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October 2001

Note: Prices listed below reflect the publisher's suggested list price. They are subject to change without notice.

Useless Virtues

Poems by T. R. Hummer

Louisiana State University Press (Paperback, $16.95, ISBN: 0807126691)

Publication date: October 2001

Christmas Stories from Mississippi

Edited by Judy H. Tucker and Charline R. McCord

Illustrated by Wyatt Waters

University Press of Mississippi (Hardcover, $28.00, ISBN: 1578063817)

Publication date: October 2001

Description from the publisher:

How do you create Christmas spirit when the temperature refuses to dip below fifty degrees or when snow is a miracle that vanishes at sunrise?

Held together by bonds of family, soil, and history, Mississippians share a peculiar yuletide experience in the Deep South. To capture the state’s unique holiday glow, Christmas Stories from Mississippi packages writings by such greats as Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, Elizabeth Spencer, Clifton Taulbert, Barry Hannah, William Faulkner, and Ellen Gilchrist with the work of such rising stars as Edward Cohen, Carolyn Haines, and Caroline Langston.

Illustrated by one of Mississippi’s best known artists, Wyatt Waters, these seventeen short stories and essays reveal the wonders and sorrows of Christmastime and the special poignancy of childhood memories. With Waters’s touch, the book makes the perfect gift for literary readers and anyone who relishes life in Mississippi.

Christmas Stories from Mississippi opens with Welty’s classic, “A Worn Path,” and closes with Morris’s personal reflection, “Christmases Gone, Revisited.” Between the writings of these two Mississippi literary giants are stories, memoirs, essays, and excerpts such as Spencer’s “Presents,” Gilchrist’s “Surviving the Holiday Season,” an excerpt from Faulkner’s Light in August, Hannah’s “Sermon with Meath,” and Taulbert’s “Quilts: Kiver for My Children.”

The many storytellers and many perspectives in Christmas Stories from Mississippi share Southern experiences in which families create their own entertainment, relish and break traditions, and celebrate a season in ways no other region’s families can.

Judy H. Tucker (Jackson, Mississippi) has published in Mississippi Magazine, the Clarion-Ledger, the Northside Sun, and Southern Living. Charline R. McCord (Clinton, Mississippi) is vice-president of publishing at DREAM, Inc., and has been published in The Southern Quarterly, The Mississippi Quarterly, and the Clarion-Ledger. Wyatt Waters lives in Clinton, Mississippi. Two books that feature his watercolors are Another Coat of Paint and Painting Home.

Web Hosting

By Carl Burnham

McGraw-Hill (Paperback, $39.99, ISBN: 0072132795)

Publication date: October 2001

Description from the publisher:

This is a hands-on introductory resource for effectively serving as a corporate Web host. Shows how to implement the essential technology—running servers, operating software, network resources, and database-management applications—needed to offer customers high-quality service.

Why Did I Ever

By Mary Robison

Counterpoint (Hardcover, $23.00, ISBN: 1582430608)

Publication date: October 2001

Description from Booklist:

In her first novel in a decade, Robison, a writer with switchblade wit, unveils the helter-skelter consciousness of Money Breton. The cynical veteran of three marriages and the mother of two screwed-up adult children, Money, still a man-magnet, is a Hollywood script doctor who commutes from a small town somewhere outside New Orleans. When she isn’t pretending to work, she holds surreal conversations with the Deaf Lady, trades insults with two persistent suitors, frets over her missing cat, and takes out her fear and anger on household objects.

Money’s gay son, Paulie, has been tortured and raped and is currently in police custody. Mev, Money’s lawyer daughter, is struggling with a methadone habit. Crazy with worry and embroiled in the maddening revision of an idiotic script about Bigfoot, Money riffs with a caustic yet deadpan humor not unlike that of Lynda Barry on men, movies, traffic, airlines, and life in general in 572 terse, numbered, and jabbing paragraphs. Robison’s incandescent soliloquy on the absurdity of existence hones fiction to a new and exhilarating measure of sharpness. —Donna Seaman. Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved.

The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass

Edited by O. Alan Weltzian

University of Utah Press (Paperback, $21.95, ISBN: 0874806976)

Publication date: October 2001

Description from the publisher:

“Art or activism? Why not both? Why worry about burning out in activism or failing in art? What else are our lives but diminishing tapers of wax, sputtering already in long flame? Rot or burn, it’s all the same to the eye of time.” —Rick Bass, Brown Dog of the Yaak

In his controversial 1998 book Fiber, Rick Bass introduced a troubling dilemma of the literary artist and activist: How can any nature writer engage in celebration of the natural world in the face of environmental degradation? Perhaps, Bass speculated, the “activist is the artist’s ashes,” the identity that emerges finally from charred remains of a “pure” devotion to the art of nature writing. In The Literary Art and Activism of Rick Bass, the first comprehensive collection of literary criticism to address Bass’s work, fifteen scholars elucidate the development of social, political, and personal issues in Bass’s fiction and nonfiction.

O. Alan Weltzien is professor of English at Western Montana College of the University of Montana. He lives in Dillon, Montana.

Midnight Burning

By Caroline Burnes (Carolyn Haines)

Harlequin (Paperback, $4.50, ISBN: 0373226357)

Publication date: October 2001

Reflections: Homes and History of Columbus, Mississippi

By Sylvia Higginbotham, photography by Mark Coffey

Eugene B. Imes (Hardcover, $37.50, ISBN: 0971155402)

Publication date: October 2001

Description from Columbus Historic Foundation:

It’s here! The long awaited coffee table book featuring 47 beautiful antebellum homes and cottages of Columbus.

“Columbus boasts one of the most impressive collections of historic houses in the state of Mississippi. The city also enjoys the benefit of a strong and committed community of preservationists, who ensure that these beautiful homes are preserved and protected. Sylvia Higginbotham and Mark Coffey have captured the rich history and great beauty of Columbus in this fine new book.” —Elbert R. Hilliard, Director, Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

African American Women Scientists and Inventors

By Otha Richard Sullivan

John Wiley (Hardcover, $22.95, ISBN: 047138707X)

Publication date: October 2001

Description from Book News, Inc.:

Sullivan once headed Detroit's program to infuse African American history into the public school curriculum. Here he profiles 25 black American woman who have made significant contributions to science and technology, explaining that many, many more are utterly unknown because first of legal bans on granting patents to slaves and later because of social constraints on women. His message to black school girls is that just because they have not heard of black women scientists does not mean that the profession is closed to them. —Book News, Inc.®, Portland, OR.

The New Urban Leaders

By Joyce A. Ladner

Brookings Institution Press (Hardcover, $22.95, ISBN: 0815751087)

Publication date: October 2001

Description from Publishers Weekly:

In The New Urban Leaders, Joyce Ladner, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, profiles some 25 appointed heads of nonprofit community-based urban organizations. Aimed at community activists and leaders, the book includes close studies of a few including Robert Moses, a civil rights era activist who now heads The Algebra Project and the Rev. Eugene Rivers, who fights gang violence in Boston and a broader analysis of how to build such leadership nationally. —Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.