It was the year 1969. I had graduated from Vanderbilt in June, married Hinky in August. He started his first year at the University of Mississippi School of Law that September . My brother Mike and his friend John Evans, undergraduates, lived in a dark apartment that sunk toward the middle of the room and pans caked with the beans cooked a month ago sat on blackened burners.

After 4 years of constant intellectual stimulation and fireside chats at professor’s homes in Nashville, I felt adrift and alone, up in or down in (depending on one’s geographical perspective) Oxford, working as an assistant to the assistant to the Dean of the Graduate School at Ole Miss, “putting hubby through.” Just a few weeks into this existential isolation, I met Hinky’s professors one by one, either in the Grove or going by the law school after work to get Hinky from the law library with the one car we shared until he decided the one car was a tool to get to school and left me with my bicycle to get to and fro.

The first prof I met was Robert Khayat, outside the law school (sitting in my car while I still had one to use). He came over and introduced himself and I told him I was waiting for a student. He asked, “Which one?” I said Hinky, a name you don’t easily forget. He said, “Good choice. (in husbands?) He’s got a lot of promise. Very good student. And how are you?” I was charmed that this handsome, older (by 9 years) man who emitted downhome hospitality, gentility, charisma and smarts would take the time to chat with me. Ole Miss started to feel like a friendlier place that day.

I knew nothing about Mr. Khayat’s years at Yale, as an Ole Miss Hall of Fame student or his NFL football seasons as a kicker with the Washington Redskins. I started to hear from Hinky’s fellow students that this was the guy whose classes were on the prime list of most desirable courses. I learned that his students regarded him as a man of integrity and a mentor. To me, he was a most welcome ambassador to those of us who were making Oxford and Ole Miss our home for the next few years.

Click here to see all of “Lemuria Reads Mississippians.” 

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-Pat

The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie (Crown, October 19, 2010)

“Although the government’s pursuit of Scruggs smacked of entrapment to his supporters, that defense could not be used because he had not dealt directly with a federal agent or an informant when he covered Balducci’s original payments with a $40,000 check. Instead, the defendants from the Scruggs Law Firm settled on a defense built around the argument that the government had created the crime for which they were being falsely accused.”

“In a lengthy motion filed with the court on February 11, Keker asked for dismissal of the indictments on the grounds of ‘outrageous government conduct.’ The document not only accused the federal government of turning Judge Lackey into an agent involved in ‘manufacturing a crime,’ it charged that the government had ‘engaged in a pattern of concealing from this court’ exculpatory evidence helpful to the defendants.” (283)

Zeus is available now.

We hope to see you today at the signing/reading event with Curtis Wilkie. If you cannot attend, you can reserve a signed copy online.

Click here to open an account on our website and we can save your information for future visits to LemuriaBooks.com or just give us a call: 601/800.366.7619.

Read other excerpts from The Fall of the House of Zeus.

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Survival and sustenance, high adventure in one of the most ecologically diverse regions in the world where both tropical and alpine conditions co-exist is the setting of this book. It is 1997 and the place is the very farthest Far East right above North Korea, to the east of China and bordered on the east by the Sea of Japan, a place called Primorye. The area is all Russian. This is where men and women escaped the ravages of boom towns that disintegrated almost as quickly as they were formed after perestroika (this word refers to Gorbachev’s political and economic changes to a freer market but not a stable one), men and women who would rather live off the land than try and amass paper money devalued to almost nothing overnight. The area was and is ripe in game, pine nuts, forests and the amur tiger, a god-like beast revered and feared. Unfortunately poachers from within and beyond the country had been killing this tiger to near extinction for its bones, organs, flesh and blood and its very spirit.

Drama abounds in this book and we meet unforgettable characters like Yuri Trush, a 6′ 2″ broad chested man whose prolific eyebrows frame his face. He’s tracking the 500-pound tiger who had once co-existed peacefully with men, often sharing fresh killed carcasses of other game with the men following in the tiger’s tracks. Yuri Trush is a man of all trades who is at home in the forbidding land among the animals who inhabit the crushing cold. Then there is the not-so-lucky Vladimir Markov whom we first meet as a corpse and only part of one who had been eaten by the amur tiger who appeared to deliberately and obsessively stalking Markov.

Valliant often presents a current scene and goes back in immaculate prose to give us the background of the characters. He has an uncanny ability to draw his characters and the land with empathy no matter how depraved or unforgiving. The tension in the book comes from this literary and philosophical facility, offering few black and white answers to the old question of who is the hunter and who is the hunted and why. The only thing we know for sure is that living with tigers and poachers and lawless people in a land far removed from inspection is a life and death struggle for everyone. We can’t help but admire the tiger who can live in extremes from -50 degrees to 100 degrees F. The men who are sent to protect the tiger and other endangered species win our admiration, too, as they root out in sting operations among the poachers and desperadoes.

Throughout all of this is a fascinating history of Russia’s Far East explorers, the conservationists determined to prevent the annihilation of one of the earth’s most magnificent creations, while recounting Russian history in the time from the Bolshevik Revolution through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and including even the literary achievements of the men who wrote in and about this strange land.

The author has written for Outside, the New Yorker and National Geographic. He has an obvious talent for bringing individual adventure driven events in the Jon Krakauer mode into the warp and weave of a total cosmos (the Russian Far East) rendered in many different perspectives. If it weren’t for his amazing story and his ability to tell it, we might be overwhelmed with so much information. But the facts and the story flow and feed off each other (no puns intended here) as he welds animal and human lives together. His fine book begs the question: Do we anthropomorphize animals too much or too little?

-Pat

The Fall of the House of Zeus by Curtis Wilkie (Crown, October 19, 2010)

“Scruggs was approaching his sixtieth birthday, and he entertained the thought, as many aging men do, of moving on to something new. One grand possibility seemed within his reach: to become an American ambassador . . .”

“His desire to become an ambassador grew as strong as his earlier yearnings to make the big lick. South America became the heart of his ambassadorial affections: he even settled on Ecuador as his next home. Surely, he figured, Trent Lott could deliver that for him. After all, Lott had arranged for Tom Anderson to serve as the ambassador in the Caribbean during the Reagan years. . .” (99-100)

“Scruggs began taking Spanish lessons. Confidently, he purchased a sixteen-seat Gulfstream, a luxury jet with the capacity to fly from the Gulf Coast to Quito without refueling. He even chose the figures to be painted on its tail: DS 368, The numbers referred to the $368 billion the tobacco industry had to put up to settle their case. The DS, he said, did not stand for Dickie Scruggs, but for “dollar signs.”

“At the beginning of the Christmas season in 2002, Lott attended a one-hundredth birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond of Southern Carolina. Before abandoning the Democratic Party and becoming a talisman for the ‘Southern Strategy’ that lured segregationists into the Republican Party, Thurmond had been the presidential candidate for the racist States’ Rights Democratic Party, known as the Dixiecrats, in 1948. Mississippi was one of the four deep states to give Thurmond its electoral votes. In the flush of the moment, more than a half-century later, Lott toasted his ancient colleague and remarked, ‘I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.'”

“In the ensuing storm of criticism, Lott gave up his position as majority leader within two weeks, and Scruggs’s dreams of becoming an ambassador died.” (100)

We hope to see you at the signing/reading event with Curtis Wilkie on Thursday, October 21st, but if you cannot attend, you can reserve a signed copy online.

Click here to open an account on our website and we can save your information for future visits to LemuriaBooks.com.

You can also call the bookstore at 601/800.366.7619 and we can put your name on our reserve list.

Read other excerpts from The Fall of the House of Zeus.

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Some of Lemuria’s customers call me from time to time, even from other states, and ask me for suggestions for good gardening books since I am in charge of the gardening section. (I’ll be glad to help anyone in the store or over the phone for suggestions for Christmas gardening book gifts, a gift all gardeners love!)

With the summer we have just had with extremely high temperatures and very little, if any, rain, and with the drought now reaching fire potential this fall, gardeners are looking for the tried and true plants and flowers which will survive. Although the summer of 2010 was the hottest summer in a decade, according to records, gardening Mississippians have now recognized the chosen winners capable of survival with very little water. One such gardening book which focuses on tough “native to the South plants” is the new release by Sally and Andy Wasowski entitled Gardening with Native Plants of the South. I also recommend the older releases by Felder Rushing, especially the one titled Tough Plants for Southern Gardens, as well as the three helpful gardening books by Pamela Crawford, one title being  Easy Gardens for the South.

In my own yard, I have noticed what has endured, and the photos show the proof. I took a walk around my parched garden this afternoon to see what is still living. Since I don’t water but once a week, as recommended by the gardening gurus, the photos show the native plants which actually have thrived on heat and humidity, unlike me!

The yellow blossomed tall flowering plant is the native G0ldenrod. You will love the bright, bright yellow long, slender blossoms. Some people erroneously blame it for their allergies and hay fever when it is really another’s fault, the awful ragweed which has just stopped blooming, thankfully, as it had me in its snare! Standing 5 to 6 feet tall, Goldenrod gracefully sways in a breeze. Felder Rushing says, “A garden with goldenrod looks and feels like home.”

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The second photo is an herb called Rosemary. Just look at it thriving in this weather!  Pick a few leaves and squeeze them between your fingers for a delightful poignant scent. It can be used to flavor many dishes, especially meat.

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The third photo is our beloved perennial lantana. Although it may look a little “droopy” right now, it was mid afternoon when I took this photo. It will revive, on its own, without water, by nightfall and will greet the morning smiling and thriving.

None of these plants photographed and shown here have had ANY water in a week. Go figure! Want to quit dragging the hose around or stop paying the astronomical watering bill for a sprinkler system? Well, then use native Mississippi plants in your garden. It really does work, and they really do stay alive, even in a drought! Lemuria has the books to help you choose what to plant now so that next year, you won’t have to watch countless plants, flowers, and shrubs die as your dollars burn up in the ground!  -Nan