by Robert Gamble

Robert Gamble outlines in detail the primary architectural currents and styles that have surfaced in Alabama over the years and defined the state's built landscape. The structures and styles, all well-illustrated, range from folk houses and early settlement buildings to railway terminals, churches, libraries, municipal and university buildings, palatial private mansions, and modest homes. Structures from every period and every major stylistic era -- Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, Romanesque and Mission Revival, and the Richardsonian -- are documented meticulously, along with examples of early-Modern buildings, including Alabama's only Frank Lloyd Wright structure and skyscrapers from the Chicago school. More than 200 photographs, supplemented by sketches, plans, and etchings, provide the general reader and the design professional with images of Alabama architecture in all its variety and range. Many illustrations offer rare views of buildings long since demolished. A substantial glossary of architectural terms and a thorough bibliography enhance this standard sure to be welcomed anew by any lover of old buildings, whether weekend rambler or serious student.

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 Hollinger Barnard

This extraordinary memoir by Virginia Foster Durr originated in interviews between 1974 and 1977. Hollinger F. Barnard pieced together the interviews in a way that eliminated repetition, produced a coherent and eminently readable narrative, and in the process, demonstrated her superb editorial skills. The result is a book that both chronicles the emancipation of a southern lady and probes the mind and mores of her region with rare insight, disarming candor and engaging wit.

by Sherryann Webb

This moving firsthand account puts the 1965 struggle for Civil Rights in Selma, Alabama, in very human terms. Sheyann Webb was eight years old and Rachel West was nine when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., arrived in Selma, Alabama, on January 2, 1965, to organize peaceful demonstrations to protest discriminatory voting laws. Selma, Lord, Selma is their firsthand account of the events of that turbulent winter of 1965- events that changed the lives of all Alabamians and all Americans. From 1975 to 1979 journalist Frank Sikora conducted interviews with the two young women and wove their recollections into the poignant story of fear and courage, heartbreak, and determination that is Selma, Lord, Selma. ****A selection of Book-of-the-Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club. Featured as a work of special merit by The National Conference of Christians and Jews and the American Library Association****

by Rick Bragg

With his bestselling All Over but the Shoutin', Rick Bragg gave us memorable stories of his own childhood. In Somebody Told Me, he offers the best of his work as a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist writing the remarkable stories of others. 
For twenty years, Bragg has focused his efforts on the common man. So while some of these stories are about people whose names we know-such as Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drowned her two sons-most are people whose names we've never heard, people who have survived tornadoes and swamps, racism and bombs. In incisive, unadorned prose that is nonetheless strikingly beautiful, these pieces rise above journalism to become literature and show the triumph of the human spirit.

by Carol I. Mason

"Mason's work significantly advanced Creek archaeology in general and the archaeology of European-Indian contact studies in particular. She combined excellent historical research with archaeological analysis, yielding a historical archaeological synthesis that was groundbreaking for the emerging discipline of historical archaeology. . . . Her description of the European trading post and analysis of aboriginal features intruding this European feature are extremely detailed. She was able to document Native use of the trading post area by the Creeks after the post was abandoned."--from the new Introductio.

by Sara Mayfield

Recognized until his death in 1956 as the outstanding literary critic of his generation, H. L. Mencken also excelled as a journalist, editor, and author. Characterized as the enfant terrible of American letters, he was famous for his vitriolic attacks on the hypocrisy and bigotry he saw in much of American life. Yet Mencken was surrounded by a circle of devoted friends and was known to be a gentle, loving, and compassionate husband. Because of her lifelong friendship with his wife, Sara Haardt, Sara Mayfield was not only part of Mencken's circle but also a trusted confidante of the literary lion himself. Drawing on letters, diaries, notes, and private conversations, The Constant Circle captures the essence of a man who left an indelible mark on American intellectual life and letters. Great and near-great figures of the era move through Mayfield's candid and unpretentious account: Hemingway, Dreiser, George Jean Nathan, O'Neill, Faulkner, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Tallulah Bankhead, Sinclair Lewis, Rebecca West, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Thomas Wolfe, and presidents from Wilson to Truman. Richard Freedman notes that "with a minimum of pious hoopla about the Algonquin Wits, Miss Mayfield brings the whole gracefully doomed era of the American literary 20's to life." When The Constant Circle was first published in 1968, the New Yorker printed a review by Edmund Wilson titled "The Aftermath of Mencken."

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.

ed. by Jeanie Thompson and Jay Lamar

In The Remembered Gate, nationally prominent fiction writers, essayists, and poets recall how their formative years in Alabama shaped them as people and as writers. The essays range in tone from the pained and sorrowful to the wistful and playful, in class from the privileged to the poverty-stricken, in geography from the rural to the urban, and in time from the first years of the 20th century to the height of the Civil Rights era and beyond. In all the essays we see how the individual artists came to understand something central about themselves and their art from a changing Alabama landscape. Whether from the perspective of C. Eric Lincoln, beaten for his presumption as a young black man asking for pay for his labors, or of Judith Hillman Paterson, floundering in her unresolved relationship with her troubled family, these personal renderings are intensely realized visions of a writer's sense of being a writer and a human being. Robert Inman tells of exploring his grandmother's attic, and how the artifacts he found there fired his literary imagination. William Cobb profiles the lasting influence of the town bully, the diabolical Cletus Hickey. And in "Growing up in Alabama: A Meal in Four Courses, Beginning with Dessert, " Charles Gaines chronicles his upbringing through the metaphor of southern cooking. What emerges overall is a complex, richly textured portrait of men and women struggling with, and within, Alabama's economic and cultural evolution to become major voices of our time.

by Lee May

This memoir is a heartfelt and touching portrait of a father and son overcoming their estranged past through a shared passion for gardening. In My Father's Garden is a wise and moving account by award-winning essayist and journalist Lee May of reestablishing his relationship with his father after 39 years of separation. On a scorching June day in 1989, May cautiously made his way up a concrete walkway to the porch of a small house in Meridian, Mississippi. There in a porch chair sat his father, bent and gray at 80 years of age. The reunion was awkward, the conversation halting-until father and son walked around the house to the garden and stood before the immaculate rows of beans, peas, tomatoes, okra, peppers, potatoes, and squash. May, himself a devoted gardener and nationally known writer on the subject, was immediately delighted and appreciative; in those fertile rows lay their common ground. The two men would build a new relationship out of their shared love of the earth and its fruits-both metaphorical and literal. Self-sufficiency, the appreciation of natural beauty and chance, respect for all growing, living things-these, they would agree, are the lessons that gardening teaches. First published in 1995 to critical acclaim, In My Father's Garden offers a universal message of hope for broken or empty human relationships. As May's father says, "It's a risky run any way you go. If you fail, just plant again." The University of Alabama Press is proud to add this volume full of grace and homespun wisdom to its Deep South Books collection. Lee May is a food and garden columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Senior Contributing Editor for Southern Living. He has been recognized with numerous national awards, including the National Conference on Christians and Jews' Gold Medal and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award's Grand Prize.

by Mattie May Jordan

This rare find--a journal of a young backwoods woman--provides a unique picture of rural life in southwestern Alabama early in the 20th century. "I am a little Alabama girl living on the frontier where the wild animals is plentiful," wrote May Jordan in 1912. During the hunting season her father traveled Washington County buying furs, and May--already 23--accompanied him on two of these trips, cooking meals, helping out with the business, and recording their experiences. May's diary of these trips from December 1912 to March 1914 describes the routine of the fur trade and provides a vivid portrait of wilderness travel and social customs. Through May's eyes, readers can experience the sights and sounds of pine forests and swamps, the difficulty of wading through waist-deep mud, and the neighborliness of the people living in this isolated area. May also shares both the solace of religious faith and her love of laughter as reflected in the jokes she records. Elisa Moore Baldwin provides an introduction that traces Jordan family history and describes economic, social, and political conditions during the period. Baldwin also includes annotations based on court records, census rolls, and other primary sources and photographs of many of the characters in May's narrative to provide a vivid picture of the times. Because few first-person accounts exist of the life of poor whites, this diary will be invaluable to students of southern and women's history; no comparable work exists for this part of Alabama during this era. May's journal takes us to another world and teaches us about the lively human spirit in the face of hardship and loneliness. Elisa Moore Baldwin is Associate Librarian and Archivist at the University of South Alabama Archives.

by Jeanie Thompson

SIGNED copies available!

From wandering the rivers and valleys of her upbringing, to veering off the beaten paths in Italy, for her fourth collection of poems, award-winning poet Jeanie Thompson carries the meditations of her heart across the span of a year. Returning to familiar subjects – love, motherhood, her elegiac Southern landscape, and the continuing search for a deeper connection “running with” her blood, Thompson’s poems bear lessons grounded in her favorite earth, rich with her most important people, and full of grace. Following the late James Wright’s counsel that writing is like the seasons, and “the seasons bear us,” Thompson refocuses her lens on the longings of the human heart. Masterfully crafted, poem after poem searches out the reader, each moment rich in its own season, bearing the good fruits of honesty and grace from a brilliant poet and a life well lived.

by Mary Ward Brown

In 1986, after years of publishing stories in literary magazines and periodicals, Mary Ward Brown published her first book, the story collection "Tongues of Flame," It soon received regional and national attention, and the following year won the PEN/Hemingway Award for fiction. Mary Ward Brown was sixty-nine years old. Though she would go on to write and publish many more stories and a well-received second collection, "It Wasn't All Dancing," Mary Ward Brown's late acclaim hardly hints at the rich and varied life that prepared the way for her success.

"Fanning the Spark" is the story of her life as a writer--her upbringing in rural Alabama; the joys of college, marriage, and motherhood; the sorrows of becoming a widow; and a lifelong devotion to writing, writers, and literature, and the company of those who shared those loves, nurturing and feeding her interior life in the face of many challenges, losses, and obstacles, both emotional and material. Here, in prose every bit as eloquent, evocative, and incisive as her stories, are her remembrances of loved ones; her letters fraught with worry to her son in Vietnam; periods of emotional isolation and unbidden silence; her invaluable friendships with renowned writers, editors, and agents; her love of community and place; and immeasurable delight with every award, speech, and public reading, the many recognitions she has garnered late in life. Above all, it is the story of the competing demands of art and of life, the constant struggle between her need to write and the practicalities of family, duty, and day to day living.

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.

Signed copies available

by Jim Lacefield

Only our favorite book in the store! Fun, educational, entertaining, colorful. And who'd have thought Alabama used to be where Africa is now?

by Chris Lilly

You missed a great party, but you can still get SIGNED copies

of this great BBQ Cookbook

Winners of the World Championship BBQ Cook-Off for six years in a row and with hundreds of other contest ribbons as well, nobody does barbecue better than Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q in Decatur, Alabama. Chris Lilly, executive chef of Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q and great-grandson-in-law of Big Bob himself, now passes on the family secrets in this quintessential guide to barbecue.

From dry rubs to glazes and from sauces to slathers, Lilly gives the lowdown on Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q's award-winning seasonings and combinations. You'll learn the unique flavors of different woods and you'll get insider tips on creating the right heat--be it in a charcoal grill, home oven, or backyard ground pit. Then, get the scoop on pulled pork, smoked beef brisket, pit-fired poultry, and, of course, ribs.
Complete the feast with sides like red-skin potato salad and black-eyed peas. And surely you'll want to save room for Lilly's dessert recipes such as Big Mama's Pound Cake. Loaded with succulent photographs, easy-to-follow instructions, and colorful stories, "Big Bob Gibson's BBQ Book "honors the legacy of Big Bob Gibson--and of great barbeque.

by Margaret Fenton

Signed  copies available!

Social worker Claire Conover honestly believed she could make a difference in the world until she gets the phone call shes dreaded her entire career. One of her young clients, Michael, has been found dead and his mother, Ashley, has been arrested for his murder.