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Showing posts with the label Alabama

MARCH: BOOK ONE (graphic novel) by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin

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Published in 2013 by Top Shelf Productions. Written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin. Illustrated by Nate Powell. Winner: National Book Award Winner: Will Eisner Comic Industry Award Winner: Coretta Scott King Book Award Winner: ALA Notable Books Winner: Reader's Digest Graphic Novels Every Grown-Up Should Read Congressman John Lewis (1940-2020) tells his life story in this graphic novel, focusing on his struggles in the Civil Rights Movement. This is the first book in a trilogy, covering the first 20 years of his life. Lewis is interested in three things as a young man - education, preaching, and the Civil Rights movement. Lewis listens to the traditional African American leaders and he hears talk of moderation (or, even worse, nothing at all about Civil Rights.) He doesn't know what to do, but he knows this is not the way forward.  Lewis's growing frustration and the moment when Lewis hears MLK . One day, he hears Martin Luther King, Jr. speak over the radio and he knows t

THE BOMBER MAFIA: A DREAM, A TEMPTATION and the LONGEST NIGHT of the SECOND WORLD WAR (audiobook) by Malcolm Gladwell

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  Published in 2021 by Pushkin Industries. Read by the author, Malcolm Gladwell. Duration: 5 hours, 14 minutes. Unabridged. Before there was a U.S. Air Force, there was the U.S. Army Air Corps. Before the Army Air Corps (re-organized as the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942) built the largest collection of flying fighting machines to relentlessly bomb the Axis Powers in World War II, they had a tiny budget and a few air bases. One of these was Maxwell Field, a training facility in Alabama. That facility became the intellectual home of a group of pilots who espoused the concept of precision bombing. They were known as The Bomber Mafia. Precision bombing is the theory that teaches that you don't have to blow an enemy's entire military to pieces, you can just hit certain key industries and choke out their ability to produce more weapons/feed their people/move soldiers and so on. This was intended to be a more humane way to wage war - an antidote to the mass slaughter the world saw in W

THE BLUEST EYE (audiobook) by Toni Morrison

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The author won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Originally published in 1970. This audiobook version was published in 2011 by Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group. Read by the author, Toni Morrison. Duration: 7 hours, 6 minutes Unabridged. Synopsis: This is a story of a girl named Pecola who lives in Ohio in the 1940's. She is sexually abused by her father and only knows her mother by the name Mrs. Breedlove. Sometimes she lives with other families as her family struggles. Pecola is universally considered an ugly child. Pecola wants nothing more than to have blue eyes like Shirley Temple because she is convinced that blue eyes would make her pretty. The narrative goes round and round and moves back and forth in time, often re-telling certain aspects of the story from different perspectives that fill in the gaps as the reader proceeds.  In the end, it is not a complicated story, but it is told in a complicated manner. My review: Undoubtedly, my take on this book is over

DOWN ALONG with THAT DEVIL'S BONES: A RECKONING with MONUMENTS, MEMORY, and the LEGACY of WHITE SUPREMACY (audiobook) by Connor Towne O'Neill

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  Published in 2020 by Workman Publishing. Read by Geoffrey Cantor. Duration: 7 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. Connor Towne O'Neill was attending the 50th anniversary recognition of the Selma to Montgomery March when he discovered something unexpected. The Selma to Montgomery march ended when Alabama State Troopers joined local deputies at the Edmund Pettus bridge and beat them until they retreated. The bridge is named for a Confederate General and a Grand Dragon of the Alabama KKK. O'Neill was looking for a place to park and drove into a graveyard. In the graveyard, he discovered a group prepping a part of the graveyard for the re-installation of a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (the original had been stolen) in the graveyard. It was on a piece of property owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the middle of the graveyard. O'Neill sensed that this was the more powerful story, no matter how dramatic that moment on the bridge had been 50 years earlier. He decid

PATRIOTIC FIRE: ANDREW JACKSON and JEAN LAFITTE at the BATTLE of NEW ORLEANS (audiobook) by Winston Groom

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Published in 2006 by Tantor Media. Read by Grover Gardner. Duration: 10 hours, 10 minutes. Unabridged. Winston Groom, best known as the author of Forrest Gump , is also a historian of sorts. He has written 14 non-fiction books, using his research skills he honed as a journalist to investigate a historical topic. In this case, the topic is the Battle of New Orleans. Most people know everything they know about the battle from the catchy Johnny Horton song: I n 1814 we took a little trip,  Along with Colonel Jackson down the might Mississip We took a little bacon and we took a little beans And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans. I knew a little bit more, having read a little about the battle. I didn't know much, however, not really being a fan of the War of 1812 or Andrew Jackson. But, I am a fan of Winston Groom so I decided to give it a try. Groom is skilled at telling a narrative history and at the end, I had a much better idea of how the Battle of New Orl

APOSTLES of DISUNION: SOUTHERN SECESSION COMMISSIONERS and the CAUSES of the CIVIL WAR (A NATION DIVIDED: STUDIES in the CIVIL WAR ERA) by Charles B. Dew

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Originally published in 2001. The greatest argument among people who study the Civil War isn't who was the best general or what would have happened if Lincoln hadn't have been assassinated or even what would have happened if the Union had lost at Gettysburg. No, the greatest argument is this: What caused the Civil War? For the better part of the last century, the argument has been that the Confederacy seceded in order to protect "their rights". The counter-argument has always been to protect "the right to do what?" For me, the answer has always been a simple one - they fought for their right to own people and to keep African Americans at the bottom of the heap in Southern society. For the Confederate States of America, slavery was the reason to fight. For the Union army, maintaining the Union, with or without slavery, was the reason to fight - a goal claimed many times by Lincoln himself.  There will be arguments that claim that Confederate states secede

BULL'S-EYES and MISFIRES: 50 PEOPLE WHOSE OBSCURE EFFORTS SHAPED the AMERICAN CIVIL WAR by Clint Johnson

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Originally published in 2002. As the title states, Clint Johnson has found 50 people from the Civil War (25 from each side) who played an important role, but are generally speaking, not big names. So, you won't find Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, William T. Sherman or Stonewall Jackson in this book, except in passing.  All of those men would have admitted that they didn't win (or lose) the war by themselves. It was a big war and it involved literally millions of people inside and outside of the military and even outside of the government. Some of those were very helpful and are labeled as "bull's-eyes". Some people, though, got in the way more than they helped. They are the "misfires". Some of the misfires and bull's-eyes that Johnson lists are clearly misfires or bull's-eyes. For example, the first person listed in the book is Union Major William F. Barry. He misidentified Confederate troops at a critical moment in the First Battle of Bu

JUST MERCY: A STORY of JUSTICE and REDEMPTION (audiobook) by Bryan Stevenson

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Published in 2014 by Random House Audio Read by the author, Bryan Stevenson. Duration: 11 hours, 11 minutes Unabridged. "...if he just had the money for a decent lawyer." Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer who has spent his entire career working with people who have been wrongfully convicted and unfairly sentenced. He works through the Equal Justice Initiative with a lot of death row inmates in Alabama. He has succeeded in getting over 100 re-trials and/or re-sentencing hearings for people on death row. He has had multiple convictions completely overturned. Stevenson does a lot of work in Alabama because Alabama doesn't do much to subsidize the defense in death row cases. How much does the state spend for the entire case, including appeals? Just $1,000. Some counties help with that amount, but more than 70% of Alabama's death row inmates were represented by $1,000 lawyers. Considering that the average cost of a simple will is $375 , you can see that a $1,000 wort