published by Cecil McMillan

Only the best food ever, from Montgomery's Blue Moon Restaurant. And don't worry about that "Revisited" in the title, or the "new edition" on the cover. EVERY recipe from the original printing of this cookbook is included here, PLUS a few more!

by Beth Muskat and Mary Ann Neeley

A classic, and essential to any Montgomery library. This one was published in 1985, and nearly 25 years later it's still unsurpassed in its combination of old photographs of Montgomery's buildings and spaces and people....and its wonderful "informal essay" about Montgomery by Mary Ann Neeley. If it were published tday it would cost $35, but for the time being, at least, it's still available at its 1985 price of only $18.

by Mary Ann Neeley

An amazing concept...pictures of old Montgomery paired with pictures of those same locations today....along with little essays by Mary Ann Neeley about the history connecting the two shots. A must-have book for any Montgomery library.

by Jeffrey C. Benton

In this well-researched text, Jeff Benton takes the reader into seventy-seven of Montgomery's architecturally and historically significant homes, public buildings, and businesses. Photos by Jim Goodwyn show off each structure's major architectural details. These marvelous buildings, from antebellum times to the 1950s, are arranged chronologically, reflecting the city's growth.

by Wesley Newton

Using newspaper accounts, interviews, letters, journals, and his own memory of the time, Wesley Newton reconstructs wartime-era Montgomery, Alabama -- a sleepy southern capital that was transformed irreversibly during World War II. The war affected every segment of Montgomery society: black and white, rich and poor, male and female, those who fought in Europe and the Pacific and those who stayed on the home front. Newton follows Montgomerians chronologically through the war from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima as they experience patriotism, draft and enlistment, rationing, scarcity drives, and the deaths of loved ones. His use of small vignettes based on personal recollections adds drama and poignancy to the story. Montgomery in the Good War is an important reminder that wars are waged at home as well as abroad and that their impact reverberates well beyond those who fight on the front lines. Those who came of age during the war will recognize themselves in this moving volume. It will also be enlightening to those who have lived in times of relative peace.

Signed copies still available!

Dixie Noir is a detective yarn that doesn’t pull any punches, beginning in medias res of a cold-blooded murder somewhere in Montgomery, Alabama. Protagonist Ennis Skinner is a man with little to lose who is bent on “making amends” by any means necessary. The novel is populated by quick-fire dialogue, a liberal application of street nicknames, femme fatales, and seedy criminals, but it is Ennis’s earnest search for redemption that elevates this gritty classic noir tale of sex and betrayal, murder and mayhem, to a believable journey of self-discovery. Behind it all lurks Montgomery, a city of stultifying heat and just-barely-repressed racial hatred.

Ennis is an ex-con returned to the city of his misspent youth with a laundry list of wrongs he intends to right. Yet the moment he gets out, both his criminal past and Montgomery’s own slew of restless ghosts come calling, launching Ennis on a mission to find and save the mentally impaired teen daughter of a deceased lover. Through it all, he navigates a landscape of crooked politicians, two-faced friends, incestuous fathers, warped cops, thugs, and short order cooks—but most of all his own past of failure, addiction, and sex.

Each brilliant character distinguishes itself with a set of simmering passions and obsessions. Carrying their unique but always somewhat dangerous pasts close behind, this cast moves within a history-rich city that is flooded with its own ghosts. Perhaps Montgomery itself is the most important character in Dixie Noir—so fraught is it with memories of racial conflict and conflagration that it seems to infect its inhabitants, its politics, and even its sweltering climate.

Curnutt deftly produces the distinct language of the noir; his characters run the gamut from Raymond Chandleresquefemme fatales to urban-hip meth dealers. An F. Scott Fitzgerald devotee, Curnutt infused the character of Red with a liberal dose of Zelda Fitzgerald. Each character has a way with words that borders at times on the campy, but Curnutt avoids that territory with believable emotions and motives for his characters.

Curnutt’s first book, Breathing Out the Ghost, received critical acclaim and won the2008 Best Books of Indiana Award for Fiction.Readers who aren’t squeamish about sex, violence, and drug use will find Dixie Noir to be a quick, gritty read.(November) Leia Menlove

 

by Heather S. Trevino & Linda E. Pastorello

Established at the beginning of the 20th century with a total of 41 acres, Oak Park was the social and recreational center of Alabamas capital city, Montgomery. It was here in 1935 that a menagerie of animals was housed in facilities built by the Works Progress Administration called the Oak Park Zoo. As the civil rights movement gathered steam in the 1950s, there was a class action suit to desegregate the citys parks, including the zoo. In response, all parks were closed, including Oak Park. In 1967, plans were approved for a 34-acre recreational park in north Montgomery, which included acreage for a small zoo. Unfortunately, although the zoo was scheduled to open in 1971, thirteen years after the closing of Oak Park, the opening was delayed for almost a year when the zoos first director died in a car accident just 37 days after accepting his post. The opening of the new Montgomery Zoo was finally celebrated in 1972 and included the happy homecoming of a female capuchin monkey, an original resident of Oak Park.

by Foster Dickson

signed copies available

The life and art of Montgomery, Alabama's most popular artist, as told to his neighbor. A must-have for anyone who owns one of Clark's wonderful paintings.

by Nancy Anderson and Blair Gaines

The only place to find out the sources of all the street names in Montgomery, Alabama...or most of them, or at least most of them in existence in 1995, when this little book was published.

by Tom Fitzpatrick

The smartest, funniest, best-read, most intelluctually curious, and most interesting person we ever knew. And one of the best writers and raconteurs, too. This collection of some of his best stuff was published in 1998, and following Tom's death in 2009 lots of folks went looking for a copy. And now we've located a few. Read this one and laugh, and marvel, and then cry at the loss of a Montgomery original.

by Judith Paterson

Well-known Montgomerian Judith Paterson was just nine when her mother died of a virulent combination of alcoholism and mental illness at the age of thirty-one. Sweet Mystery is her harrowing account of the memories of her mother, placed against a background of relatives troubled almost as much by Southern conflicts over race and class as by the fallout from a long family history of drinking, denial, and mental illness. An exquisitely written memoir that captures the perspective of childhood as evocatively as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Sweet Mystery is rich in the details and flavor of small-town life in the rural South of the 1940s. Drawing on both personal experience and recent research, Sweet Mystery explores the effects of early trauma as well as the strengths of circumstance that enable some children to survive them

by Robert Ely

From Mose T., one of America's premier folk artists, and his friend, poet Robert Ely, comes a delightful book for adults and children alike. Reproductions of Mose T's fanciful paintings, printed in full color on glossy paper, are accompanied by Ely's playful verse. Subjects include Porky Pine Turtle, the Geek Bird, Swayback Horse, and more. Recently reprinted.

by Mary Stanton

In 1955, the majority of Montgomery's Jews confounded Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., by ignoring the Bus Boycott. Northern Jews were his staunchest allies, but the Montgomery Jewish community was locked in a painful ambivalence, torn between applying the torah's ethic of justice and wanting to protect their homes and businesses. The Hand of Esau illuminates why some responded positively to the demand for social justice while others vehemently opposed it. How the community dealt with this tension is the story of their Southern experience. The arrival of Jewish immigrants in Montgomery in the 1830s began a saga that eventually took on almost biblical proportions, a tale of the second son's struggle to outfox his elder brother, the designated heir, while desperately trying to maintain family peace: the story of Jacob and Esau writ large.

by John Salmond

Clifford Durr (1899-1975) was a lawyer and nationally respected defender of civil liberties during the post-World War II Red Scare, a supporter of the civil rights movement, and counsel to civil rights icon Rosa Parks. In his early life he reflected the race- and class-based attitudes of his Alabama contemporaries, but during the years of the Great Depression and the subsequent New Deal he experienced an intellectual awakening. With the help of his activist wife, Virginia Foster Durr, Clifford Durr defended those unable to defend themselves, often at the expense of his own livelihood. Clifford Durr (1899-1975) was a lawyer and nationally respected defender of civil liberties during the post-World War II Red Scare, a supporter of the civil rights movement, and counsel to civil rights icon Rosa Parks. In his early life he reflected the race- and class-based attitudes of his Alabama contemporaries, but during the years of the Great Depression and the subsequent New Deal he experienced an intellectual awakening. With the help of his activist wife, Virginia Foster Durr, Clifford Durr defended those unable to defend themselves, often at the expense of his own livelihood.

by Mills Thornton

With this bold offering from two decades of research, J. Mills Thornton III presents the story of the civil rights movement from the perspective of community-municipal history at the grassroots level. Thornton demonstrates that the movement had powerful local sources in its three birth cities—Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. There, the arcane mechanisms of state and city governance and the missteps of municipal politicians and civic leaders—independent of emerging national trends in racial mores—led to the great swell of energy for change that became the civil rights movement. "Superbly researched, forcefully presented, and clearly one of the most important works on the history of the Modern South." —American Historical Review

by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson

This fascinating memoir provides new evidence on the origins and sustaining force of the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56). Robinson (English, Alabama State Coll.), a founding member of the Women's Political Council (WPC) of Montgomery, shows clearly that the initial idea for boycotting buses in that city came from the WPC. Moreover, several black women, including the author, experienced and protested the agony of discrimination on city buses long before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. One only wishes that Robinson had spent more time recounting her life before and after the boycott and less on retelling the well-known story of the tribulations and ultimate success of Martin Luther King, Jr. Still, highly recommended. Anthony O. Edmonds, History Dept., Ball State Univ., Muncie, Ind.

by Bobby McAlpine with Susan Sully

McAlpine Tankersley's architecture and interiors gracefully blend and distill popular enduring styles of the past with contemporary features, providing wonderfully comfortable and inspiring residences. This distinguished firm designs idyllic houses that wed historical precedent with gracious modern living. McAlpine Tankersley is renowned nationwide for their talent in creating residences that resonate with nostalgia, fantasy, and a sense of place. Their dwellings--from country and seaside retreats to homes in historic American neighborhoods--offer favorite period styles with a timeless quality. Presented are twenty-five houses in a variety of settings that illustrate concepts running throughout their work. Juxtaposing intimate spaces and lofty entertaining areas and combining unexpected materials, such as stone with thatch, are among the hallmarks of this prestigious firm. Examples include a Mediterranean-revival house with sleek factory-sash windows and old-world stone columns, a beach house with a vaulted hallway leading to a light-filled contemporary salon, and an unusual house that blends Scottish vernacular style with modern details. With lush photography capturing the allure of these houses, "The Home Within Us" is ideal for anyone wishing to be inspired by the poetic design of a romantic home.

Susan Sully is the best-selling author of The Southern Cottage: From the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Florida Keys; Casa Florida: Spanish Style Houses from Winter Park to Coral Gables; New Orleans Style: Past and Present; Charleston Style: Then and Now; and Savannah Style: Mystery and Manners. Her articles about decorative arts and architecture have appeared in The New York Times, Town & Country Travel, Art and Antiques, Metropolitan Home, Southern Accents, and Coastal Living. She lives in Charleston.