The Book Shopper

Savannah Book Shopping

All my vacations usually include book shopping and our recent trip to Savannah and Tybee Island earlier this month was no different.  Coincidentally, our trip was the result of book shopping activities. At first, Denise and I planned a long weekend to Edisto Island in South Carolina (any place that has shrimp ‘n’ grits is fine by me), but chatting with Polly Wylly Cooper  author of the Kennesaw State Press’ Tybee Days at the Decatur Book Festival  influenced us to consider Tybee Island.

There are basically four types of book shopping experiences in the Savannah-Tybee area: books and bookstores featuring Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, Civil War books, tattered beach books, and cook books from Paula Dean. Unfortunately, one bookstore, E. Shaver Booksellers, (click on photo ) in the heart of the city looked promising, but unfortunately was closed on Sunday. 

I won’t even approach discussing Midnight or Paula Dean as their legions of fans have already covered those reading and foodie experiences respectively ad infinitum, but I saw several bookstores carrying Civil War books including The Savannah Visitor Center, and two stores at the Fort Pulaski National Monument.   

As one who always looks for opportunities to learn more about the Civil War, especially the engagements here in Georgia, I purchased  David Smith’s brief history Sherman’s March to the Sea 1864, Atlanta to Savannah. I hoped the book would answer my question: Why did Sherman burn Atlanta, but not Savannah? I am not sure, but my understanding is that Atlanta had more facilities to wage war than Savannah and that according to Smith, the outnumbered Confederate military had already decided to evacuate Savannah even before Sherman issued a threat that if the city resisted, it would be burned. Besides Sherman was anxious to invade South Carolina. He wrote “we can punish South Carolina as she deserves, and as thousands of the people in Georgia hoped we would do.” (Georgia, really!) 

 

Battle of Atlanta Coincidences

I may be relatively new to this area, but I have had an interest in the Battle of Atlanta dating back to 1966 when our family took a trip south to visit the Civil War battlefields at Shiloh, Chickamauga, Kennesaw Mountain and concluding with a stop at the Cyclorama in Atlanta. The trip cemented my burgeoning interest in the War Between the States, which began with the Topps Civil War trading Cards that my brother and I collected in the early 1960s. (You can still see the entire set of wonderfully gruesome cards at the Authentic History Center. This card image comes courtesy from their website.)

That’s why for the second year in a row, I made it over to East Atlanta’s B*ATL which “commemorates the Battle of Atlanta in the neighborhoods which it was fought.” I tried to get a ticket for the OaklandCemetery tour, but it was already sold out, but the drive was not in vain as I did see “Gone with the Wind in 20 Minutes” by performance artist Doug Lothes, (shown), which was nothing short of hilarious. 

Part of my interest in B*ATL can be attributed to the book I am currently reading:  Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, which I heard about through a friend on my last trip to Knoxville.  Faust’s book is not about specific battles, strategies or personalities, (she assumes you already know about this) but her theme is how the unprecedented death toll in the Civil War directly affected everyone in the country and how it  shaped our current views of death. I really don’t seek out Civil War books and novels too much any more—even though that is certainly a popular topic for fiction and nonfiction here in Atlanta—but Faust’s book is not only well researched and tightly written but when she introduced me to aspects of the war I had never given much thought about, I was hooked.