical-intellectual, and a daughter broken by her alcoholic father who shot himself, Amy Irvine spent nine years of her chaotic life writing out this book, her personal story intertwined with geography, history, and culture lessons of the Colorado Plateau — the Promised Land of Utah and parts of California, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada claimed by Mormon prophet Brigham Young and her ancestors.

Called the Kingdom of Deseret by the Mormons, the plateau is an unforgiving region of redrock deserts and less than lush mountains drained by the Colorado River and mostly owned by the federal government. A sixth-generation Mormon whose pedigree includes 3rd great-grandfather Howard Egan, bodyguard to both founding prophets of the Mormon church, Irvine moved to San Juan County, Utah, a remote southeast corner of Utah south of Hole ‘n the Rock (which has family and historical significance in her story), to be near her boyfriend and write grants for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. There she worked on her book and there she felt totally alienated from the locals who resented her as a neo-hippie environmentalist who causes trouble with their way of life.

As her book metamorphosed from an environmental rant, she came to realize symbolically that everyone was staking a claim to the land and taking water out of the Colorado, that is to say that the land was taking a beating from all of us, not just “those people.”

Irvine saw that the resistance to new ways of looking at landscape have met a fierce resistance to federal laws, environmental protection efforts, and intervention because of the Mormons’ sense of persecution and belief that they were entitled to their “land promised from God.” She underwent a shift in her thinking as an apostate Mormon who was frustrated with her relationship to Mormonism and what she saw as its negative impact on the environment in the West. As she recognizes the duplicity on both sides of the fence, at one point when she is so dissatisfied with everything, she pens one of her many descriptive word pictures, “When I walk out into the night, I see how the trees scratch their own architecture in the star-soaked sky.”

Edward Abbey, who wrote a lot about the Colorado Plateau from the 1950s to the 80s, including his famous The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, greatly influenced Irvine. While she holds some differences, she believes in order to save wilderness you have to find your place in it. She has been surprised that her region’s conservation critics — Mormons, off-road enthusiasts, ranchers, and anti-wilderness folks — have received her book with curiosity and interest in her unique story rather than attack her.

Irvine ends her story less than satisfyingly with the questions as to whether the New West will destroy the fragile desert ecosystem and if her marriage to her environmental attorney boyfriend and her own health after giving birth to a stillborn child will survive. Her marriage and health have apparently recovered after she moved to Colorado, but the other question remains — will the New West destroy the Old West?

And while her outdoor loving father was a hunter and fisherman who despised environmental efforts to protect it, the also outdoor-loving author so serious about protecting wilderness is her father’s daughter, and one author I would like to meet.