It is a sad fact that many churches in Mississippi have met their untimely ends in tornadoes, fires, hurricanes, and – most frustratingly – at the jaws of bulldozers.  Luckily for those churches, Richard Cawthon has beautifully preserved their legacies in his new book,  Lost Churches of Mississippi.

This book is stunning.  Cawthon, an architectural historian (he was the chief architectural historian for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for twenty years), has done such a great job of assembling photos and information that his passion for the subject is contagious.  It’s a beautiful book, but also maddening; if a church wasn’t destroyed by some sinister natural disaster, it was simply ‘replaced’.  It’s almost criminal that some of these structures were demolished.

It’s also worth noting that you don’t have to know a thing about architecture to appreciate Lost Churches.  It is primarily a photographic book, and while Cawthon’s descriptions of the 110 churches he documents are brief, they’re engaging.

I’m sure many Mississippians will remember these buildings; a good number of them were still standing less than fifty years ago.  This book will be a treasure not only for those who are familiar with these ‘lost’ churches, but also for those, like me, who knew nothing of them.

We were pleased to have Richard in the store earlier today for a signing, so come and pick up a copy!  Also have a look at Historic Churches of Mississippi while you’re here – he worked with photographer Sherry Pace on that book and credits it as being the inspiration for Lost Churches.

Susie

There’s a tricky and special type of book out there that I don’t often completely trust; a certain type of nonfiction, the kind that recounts real-life events with a little too much zeal.  It’s a fine line to walk, that one between historical fiction and dramatic nonfiction, and I guess that makes me skeptical of ‘nonfiction’ that reads as smoothly as a novel.  It makes me sound curmudgeonly but I must be honest – when it comes to certain subjects, I am reluctant to give nonfiction authors much creative license.

And so when Hellhound on His Trail came out, I was excited but also a bit nervous, because all I heard about was how easy it was to read, and how it read just like a novel, and all the rest of it.  That nervousness, however, was tempered by the fact that Hampton Sides has written two highly acclaimed works of nonfiction before: Blood and Thunder and Ghost Soldiers.  So I focused on that and bought the book and was pleased to note the reassuring tone in Sides’s note to readers:

“The first writer I ever met, the great Memphis historian Shelby Foote, once said of his Civil War trilogy that he had ’employed the novelists’s methods without his license,’ and that’s a good rule of thumb for what I’ve attempted here.  Thought I’ve tried to make the narrative as fluidly readable as possible, this is a work of nonfiction.”

And sure enough, it DOES read fluidly. Sides’s chronicling of how James Earl Ray (a.k.a. Eric Galt) escaped prison, lived his life down in Mexico for a while, drifted up to L.A., the whole time dreaming of how one day he’d be a director of porn films – it’s fascinating, and well-written, and, most importantly for this reader, not overdone.  I haven’t yet encountered language that made me feel uneasy about this being classed as ‘nonfiction’.

James Earl Ray aside, however, perhaps the most interesting thing to me about Hellhound on His Trail is reading about the absolute hatred J. Edgar Hoover had for Martin Luther King, and the resulting relationship the FBI had with him – both before and after his death.

Here’s an interesting article about how, with the help of history buff Vince Hughes, Sides researched much of this book.

Susie

Lee Child is coming to Lemuria on May 19, 2010 to sign his new Jack Reacher novel, 61 Hours.  This will be Mr. Child’s first trip to the bookstore and we are all very excited to meet him.  This is an interview I found in January Magazine that came out when Mr. Child’s novel, Persuader, was published in 2003.  I thought that you might find it as interesting as I did. (Note that I have chosen excerpts from the interview; please follow the link for the full interview.)

“Creating a fictional character is a real luxury, because you get to choose everything. And you get to react to what has been done before. In that regard, I didn’t want another drunk, alcoholic, miserable, traumatized hero. I didn’t want him to have shot a kid, or his partner, or whatever. I just wanted a decent, normal, uncomplicated guy.”

Lee Child’s best-known character, ex-military policeman Jack Reacher, comes out of the heroic-altruism tradition in British crime fiction exemplified early on by Leslie Charteris’ Simon “The Saint” Templar and Peter Cheyney’s Lemmy Caution: A mysterious benefactor arrives on the scene to help out when the law no longer can. As this tradition evolved, the enigmatic champion took an antiheroic turn in the hands of Dornford Yates, Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean and Eric Ambler. More recently, the character darkened considerably under John Le Carré, Adam Hall (aka Elleston Trevor), Len Deighton and Ian Fleming. Indeed, it became difficult to distinguish the bad guys from the good at times, especially with Fleming’s works, in which James Bond’s adversaries were made into grotesque parodies to contrast them with the dark side of 007.

What was the source of this character who’s become such a linchpin of the mystery genre? Is there much wish fulfillment for you in Jack Reacher?

Creating a fictional character is a real luxury, because you get to choose everything. And you get to react to what has been done before. In that regard, I didn’t want another drunk, alcoholic, miserable, traumatized hero. I didn’t want him to have shot a kid, or his partner, or whatever. I just wanted a decent, normal, uncomplicated guy. Or, as I realized in retrospect he actually was, I wanted him to have flaws and faults and edges, but to be personally unaware of them. Thus he’s interesting, but he’s not always gazing at his own navel. He thinks he’s completely normal. Only we readers know different. Wish fulfillment? Maybe a little, but really more of a throwback to the way I was as a kid. I was a tough guy in a tough neighborhood, and I grew big very early, so I ruled the yard — never scared, never intimidated. At elementary school I was a paid bodyguard. Kids gave me cookies and lunch money to watch their backs. Some bully stepped out of line, I was waiting for him on his way home. I never started a fight, but I was in plenty. I broke arms, did damage. But I felt I was on the side of the angels. I wanted to recapture that feeling and update it into adulthood.

Is it true that your wife, Jane, came up with the name “Reacher” while she was out shopping?

She was naturally interested in how I was going to replace my monthly paycheck, and I told her I was going to be a novelist. She took it very well, really. Killing Floor, that first book, was a first-person narrative, and as it happened the main character didn’t need to be named until somebody interrogated him, about 20 or so pages in. So I had started the book and I hadn’t come up with a name I liked. We went out shopping to the supermarket and — like you probably, Ali, because you’re tall, too — every time I’m in a supermarket, a little old lady comes up to me and says, “You’re a nice tall chap, could you reach me that can?” So Jane said, “Hey, if this writing thing doesn’t pan out, you could always be a reacher in a supermarket.” I thought, Reacher — good name.

Have you been surprised at the global success of the Jack Reacher books? Where does that appeal come from?

I’ve been very pleasantly surprised, yes. Obviously I hoped people all over the world would like them, but as I said before, you can’t guarantee anything where public taste is concerned. The reason? I think you hit on it before: Reacher is part of the knight-errant, altruistic loner paradigm, and the interesting thing is that every culture has its own version of that same myth. We mentioned Robin Hood, for instance … Most people think that’s a semi-historical, part-real, part-fable legend about medieval England, but in fact it’s a universal myth, based in the human need for justice and fairness. I once read an academic book about it … There are three completely separate Robin Hood narratives in England alone, and every other country in the world with a narrative or literary tradition has its own versions of the exact same story. So Reacher as a character hits the same nerve with readers everywhere … Germans can think he’s a German type of guy, same for Japanese or Australians or anybody. Everybody recognizes the noble loner.

Ali Karim is an industrial chemist and freelance journalist living in England. He contributes to Shots magazine and the Deadly Pleasures Web site, and is currently working on Wreaths, a techno-thriller set in the world of plant viruses and out-of-work espionage agents.

Click here for a full list of the Reacher novels. Note that they can be read in any order.

Lemuria is still wrapping things up after our dreamy night with Karl and Barry. We were glad to see that Karl and Barry really hit it off visiting with a few brews on the porch of our DotCom building!

Tupelo native Minrose Gwin has penned quite a remarkable novel set in small town Mississippi during the tumultuous 1960s. The pre-teenaged protagonist named Florence (“Flo” for short) vacillates among several “homes”, one being  the confusingly distraught primary home of her cake-baking emotionally unstable and alcoholic mother and her child abusing Ku Klux Klan leader father, the second being the home of her upstanding socially conscious, but sometimes distant grandparents, and the third being the home of her grandparents’ housekeeper and cook, Zenie.

Ironically, Zenie and her husband Ray’s home in Shake Rag becomes the place where Florence spends most of her growing up days sleeping and recuperating from her primary home life in the deep oppressive heat  of a Mississippi summer, but it is also where she feels love, even though that love is sometimes complicated  and stirred with mixed racial messages which Florence does not understand.  A forward thinking educated niece comes to live with Zenie and Ray and tutors Florence in English grammar, particularly in sentence diagramming, since Florence has been tossed from one school system to another and is basically several grades behind where she should be. Eva also becomes a mother or older sister figure and introduces Florence  to make-up and hair tricks which Florence’s mother neglects doing for her lonely daughter who has no friends. The only true happiness which Florence finds comes when her grandmother sends her to a two week camp in Mentone, Alabama, which will delight many Mississippi parents who drove  their children to Lookout Mountain summer after summer for the long awaited delightful camp experience.

The reader will see the resemblance between Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird and Florence  in The Queen of Palmyra immediately. Lee Smith, well known Southern author of  many popular novels, including Oral History, Saving Grace, and On Agate Hill commented on The Queen of Palmyra, “Here it is, the most powerful and lyrical novel about race, racism, and denial in the American South since To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Jill McCorkle, also popular Southern author of the recent short story selection Going Away Shoes, said about The Queen of Palmyra, “A brilliant and compelling novel….the beauty of the prose, the strength of voice, and the sheer force of circumstance will hold the reader spellbound from beginning to end.”

Lemuria’s book club “Atlantis” has decided to choose this readable novel for our June pick. So, all readers are invited to join us on Thursday, June 3, to discuss The Queen of Palmyra . Also be sure to come join us on Wednesday, June 16, for the reading/signing by Minrose Gwin, who  also teaches literary fiction at The University of North Carolina. Additionally a writer of creative non-fiction and poetry, she has written three scholarly books and is a coeditor of The Literature of the American South and Southern Literary Journal.

-Nan