The Book Shopper

Inside Grant’s Tome

Our book group has just finished reading Ron Chernow’s voluminous biography Grant (2017), which illuminated a period of American history that we knew little about.  Chernow uses the life of Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1888) to give us perspectives on the Mexican War, the coming storm between the North and the South, the Civil War, and the continued strife and violence against blacks who were denied their full rights for decades after the war.

Heretofore, Grant was perhaps best known for two things: the Union General who defeated Robert E. Lee ending the Civil War only because he had superior numbers and resources and secondly, as the two-term 18th President of the United States whose administration was embroiled in corruption and scandal.

Chernow dispels both of these harsh judgements. Although in the early part of his life “Grant had been a failure, battered by life at every turn,” his life changed as dramatically as if it were a fairytale.  An 1843 graduate of West Point Grant served in the Mexican War but left the military in 1854 under duress.  As an unsuccessful businessman mostly because he was susceptible to being duped, he was barely able to support his family. Suffering from alcoholic binges did not make things any easier. When the Civil War broke out in 1860, he was a shopkeeper in Galena, Illinois. Eight years later he was a war hero and President of the United States.

General Grant

Unlike Lee who was tactician in battle, Grant was a strategist who led the Union to early victories at Fort Donelson, Fort Henry, (Shiloh not so much) and then went on to capture Vicksburg in 1863—a campaign rated by military historians “a masterpiece, the preeminent campaign waged by any general during the war.” His army suffered horrible losses against Lee in Virginia in the summer of 1864, where he was called "Grant the Butcher" by northern critics.  Eventually he cornered Lee in an untenable defensive position that ultimately led to the end of the war. Chernow writes:

“Grant was the strategic genius produced by the Civil War. He set clear goals, communicated them forcefully, and instilled them in his men. While Lee stuck to Virginia, Grant grasped the war in its totality, masterminding the movements of all Union armies (including Sherman’s).  It was Grant who best apprehended the strategic interactions of the eastern and western theatre.”

President Grant

Unfortunately, the corruption and scandal of Grant’s presidency overshadowed his relentless efforts to give newly freed blacks not only the right to vote, but the ability to do so without risking their lives. Chernow does not gloss over the scandals, but he establishes that it wasn’t Grant who was corrupt himself.  But Grant had major flaw in trusting the wrong people who took advantage of him throughout his life (unlike his alcoholism which he controlled through total abstinence).

An abolitionist before the war (more so than Abraham Lincoln) Grant was a fervent believer that blacks should be able to vote without intimidation, hold office and during his first term he enacted laws to strengthen the rights to vote.  He used Federal troops to disembowel the nascent Ku Klux Klan “unquestionably the worst outbreak of domestic terrorism in American History” writes Chernow, and he created the Department of Justice to indict and convict over a thousand Klansman.  (A reincarnation of the Klan was formed in the 1920s.) In other words, there was only a short period of reprieve before the white Southerners and Democrat power structure formed new militant groups. This coupled with Northern “Reconstruction fatigue” led the evaporation of voting rights for blacks. (During Lincoln and Grant's tenure it was the Republicans who were the champions of Reconstruction and securing the rights of blacks. The Democrats where the party of the white Southerners who had no intention to succumbing to new order proposed by Lincoln.)

Chernow maintains that it would be another 96 years after Grant (1968) that another fair election would be held in many parts of the South.  “Slavery had been abolished,” writes Chernow, “but it had been replaced by a caste-ridden form of second-class citizenship for southern blacks, and that counted as a national shame.”

Post Presidency

 After serving two terms in office Grant made a two-year world tour, but upon his return stateside failed to win the Republican party's nomination in 1880. At the end of his life, he was swindled in a Ponzi scheme that left him penniless. Moreover, he soon he was in declining in health from throat cancer. Fortunately, an important writer and publisher of the time—Mark Twain—understood that he could restore Grant’s wealth by publishing the general’s memoirs. While in intense pain, Grant finished his two volume Personal Memoirs just a month before his death and it eventually sold 300,000 copies which provided Grant's devoted wife Julia with generous royalties.

More About the Book Group

In the spirit of transparency. our book group—consists of just two people (easy to schedule get togethers and everyone reads the book!) and it began in the summer of 2020 as a way for two college chums and new retirees to "support" each other to read challenging books and avoid inflicting our "intellectual" chatter on loved ones. Our first book was Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and have just finished Chernow. We keep notes, ramblings, observations, (sometimes irreverent like a comparison between Ulysses S. Grant and Donald Trump) on our discussion board available here (but you must scroll down).

And you can order the book Grant from our blog partner Destination: Books.

Reading in the Past

For the last several weeks I have been reading two books from the 1930s. The first is George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931). Isabell Wilkerson recommended it in one of those “By the Book” columns in the New York Times Book Review. She mentioned that the book was a satire, which caught my attention because there are times that I have dabbled in satire (despite the trend that memes are crushing the long-form satire market).

The premise of Schuyler’s short novel is that a black doctor has discovered a process that can bleach a black man’s skin white, which will solve “America’s race problem,” but as one would expect there are many unforeseen complications as blacks rush to turn themselves white thinking this will be a permanent solution. One major shortcoming is that the blacks-turned-white soon begin to miss their black culture, and whites become increasingly nervous about the thought that there are blacks posing as whites. The possibility that the offspring between these two “demographics” could be born black adds to the society's confusion and anxiety.

Naturally, religious leaders and politicians alike take advantage of America’s new race dynamic.

Schuyler’s book drips with tone-sharp, dark humor (I liken it to Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary - 1911) while making one uneasy since not a whole lot has changed in almost a century. He explains how a demagogue can rise to power. Not only will “people believe anything that was shouted at them loudly and convincingly enough” writes Schuyler, but these demagogues also justify stealing (misappropriating donations) because it was the “rightful reward for their services.” Sound familiar?

Included in the Penguin edition is an illuminating introduction by Danzy Senna, who explains Schuyler’s controversial legacy, which began when he was  African-American journalist during the Harlem Renaissance. Because the book is set in the near future (1933), Senna maintains that Black No More is an example of Afrofuturist fiction “before such a term existed.”

William Faulkner’s Civil War

The second book from the 1930s is William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! published in 1936 the same year as Gone with the Wind.  This novel came to my attention via Drew Gilpin Faust (see previous posting) who wrote a review of Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War (2020), which was published in last September’s issue of The Atlantic (“What to Do About William Faulkner”).

Absalom, Absalom! is considered Faulkner’s most Civil War centric novel, though most of this work deals with the aftermath of the South shortly after the war instead of military engagements. The plot centers around the Sutpen family beginning with Thomas the patriarch who arrives mysteriously in Yoknawpatha County in 1837. He fathers two children Henry and Judith with Ellen Coalfield, the daughter of local merchant but sires another son, Charles Bon with a Haitian woman before he ever arrives in Mississippi. By happenstance Charles and Henry meet in college and become good friends at the precipice of the war, though unbeknownst to Henry, Charles is his half-brother. They fight together in the war and Charles plans to marry Judith. But when Henry finds out about Charles lineage well, bloody hijinks ensue.

Gorra’s book is a great companion to Absalom, Absalom! and as valuable as one of those online chapter-by-chapter summaries (otherwise you'll be buried Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness prose). But what sets Saddest Words apart is that Gorra also spends time and effort contextualizing Faulkner with other writers of the post-Civil War period (George W. Cable, Ambrose Bierce, Joseph Conrad). Gorra has written kind of a travelogue as well, as he describes visits to Oxford, Vicksburg, and Shiloh – the latter being Faulkner’s “favorite” battlefield as it was less than two hours from his home. Discussion of current hot button issues such as The Lost Cause and Confederate memorials are deftly woven into the book as well.

Gorra does not avoid the difficult assessment of the Faulkner, who is both a white man in the Jim Crow South and winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.  Gorra writes in the last chapter:

There is never a clear line between the work and the life, many people now judge the tale by the teller, they see the book’s best self in terms of the man at his worst. For some people, the history I’ve detailed in the paragraphs above (where Gorra reveals some of Faulkner more shameful opinions) will be reason enough not to read him. Such decisions are personal and not perhaps subject to argument or exhortation. I have made a different one. I read him despite, and I read him for or because or on account of this difficulty. Not the formal difficulty of his work, however compelling I find it. The moral difficulty, rather, the drama, and struggle and the paradox and power of his attempt to work through our history, to wrestle or rescue into meaning.

With Black Lives Matter, the rise of white supremacy groups, the gerrymandering efforts to restrict voting, and the Meghan Markle-Royal Family saga, the works of Schuyler and Faulkner are as topical today as when they were first penned 90 years ago.

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If you purchase Black No More or The Saddest Words at Destination:Books, part of the purchase price goes to the blog and to independent bookstores. 

The Current Republic of Suffering

As the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus surpasses the half a million mark, comparisons to the those who died during the American Civil War are sure to follow. Over 625,000 Union and Confederate soldiers perished in the war along with an estimated 50,000 civilians, approximately 2 % of the country’s population at the time.

Rereading Drew Gilpin Faust’s often cited and highly regarded book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008) has a new degree of relevance as we begin year two of the pandemic. Her book is not about specific battles, strategies, or personalities, (she assumes you already know about this) but rather her theme is about how the unprecedented casualties in the Civil War directly affected the entire country and how it shaped our current views of death. The breadth of Faust’s scholarship is overwhelming as she discusses the logistical and emotional nightmares of burying, identifying, and reconciling the staggering losses. Because so many died on distant battlefields and hospitals, she writes that the fallen and their loved ones would not have the comforts of what was known as The Good Death (ars moriendi). No family member could attend to a dying son, husband or brother and any corresponding religious ceremony was severely truncated or non-existent.  This sounds strikingly familiar given that those who die in hospitals from COVID-19 are often unable to be joined by family members in their final hours and traditional funerals have been curtailed because their potentiality as super-spreader events.

Here in 2021, amidst the mourning, ignoring, forgetting, obsessing, and despairing over the virus death tolls, one hopes to uncover the significance or meaning of it all. In This Republic of Suffering, Faust writes that though we continue  to question “both the humanity of those slaughtered like animals and the humanity of those who had wreaked such devastation” a paradigm change did emerge from the carnage*.  

Soon after the first battles of the Civil War, (most notably Shiloh in April of 1862), both sides realized that they had no mechanisms to deal the emotional devastation  as well as the physical bodies themselves. Thousands of corpses rotted on the battlefields; others were buried unidentified in mass graves—and only the “lucky” families received any news of what had happened to a missing loved one. But the war changed all that as the Federal government, the military, philanthropic organizations, and private citizens sought to establish procedures to address this new crisis. By late 1865 a nationwide program began to find, identify and move the bodies of tens of thousands Union soldiers.  (Faust details how this came about, which will leave the reader humbled by the dedication of those who took on this monumental task.)

Today, there is an expectation that the military authorities will go to great lengths to recover the remains of a dead U.S. soldier and to properly honor them for their sacrifice. (According to Faust, “The United States expends more than $100 million each year in the effort to find and identify the approximately 88,000 individuals still missing from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.") She reminds us that it was the horrors of the Civil War that led to the outcry that the fallen deserve a decent burial in the hallowed ground of a National Military Cemetery, many of which were located near battlefields.**

By reading This Republic of Suffering, one can at least be hopeful that something meaningful will emerge from the millions globally who have died during the pandemic. But for the time being that revelation remains shrouded in grief. 

Footnotes

*Thanks to Francis Walker of the GRSG, who has also recently read the Faust book and gave me some good feedback on this posting. With respect of the quote from Faust, (“both the humanity of those slaughtered like animals and the humanity of those who had wreaked such devastation”), Francis poses how these same sentiments translate here in 2021. He writes: “similar questions may haunt us going forward with the pandemic death toll with respect to those who succumbed and the humanity of those who knowingly or unknowingly contributed to its spread.”

** The headstone photo comes from my cousin Jackie Fehrenbach who spends a lot of time delving into our family’s history. Here is a photo from a trip she made a few years ago to the Nashville National Cemetery, which was established in July, 1866.

 The framed piece at the top of the posting contains a photograph of my grandmother’s uncle William Henry Kelley who fought with the 12 Regiment of the Indiana Volunteer Infantry and later died from his wounds sustained in the Battle of Missionary Ridge in November, 1863.  The letter dated November 30, 1863 was one of his last letters to his family.

 

Best Books Read in 2017

Instead of focusing on the best books published in 2017, my tradition is to revisit the best books I  read in 2017. To do this I pull out  a year's worth of scribbling on notecards that have been repurposed from a variety of sources. These might include promotional postcards from restaurants, travel postcards, or my Vietnam Posters-as-Postcards collection (shown at right). Moreover, if I add a page number to my notes, it works as an index, does it not? Upon completion,  I either stick the card in the book for future reference or place it in a card file. 

This method looks better than using a highlighter or a pen to mark up the book and when I revisit the cards, it’s like getting a brief refresher on what I read. (The complete list of what I read, examined, skimmed and studied can be found in the right margin of The Book Shopper home page. ) I like to think of it as an eclectic list, but I did discover some shared themes. Here are some topics that emerged.  I have embedded some links to relevant earlier postings as well.  

Slow-reads. Doublethink/Doubletalk: Naturalizing Second Thoughts & Twofold Speech (2016) by Eva Brann. This book of aphorisms ranging from death to kookiness filled so many postcards that I finally switched to 8 ½ by 11 sheets of paper for my notetaking. A seamless mix of wisdom, humor, and philosophy. It will require a re-read in the future.

Japan-related books. I started out the year reading Alistair Horne’s Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century which devoted a chapter to the pivotal 1939 battle between the Soviets and the Japanese at Nomonhan on the Mongolian-Manchurian frontier. Horne’s identifies some of the lesser-known historical battles of the 20th century that had wide ramifications to our world geography. (After their defeat at Nomonhan, Japan turned its interests more to the Pacific theatre.) By a strange coincidence, I was reading Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), which includes a character who was wounded at Nomonhan. I also read John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and in another coincidence Hershey’s prose style reminded me of Murakami’s.

Vietnam Books. The toughest book to read in length and just general sadness on the destruction and waste in Vietnam was Neil Sheehan’s: A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (1988), which I wrote an essay about for the Tropics of Meta blog.  Another related Southeast Asia book was on my shelves for decades: Impossible Vacation (1992) by Spalding Gray found its way into my reading queue too.  The author was known more for his solo performances, which is the core of the late Jonathan Demme’s film, "Swimming to Cambodia". Billed as a novel, Impossible is an account of how Gray developed as an artist while living in New York City and making pilgrimages to India and Mexico. I loved the book’s dedication: To my “Mother, Creator and Destroyer.”

Books about Books.  Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962) wins this year’s prize for most serendipitous discovery. I first saw a guy reading this book on a beach vacation while on  Long Island in August. This 800-page tome by storied critic Edmund Wilson examines writers ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Ambrose Bierce to generals Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman,  and Confederate cavalry man John S. Mosby.  Patriotic Gore caught my attention because this is no beach book. Well, I didn’t think much more of it until a few months later when I was having lunch with book publisher Paul Dry. We were conversing about the new Grant biography by Ron Chernow, and Dry mentioned Wilson’s chapter about Grant in Patriotic Gore. It was then I knew that I needed to check this book out. I have not finished this well-written, brilliant book yet because it is thick and requires meditative reading,  but to my Civil War buffs/friends (I won’t embarrass you in a personal callout) you gotta look at this. And for others, if you don't think the Civil War matters any more, why is this statue in Lee Circle in New Orleans suddenly missing something (Robert E. Lee)?

Fantasies of the Library (2016) edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin and published by one of my favorite presses and bookstores (MIT Press) is a collection of essays/research articles on archives and libraries. What makes this book  a delight is that it  captures some of the physical delights of reading and reading spaces. 

Final thoughts. 2017 was a good reading year for me. A little intellectual discourse with a another mind -- that one-on-one between writer and reader --- always helps me keep a calm perspective in these tumultuous times.  

 

Summer Clearance

 My response for not posting in over a month is a late summer recap of small, book-related things:

 

MIT Press: "facts and Facts"

I was in Boston again this summer visiting my older daughter Cynthia, which always includes an hour at the MIT Press Bookstore.  Coincidentally, while on my trip I was still reading another MIT book Raw Data is an Oxymoron (2013), a series of thought pieces on data, edited by Lisa Gitelman.  (Earlier this year I posted a piece on Gitelman's  Paper Knowledge: A Media History of Documents 2014 by Gitelman.) Since it can be a little geeky, Raw Data is not for the feint of heart. However, there is one piece that really separated itself from the others -- the story of how data was used to fight a horrible social injustice.  Ellen Gruber Garvey's "facts and FACTS":  Abolitionists' Database Innovation" is the tale of two sisters, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, who left antebellum South Carolina and moved to New Jersey with Angelina's husband Theodore Weld. Based on their knowledge of slavery (which is why they left their home state), they clipped newspaper advertisements and articles about runaway slaves and built a database -- compiled of thousands of facts --which began to illuminate the atrocities that were going on in the South. This database was the basis of the book American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839) which was later used by abolitionists such as Frederick Douglas and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851), to support their efforts. American Slavery As It Is, writes Garvey, ""was an important gesture in the move away from theology or exhortation, and toward reliance on documented, factual information to change the minds of white Northerners about slavery."  

  

Walden Pond

On an overcast Sunday, Cynthia drove me a few miles out of Boston to Walden Pond (shown above), the place where Henry David Thoreau spent two years (1845-1847) building a small cabin on land owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Using his journal notes from the experience, Walden was later published in 1854.  Thoreau's  motivation behind the experiment was that living simply would give him more time to think and write. Who doesn't need more time to think and write?

It was our good fortune to go on the dismal, gray day because it kept the attendance down (apparently since they restrict the number of visitors to the state park).  The park is currently being renovated, which is a good idea because it was a little worn around the edges. We hiked and I took in the healing waters of the pond, only to learn that the waters of Walden do not have any medicinal properties -- except to relieve writer's block.

 

The Battle of Allatoona Pass

After returning from Boston,  I made a quick trip up from Atlanta to Knoxville to see some old friends. Since I was traveling alone, I took the opportunity to visit another one of the small Georgia battlefields on my ever-so-modest bucket list -- The Battle of Allatoona Pass. Using my trusty guidebook, Barry L. Brown and Gorden R. Elwell's  Crossroads of Conflict: A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia (2010), I had no trouble finding the site off I-75/ Exit 283, which is quiet and decently well-preserved.  Fought on October 5, 1864,  this small, but fierce and bloody battle preserved General Sherman's supply line after he captured the city of Atlanta.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remembering Civil War Books

Since it is Memorial Day weekend, I was thinking about the Civil War and how the holiday originated.  Since 2011, I've posted numerous articles about various Civil War books.  You can go to a single link (here) to browse through some of the fanfare.  There are articles about the William Tecumseh Sherman "songbook",  Ambrose Bierce (the only major American writer who actually fought in The Civil War), and "travel pieces" about various Georgia battlefields highlighted with a review of Barry L. Brown and Gordon R . Elwell's  Crossroads in Conflict: A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia.

About Lincoln

Shelby Foote on Abraham Lincoln:

It's almost impossible to overpraise Lincoln. He's beyond our comprehension and as a big a man as anyone wants to think he was. But the sanctification of him has covered up some of his most important points. He had qualities that people don't recognize because they are hidden under saintliness. He had a certain steeliness and an ability to analyze himself that's almost incredible in any human being. And he had absolutely no humility, but he had a covering modesty. He's one of the few men I've ever read about who could abide having another man think he was a fool. If someone thinks I am a fool, I'm going to be very fast to disabuse him of that notion. Lincoln would sit back and wait for his opportunity to demonstrate when it would really count. If an opponent of some sort thought he was a fool, Lincoln had him exactly where he wanted him. He could do things like that. This steely quality to his mind that would enable him to analyze a situation and analyze his own position in that situation is one of the most remarkable things about him.

The saintliness has covered up another side to him. I've forgotten the figures now of how many warrants for execution Lincoln signed during the Civil War. Lincoln was know as the man who wouldn't let a little soldier boy who slept on his post be shot. He signed a great many warrants for execution. Jefferson Davis never signed one...Davis said the poorest use could be made of a soldier is to shoot him.

 

This excerpt is from an interview that Foote had with Dick Cavett in 1979 from the book Conversations with Shelby Foote,  edited by William C. Carter, University of Mississippi Press, 1989.

Happy Birthday, President Lincoln.

 

 

A History of Decatur Festival Bookshopping 2015

Some people go to the Decatur Book Festival to wait in line to see authors, (like the queue to see Ron Rash, bottom of page)  others go take their children to expose them to written word and have their face painted, but I like to watch people search for books like these intense bibliophiles in front of the library.

I did most of my book shopping at the Georgia Antiquarian Book Association's  (GABA) Fair, which was located in the First Baptist Church gymnasium (shown left). This was a return for GABA who had not been to the festival for several years.

Ironically, my only purchase was from the Dekalb History Center booth near the Old Courthouse where I bought a thin copy of The Battle of Decatur, July 22, 1864 (2003)  a small pamphlet written by Albert Rauber. I am becoming more and more interested in the history of Decatur especially events that happened near my doorstep.   One unique aspect of the book is that it comes with a mylar map overlay that you can place over a page showing a 1860s map,  which gives the reader a sense of  where the battle took place in relation to current Decatur landmarks.

Later at the GABA booth I was chatting with Ken Beebe  one of the vendors of history books ( had a gorgeous set of Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy hardbacks), who observed that he could see e-readers being popular with fiction, but with history books -- and especially those with maps -- he didn't see how the e-book could replace paper.  Especially the ability to stick your finger in the book and flip back and forth between map and text with ease.  I never thought about it until then, but he's correct. Another history lesson from the Decatur Book Festival (#dbf2015).

 

 

 

 

 

The Inaugural Memorial Day Parade

This weekend marks the 150th anniversary of the first Memorial Day Parade before there was even a Memorial Day. On May 23 and 24, 1865 Washington D.C. hosted the two day Grand Review parade of the Union Troops. The Army of the West led by William T. Sherman had completed it's capture of Atlanta and Savannah the previous autumn and had marched through South Carolina and North Carolina in the spring of 1865. They were about to join Grant's Army of the Potomac in Virginia when the war ended, but there was one last military spectacle left.

Here's an account of this extraordinary event from B.H. Liddell Hart's 1958 biography, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American:

"On the 23rd, the Eastern armies (the Army of the Potomac)  marched in review through Washington, an endless column of troops well-clad and well-drilled, their ranks trim and spotless. Returning from the pageant Sherman, with his customary candour, declared: 'It was magnificent. In dress, in soldierly appearance, in precision of alignment and marching we cannot beat those fellows.' Then some one suggested that they should not attempt it but instead should be workmanlike and pass in review 'as we went marching through Georgia.'

Sherman caught up the suggestion and next morning as the people of Washington watched the Grand Army of the West defile before their eyes they saw no glittering pageant, but instead an exhibition of virility. With uniforms travel-stained and patched, colours tattered and bullet riven, brigade after brigade passed with the elastic spring and freely swinging stride of athletes, each followed by its famous 'bummers' on laden mules ridden with rope and bridles. The most practically trained, physically fittest and most actively intelligent army that the world had seen."

 

 

My DBF 2014 Self Assessment

As always, my Festival plans and my actual participation did not exactly match (see last posting), but this year's Decatur Book Festival (DBF) had a few moments worth reflecting upon.

I did make it to one of the Civil War panels to hear the discussion surrounding the "nefarious" William T. Sherman and the destruction of Atlanta. I was too shy and too Midwestern to rebuke some of  grandstanding by Dr. Stephen Davis (author of What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman's Bombardment and Burning of Atlanta)  even when he was giving John Bell Hood a historical pass on the Confederate general's strategy in defending Atlanta. 

And as predicted, the University of Georgia Press did have a copies of Brown and Elwell's Crossroads of Conflict: A Guide to Civil War Sites in Georgia for sale. I also found out that they have a new book, The Civil War in Georgia, which was published as a separate piece from the New Georgia Encylopedia.

A late morning beer (a St Bernardius ABT 12) at The Brickstore with a book selling exhibitor friend. It was a little early, but we did beat the crowds.

I chatted with some illustrators and a few self-published authors. Some of those book covers were pretty steamy, especially for such a hot and humid day.

I did make to the Decatur Arts Alliance/ The Art Institute of Atlanta-Decatur Book as Art exhibit. Shown here is Diane Jacobs', Hair Talk, Volume II.  You can see the exhibit until September 19th. For more details, including a slideshow of the entire collection, visit here.

At the Georgia State booth I picked a free copy of the literary journal Five Points.  Near the booth, I met Julia Eichelberger, the author of Tell About Night Flowers: Eudora Welty's Gardening Letters 1940-1949  but unfortunately I missed her and Pearl McHaney's lecture on Welty. Maybe I would have asked my them to comment on the Welty quote that sticks in my mind: 

Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new; but that is enough.

Then again, I would have been too shy and too Midwestern to talk in front of a crowd --- unless I had imbibed in a second St. Bernardius ABT 12 beforehand. Remember DBF can also mean Decatur Beer Festival