LSU Press publishes the works of a host of talented scholars and poets. Each month, we take a moment to recognize the impact these authors and their works are having on communities nearby and around the world.
Trade
E. Kay Trimberger spoke with Rose City Reader book blog editor Gilion Dumas about her book Creole Son: An Adoptive Mother Untangles Nature and Nurture, as well as upcoming projects in the field of adoption studies and helpful resources for parents considering adoption. Read Trimberger’s full interview with Dumas here.
Philip Gould’s photography has captured the spirit of Louisiana for nearly fifty years. In this Country Roads profile, Gould talks about the creative process behind his latest book with LSU Press, Bridging the Mississippi: Spans across the Father of Waters.
Forty years after its initial publication, A Confederacy of Dunces continues to intrigue audiences worldwide. In this piece written for the New Yorker, Tom Bissell reflects on the pull of this American classic, as well as our continuing fascination with the life of its author, John Kennedy Toole.
In this thoughtful discussion of Henry Taylor’s new-and-selected volume, This Tilted World Is Where I Live, Washington Independent Review of Books writer Rose Solari unpacks how Taylor’s book allows readers to trace the way his style evolved over fifty-eight years of poetry writing.
Tim McNally joined Southern Food and Beverage Museum founder Elizabeth C. Williams for an episode of the podcast Tip of the Tongue. Williams talks to McNally about The Sazerac, his new book on the official cocktail of New Orleans. Listen here.
Scholarly
Belles
and Poets: Intertextuality in the Civil War Diaries of White Southern Women, Julia Nitz’s
analysis of the Civil War diary writing
of eight white women from the U.S. South, was featured in Women in Academia
Report’s list of “Recent Books of Interest to Women Scholars.” See what
other titles made the cut here.
“Nonspecialists curious about the relationship between oceanography and war-making should consider Winds, Waves, and Warriors: Battling the Surf at Normandy, Tarawa, and Inchon an enjoyable place to dip their toes in the water,” says Penelope K. Hardy in her review of Thomas M. Mitchell’s new book for Michigan War Studies. Read the full review here.
Alice Burton recommends Ben Wright’s new book Bonds of Salvation: How Christianity Inspired and Limited American Abolitionism in a recent Book Riot newsletter: “If you’re a nerd about early American history or want to read about how a dominant religion helped and hindered the end of enslavement in America, check this book out.” Read her comments here.
“American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era is a valuable read for anyone seriously interested in the Civil War and American society in the mid-nineteenth century.” Read this Strategy Page review of Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon, and Laura Mammina’s new edited volume here.
What did the American Civil War mean to Britain and its citizens? Civil War Books and Authors writer Andrew J. Wagenhoffer offers an introduction to Michael J. Turner’s new book, Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain. Read Wagenhoffer’s comments here.
“Cavaliers and Economists: Global Capitalism and the Development of Southern Literature, 1820–1860 offers an important contribution to literature from and about the pre–Civil War U.S. South,” says Gina Caison in her review of Katharine A. Burnett’s book for the journal Early American Literature. Read more here.
John T. Arnold’s new book, A Thousand Ways Denied: The Environmental Legacy of Oil in Louisiana, explores the lasting impact of the oil industry on Louisiana’s people and coast. In this piece written for 64 Parishes, historian Chad H. Parker notes, “Arnold carefully walks readers through the complex and interlacing reasons for coastal land loss and documents well the struggles regarding oil industry accountability among state legislators, state regulators, and oil company representatives.”
Conor Picken and Matthew Dischinger recently appeared on the New Books Network podcast Bookshop to discuss their new edited volume, Southern Comforts: Drinking and the U.S. South. Picken and Dischinger explore the assumption that alcohol consumption is a community-building activity, arguing that drinking together, like eating together, often obscures underlying and persistent inequalities of race, class, and gender. Listen here.
“Good history both informs the present and illuminates the past,” says Douglas R. Egerton in his review of Christopher M. Rein’s Alabamians in Blue: Freedmen, Unionists, and the Civil War in the Cotton State. “Elegantly written and richly sourced, Rein’s study joins a small but growing number of important accounts that chronicle yeomen’s disaffection with the planter class and erode old myths of a unified Confederacy in the Lower South.” Access an excerpt of the review here or purchase a subscription to the American Historical Review here to read the full review.
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