Casual Questions with Gordon Martin

Gordon A. Martin, Jr., is the author of Count Them One by One: Black Mississippians Fighting for the Right to Vote. This book is a personal account of one lawyer’s involvement in the groundbreaking voter discrimination case United States v. Lynd.

Martin is a retired trial judge and an adjunct professor at New England School of Law.  Count Them One by One is now available from UPM.

• What was your first job?
  
  My first job was a summer job while in high school. I built guinea pig castles at a suburban Boston zoo.

• How do you like to relax?
  
  To relax I play tennis or work out in a gym. I attend college sports events, particularly football, basketball and ice hockey. I also enjoy classical music concerts, reading mysteries and watching some on television.

• What is the most satisfying thing about having a book published?
  
  The most satisfying thing about Count Them One by One being published is knowing that courageous local African Americans who sought to vote will be recognized for the first time. I talked, for example, to the grandson of one of our witnesses who was three when his grandfather died. He had no idea his grandfather was a hero.

Praise For: Down on the Batture

Michael Grunwald, a senior national correspondent for Time Magazine, has penned a very provocative review of Oliver Houck's Down on the Batture for The Book - an online review at The New Republic.Grunwald, himself a student of endangered ecosystems himself, had some very complimentary things to say about Houck and his treatment of the batture. 

A soundbyte:

Houck’s Down on the Batture because it is beautiful, enjoyable, evocative, provocative, and wise. I do not really have many larger points to make, except that I think you should read this book.

Grunwald is the author of  The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise and he seems to be envious of Houck's ability to romanticize the eroding ecosystem.

Houck’s hypnotic prose, sporadically interrupted by sudden bursts of moral indignation, made me wish I had attended sunset school. A walk in the woods in Jefferson Parish reminds him of the one time in a quarter of a century of meandering that he got a ticket for failing to leash his dog, which evokes the ugly history of selective law enforcement in those parts, which somehow leads back to his childhood, when he and his brother set a fire that burned out of control and nearly blew up a gas station

Oliver A. Houck, a resident of New Orleans, Louisiana, is a professor of law at Tulane University. He received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Environmental Section of the American Bar Association and has been named Louisiana's Conservationist of the Year, among other honors. Down on the Batture is now available from UPM

New Book: Sacred Light

Tourists may crowd the famous European cathedrals such as Notre Dame in Paris and Westminster Abbey in London. Yet the splendors of local churches in America all too often remain cloistered and unheralded. Renowned photographer A. J. Meek corrects this oversight for at least one region of the nation, Louisiana, which happens to feature a great many beautiful and long-standing holy places.

In Sacred Light: Holy Places in Louisiana, Meek takes readers on an inspired visual journey with 88 stunning color photographs of the interiors of churches and synagogues located in south Louisiana, mostly along the lower Mississippi River valley.

Divided into three sections, the first section of Sacred Light encompasses altars, chancels, and sanctuaries. The second section contains photographs of statues representing deities, angels, Madonna’s, and saints, often seen with intense color derived from stained-glass windows or artificial light. Light itself is the subject of the third and last section. Interestingly, in several photographs, light is transformed by a window into a kaleidoscope of color on a wooden pew or pulpit chair. Other times the light seems to radiate a living presence of its own. 

Click through the jump to see images from the book.

Q&A with Cameron Nickels

Cameron C. Nickels of Staunton, Virginia is professor emeritus of English at James Madison University and the author of the recently published Civil War Humor. In his thorough account of wartime humor, Nickels studied broadsides, newspaper journalism, sheet music covers, lithographs, political cartoons, light verse, printed envelopes, comic valentines, humor magazines, and penny dreadfuls both from and for the Union and the Confederacy.

Below, Nickels offers commentary on the subject of his book.

The title of your book, Civil War Humor, seems like a contradiction. What is humorous about war?

One of the things that humor does is to provide a way of coping with the vicissitudes of life by making them laughable. The outbreak of the Civil War dramatically altered all aspects of life North and South, and the mass media popular responded with what I call a “paper war” that shaped and mediated those changes in the popular imagination.

Humor about soldiers also provided comfort for those at home. The quip, “United we sleep, divided we freeze” appeared in newspapers on both sides, expressing with some wit a real hardship on the part of the soldiers but also an implicitly patriotic solidarity for survival that would comfort those on the home front.

New Book: Legs Murder Scandal

The Legs Murder Scandal, written by former UPM marketing manager Hunter Cole, is the full story of "Mississippi's Lizzie Borden."

Touted as the most sensational crime in Mississippi history at the time, the Legs Murder of 1935 is almost entirely forgotten today, and the controversial outcome decided by an unsophisticated jury has been left distorted by ambiguity.

Some quick background on the Legs case: In Laurel, Miss. in 1935, one daughter of a prominent, wealthy, and problematic family was accused of murdering her mother with the help of an equally prominent Laurel businessman, her reputed lover. Ouida Keeton apparently shot her mother, chopped her up, and disposed of most of the corpse down the toilet and in the fireplace, burning all but the pelvic region and the thighs.

Attempting to dispose of these remains on a one-lane, isolated road, Ouida left a trail of evidence that ended in her arrest. Witnesses had seen her driving there, and within hours, a hunter and his dogs found the body parts and the cloth in which she had wrapped them.