tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64636479549405573312024-02-19T11:13:30.404-05:00Read Southside VirginiaLHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.comBlogger29125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-25641655957166465102012-07-27T16:41:00.001-04:002012-07-28T15:54:15.752-04:00Ralph Berrier, Jr. If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood, War, and Bluegrass. New York: Crown, 2010.
From Roanoke.com
As a librarian, I am confronted daily with the truth that I will never read every book I want to read. In fact, I will probably never read every book I should read. Thousands of books stare me in the face every time I go to work, and as intriguing as many of them sound, reading them cover-to-cover is simply impossible. If only the notion that the only thing a librarian does LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-16087570435610030872012-07-17T10:20:00.000-04:002012-07-17T10:27:30.359-04:00Listen Southside Virginia: The Great Moonshine Conspiracy [Audio Documentary]
from UNC Libraries
Last year I wrote about The Wettest County in the World (Scribner, 2008), which follows Matt Bondurant's grandfather and two great-uncles as they made a living moonshining. It was a hard life for them: poverty was widespread in Franklin County in the 1930s, the effects of the Great War and of Spanish Influenza still weighed heavily on the community, and a drought made makingLHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-18064587985671452212012-07-12T19:33:00.000-04:002012-07-27T16:41:57.134-04:00Terri Fisher and Kirsten Sparenborg. Lost Communities of Virginia. Earlysville, VA: Albemarle Books, 2011.
From Virginia Tech News
Here
is something that I will only say once, and if it weren’t for the eternal nature
of blogs, I would deny ever uttering (writing) it from here on out. So all of
you out there who bleed maroon and orange, listen up! Here it is: reading Lost Communities of Virginia made me
wish that I had gone to Virginia Tech. If I had become a Hokie,
I would have gotten involved LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-78988890701877646662012-07-02T15:37:00.001-04:002012-07-12T19:37:54.203-04:00Herman Melton. Southside Virginia, 1750-1950: Echoing Through History. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2006.
From Mitchells Publications.
Reading Herman Melton's latest book about Southside Virginia
is almost like spending an afternoon with someone who experienced
the events firsthand. You get a good overview of episodes in our
history, but without the heavy, intricate details that often (but not always) weigh down those
stories. These clips are valuable because Melton expounds upon occurrencesLHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-8974408147122987802012-06-13T19:11:00.002-04:002012-07-02T21:45:38.223-04:00Barbara Hall. The Music Teacher. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2009.
From Fantastic Fiction.
At its heart, Chatham, Virginia, native Barbara Hall's novel The Music Teacher is about relationships. A teacher's relationship with her student. A wife's relationship with her (ex)husband. A daughter's relationship with her father. A musician's relationship with her instrument. A woman's relationship with her co-workers. A human's relationship to the earth. A person'sLHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-91763070583904535862012-06-07T13:56:00.000-04:002012-06-07T17:02:41.659-04:00Outside Southside: Natasha Trethewey Named U.S. Poet Laureate
From http://www.loc.gov/poetry/laureate.html.
Natasha Trethewey has been recognized with many titles over the past few years:
Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University
Member of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame
2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Recipient
2008 Georgia Woman of the Year
2010 Keynote Speaker at Hollins University's Commencement
2012 Louis D. Rubin LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-27074794587256652012-06-06T11:55:00.000-04:002012-06-06T18:04:12.032-04:00Southside Misrepresented: Heidi Schnakenberg's Kid Carolina.
Outrage!
I was having what was supposed to be a quiet, lazy Sunday morning of reading when I almost choked on my coffee. I had just thumbed through the pictures, browsed the index, and finished the introduction of Heidi Schnakenberg's 2010 publication Kid Carolina: R.J. Reynolds, Jr., a Tobacco Fortune, the Mysterious Death of a Southern Icon when I found it. A glaring mistake. Two of LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-77496557517131092232012-05-30T18:35:00.001-04:002012-05-30T18:37:29.299-04:00Sharyn McCrumb. If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him... New York: Ballentine, 1995.
Tomorrow is the last day of May, and I'm sure that all of the mystery readers out there know what that means - the Agatha Awards were announced earlier this month! (For those of you who did not know that, the Agathas are awarded by Malice Domestic, which holds a "fan fun" convention each May). North Carolina author Maragret Maron won the 2011 Agatha Award for Three Day Town, but way back in LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-67017422694810937562012-05-04T16:49:00.000-04:002012-05-30T18:36:37.464-04:00James Fox. Five Sisters: The Langhornes of Virginia. New York: Touchstone, 2000.
Watching the wildly popular PBS period drama Downton Abbey, it may be hard to believe that there could be any connection to Southside Virginia. The outfits! The accents! The architecture! The dichotomy of servants and aristocrats! The stares! MAGGIE SMITH! How could there be any connection to the tobacco fields of early twentieth century Southside Virginia?
As it turns out, the LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-43265742984196176592012-03-15T19:26:00.000-04:002012-05-04T16:50:39.497-04:00John Taylor. The Count and the Confession: A True Murder Mystery. New York: Random House, 2002.
from Open Library
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” In a perfect world, all court rulings would have the correct outcome. However, as we have seen time and time again, juries and judges get it wrong sometimes. Unfortunately, this often means that innocent people are forced to spend valuable periods of their lives behind bars and LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-65463724460108819612012-02-23T18:25:00.001-05:002012-04-30T18:14:26.260-04:00Robert Collins Smith. They Closed Their Schools. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.
from Amazon
February is Black History Month, and although March and warmer days are right around the corner, our appreciation of this special designation does not have to come to an end. We can still honor the sacrifices and enormous strides that African Americans have made over the years.
Southside Virginia has the distinction of being a major battleground in the Civil Rights Movement. InLHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-50229808376959693012011-12-23T13:00:00.000-05:002011-12-23T13:12:42.883-05:00Southside in the News: Richard's House of Prayer No. 2 an Entertainment Weekly Favorite
Photo by Jeff Vespa, from Skylight Books
Earlier this year, I reviewed Mark Richard’s House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer’s Journey Home. I discussed how I read it thinking that I would know exactly what it would be about and became pleasantly surprised that I was wrong. Richard has lived a remarkable life, and his ability to describe periods of it is outstanding.
photo from The New Yorker
Turns LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-63069111670070899512011-12-02T14:45:00.001-05:002011-12-23T13:19:26.094-05:00Alex Kershaw. The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.Southside Virginia is known for many things: the controversial connection to the groundbreaking HeLa cells that have saved many lives, the powerful meaning Virginia's poet laureate Kelly Cherry conveys in her poetry, the unusual history of moonshine in Franklin County. Unfortunately, Southside Virginia also has the sad distinction of being home to the "Bedford Boys," the group of men who perishedLHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-62792710704146901562011-11-26T14:56:00.000-05:002011-12-15T18:22:16.295-05:00Lawrence Reveley Burton. Tales of Old Patrick: Enchanting Tales, Mysteries, Poems and Stories. Stuart, VA: L.R. Burton, 1997.
Lone Ivy, Virginia | Summer 2009
At this time of Thanksgiving, I feel it’s appropriate to highlight a collection of short stories that highlights a time in my life for which I am especially grateful. Four years ago in August, I moved to Patrick County, Virginia, to work in the high school as a college counselor for the UVA College Guide Program (now the Virginia College Advising Corps). ILHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-20430815605195850792011-10-04T18:43:00.000-04:002011-12-02T14:39:23.585-05:00Out and about: Sharyn McCrumb at McIntyre's Books in Pittsboro, NCOkay, I admit that not much of this post has much to do with Southside Virginia. No, Sharyn McCrumb is not a native daughter, and the hanging of Tom Dooley (or Tom Dula) did not occur in our neck of the woods - or state. Still, McCrumb is too good and her latest novel, The Ballad of Tom Dooley (2011), is too fascinating to not at least try to claim her. Virginia may be vastly different from LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-49210634476544344622011-09-13T23:02:00.000-04:002011-12-23T13:17:25.545-05:00Alan Pell Crawford. Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman -- and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth Century America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.photo from Simon & Schuster
These days, celebrity gossip is everywhere, whether we want it or not. An entire industry (think tabloids, public relations firms, TMZ, E!, even your local weekly) is centered around what goes on in the lives of the famous, and the definition of “famous” is forever changing (one word: Snooki). Love it or hate it, society seems to have an indelible appetite for it (LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-37568581560246409232011-08-27T18:11:00.000-04:002011-12-23T13:17:46.720-05:00Matt Bondurant. The Wettest County in the World. New York: Scribner, 2008. photo from UNC Libraries
These days, the fact that Franklin County, Virginia, was the “Moonshine Capital of the World” in the 1930s is more of a fun trivia tidbit than something at which to take pause. That's right, Southside's very own Franklin County - not Chicago or New York City - was the mecca for liquor during Prohibition.
Locals see it as a significant part of our proud historyLHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-76028897257958885972011-07-18T12:42:00.000-04:002011-07-18T12:42:03.381-04:00Outside Southside: Try the "Read North Carolina Novels" blog!Although Southside Virginia will always be home, I am thoroughly enjoying getting to know North Carolina. Over the weekend I traveled north on Route 501 to have supper with my parents in South Boston. Along the way, feeling guilty for not submitting a blog post in the past week, I realized that you might be interested in a Reader's Advisory blog from our neighbors to the south. The North CarolinaLHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-91882647335546690392011-07-06T13:23:00.000-04:002011-07-18T12:12:00.955-04:00List of Southside Authors: CurrentDo you ever find yourself looking for a book to read by a local author? Poetry, short stories, nonfiction - anything could fit the bill as long as it is by a Southside author? The following list represents some of the talent in our part of Commonwealth. As time goes on, I will continue to add to this list to help expose you to Virginia writers.
Author Southside Connection Genre
CraigLHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-30068772259845542462011-07-01T15:06:00.000-04:002011-12-23T13:18:10.422-05:00Kelly Cherry. Girl in a Library: On Women Writers and the Writing Life. Kansas City, MO: BkMk Press, 2009.photo from Barnes & Noble
Kelly Cherry, a resident of Halifax County, was recently named Virginia’s poet laureate, so when I picked up her 2009 publication, Girl in a Library, I expected a book of poetry. I am embarrassed to say that I usually run away from the genre, so I was a bit apprehensive to review the book for this blog. Fortunately, I looked closer to read the subtitle – On Women LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-75605558467694417182011-06-24T16:10:00.000-04:002011-07-01T15:08:20.170-04:00Mark Richard. House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2011.photo from The New Yorker
Say you're reading a book; the story is one that you think you’ll know before you’ve even started reading. In nearly every review and description of the book, authors illustrate that the memoir will detail the life of a "special child" growing up in tobacco-loving Southside Virginia during the 1960s. You might assume that the book will be rather self-congratulatory on LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-17581522320534922252011-06-20T13:08:00.000-04:002011-06-24T16:14:50.571-04:00(Almost) Summer greetings!My apologies for the gap in between posts, but I hope that you have had a delightful spring and are ready for summer tomorrow! Although we seem to already have plenty of dog days under our belts with record-high temperatures, cookouts, and baseball (Wahoowa!), the summer solstice will make it official. And maybe that means that you are looking for some Southside Virginia gems to add to your LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-81102962835570937772011-05-02T10:36:00.000-04:002011-05-02T12:27:12.695-04:00Trip to Clover, Virginia
Over the weekend, I finished Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010). As my mother and I discussed it last night, we agreed that it was a story that neither of us could put down. One of the aspects that we found so appealing was that one of the settings was so close-to-home. Henrietta Lacks grew up in Clover and loved it; even when she moved to Baltimore, Skloot describes LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-75206552661442030582011-05-02T09:35:00.000-04:002011-12-15T18:13:54.799-05:00Rebecca Skloot. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown, 2010.photo from The Baltimore Sun
Rebecca Skloot's book is centered around the simple act of a Johns Hopkins doctor taking tissue samples from a sick woman in 1951, but this fascinating story goes much deeper than describing what happened in a lab sixty years ago. Henrietta Lacks, whose cervical cancer cells were taken without her knowledge or consent, was a poor, young mother of five whose body was LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6463647954940557331.post-45627773434762703092011-04-25T15:21:00.000-04:002011-05-02T12:28:24.723-04:00Spring greetings!I am embarrassed to acknowledge that it has been two months since I last updated Read Southside Virginia. I apologize for the delay.
Although my attention was away from this blog, my mind was still on - and sometimes in - Southside Virginia. I spent most of the months of February and March feverishly researching the history of the Charlotte County Library for my Master's paper. I turned that in LHPeadenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17353954203501069840noreply@blogger.com0