Lemuria Bookstore Blog

Richard Dortch, an avid reader of Tony Horwitz, contributes this review of his latest book, Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. The Civil War didn’t start with the firing on Fort Sumter, said the great African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. It started with John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. [...]

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This year’s Looking Around Mississippi has been replaced by Looking Back Mississippi by Forrest Lamar Cooper. Cooper’s name did not ring a bell for me but you may have been reading his columns in Mississippi Magazine on history and culture for the past thirty years. Looking Back Mississippi is a sampling of some of Cooper’s [...]

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Mississippi conjures many different images in people’s minds.  Some people think about the wonderful authors and artists from here, some think of the Civil Rights movement, some people think of The Blues, some people think of beauty queens and lately we have all been thinking about heat and humidity.  This year though we have had [...]

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As CNN correspondent Kathleen Koch covered the Katrina aftermath on the Gulf Coast, she made a promise to the hurricane victims in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. The day she left, she told them, “I promise I won’t let anyone forget what happened here.” Rising From Katrina is not just a story of destruction and disaster; it’s [...]

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Having grown up in Mississippi, I think I tend to forget that less than 50 years ago this place was, for so many people, truly nightmarish.  It really is hard to believe. Last night Bruce Watson came and talked about his new book, Freedom Summer, written specifically about the summer of 1964. This was the [...]

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It is a sad fact that many churches in Mississippi have met their untimely ends in tornadoes, fires, hurricanes, and – most frustratingly – at the jaws of bulldozers.  Luckily for those churches, Richard Cawthon has beautifully preserved their legacies in his new book,  Lost Churches of Mississippi. This book is stunning.  Cawthon, an architectural [...]

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The great majority of the South’s plantation homes have been destroyed over time, and many have long been forgotten. In Lost Plantations of the South, Marc R. Matrana weaves together photographs, diaries and letters, architectural renderings, and other rare documents to tell the story of sixty of these vanquished estates and the people who once [...]

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I think it was about two years ago that Tony Horwitz was last at Lemuria. I had just started working here and was at the reading. I was quickly impressed with his candor and knowledge. I could have listened to him talk all day! I purchased A Voyage Long and Strange and my boyfriend read [...]

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Ok, I took Mississippi history in high school, and I have lived in Mississippi since birth, so I am a little embarrassed to admit that until recently, I knew nothing of Jones County’s secession from the Confederacy during the Civil War. Horrible, I know. To offset this awful deficit of personal knowledge, I began reading [...]

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