Cover to Cover

What Williams accomplishes in this novel is a seamless meld of sometimes opposing forces—historical fact with contemporary commentary, warm emotion with calloused characters, horrific battlefields with witty quips—all within the lives of Confederate soldiers who abhor the institution of slavery. It all works because Williams never compromises his role as a storyteller in order to make a point.

It was an absolute delight to talk with Philip Lee Williams. Like him, I am also from Madison, and I’ve followed his career for some time now. Not only is he a wonderful writer, he’s also an incredibly insightful man with a passion for the arts. I’ve interviewed Williams twice now and each time I’ve come away thinking I’ve just learned something invaluable about what it means to be a writer in the South.

In addition to the new book, we’ll also talk about Williams’ selection to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. That honor was announced earlier this year and in my opinion they couldn’t have picked a more fitting inductee.

So please join us this Sunday. We air at 8 PM in most parts of the state and at 6 PM in the Athens area on WUGA.

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This week on Cover to Cover we present a special live recording from the Bartow County Library in Cartersville, hosted by GPB’s John Sepulvado. We are featuring award-winning novelist Terry Kay. He is a 2006 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and has been a sports writer and film/theater reviewer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Terry Kay is the author of ten published novels, including The Book of Marie, To Dance with the White Dog, The Valley of Light, Taking Lottie Home, The Kidnapping of Aaron Greene, Shadow Song, The Runaway, Dark Thirty, After Eli, and The Year the Lights Came On, as well as a book of essays, Special K, and a children’s book, To Whom the Angel Spoke.

The interview was recorded live in front of a studio audience. Terry Kay will read excerpts from some of his novels followed by questions from the audience. Please join us for this special edition of Cover to Cover this Sunday night at 8 on GPB radio.

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Amanda Gable: The Confederate General Rides North

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Atlanta resident Richard Doster was in advertising for most of his career and currently edits a magazine published by the Presbyterian Church. Over the last several years, he has focused his writing and interest in spiritual matters, the South, race and culture in an intriguing approach to fiction.

His fist novel, Safe at Home, chronicled a fictional southern town in the 1950s experiencing the integration of its minor league baseball team.

Having covered that explosive story in his hometown newspaper, Doster’s sportswriter hero Jack Hall caught the attention of editors in Atlanta and takes a job in the big city just as the Civil Rights movement was beginning to take shape. Thus the story of Doster’s follow- up novel, Crossing the Lines, is set in motion.

Hall and others eventually start a magazine that celebrates all that is great about the South–its literature, its music, its culture– while the region is being understandably ridiculed by the national media during the period for its racial intolerance. Through the journalistic travails, Hall, a man entirely of his times, experiences an evolution in his own race consciousness.

In his Cover to Cover interview, Doster talks about his inspiration for taking on such volatile subject matter and discusses his methods of bringing to fictional life such historical figures as Martin Luther King, Ralph McGill and Flannery O’Connor in his work.

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By the time he had reached middle age, Max Cleland thought he had nothing to live for. A grenade explosion in Vietnam had left him a triple amputee. He had lost his seat in the U.S. Senate, and in the grip of depression he had lost his fiancée, too. But instead of giving up, Cleland reaches deep into his soul and discovers that he has what it takes to survive: the heart of a patriot.

Born and raised in Georgia, Cleland came back from Vietnam missing three limbs and was confined for months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Doctors didn’t give him much hope of living an active life, but through the bonds he formed with other wounded soldiers, and through his own Southern grit, he learned how to be mobile and overcome his despair. He returned to Georgia and pursued his passion for public service by becoming the first Vietnam veteran to serve in the Georgia state senate. Jimmy Carter appointed him head of the Veterans Administration. Later he became Georgia’s youngest secretary of state and then in 1996 was elected to the U.S. Senate.

But during his reelection campaign he is singled out by Karl Rove and the Republicans, who campaigned against him as “unpatriotic.” He lost the election and sank into deep depression. A long-dormant case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, awakened after 9/11 by the invasion of Iraq, pushed Cleland to the brink. Forty years after Vietnam, having reached — and fallen from — a pinnacle of power, Cleland returned to Walter Reed as a patient, this time surrounded by veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. There he found the faith and endurance to regain control of his life.

In a memoir in which he pulls no punches about the costs of being a soldier, Max Cleland describes with love the ties America’s soldiers forge with one another, along with the disillusionment many of them experience when they come home. He spares no one his humiliations and setbacks in this gut-wrenching account of his life in the hope it will keep even one veteran from descending into darkness. Heart of a Patriot is a story about the joy of serving the country you love, no matter the cost — and how to recover from the deepest wounds of war.

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It’s been a good year for Raymond Atkins. After longing to be an author for much of his life, he finally published his first book in 2008. It was called The Front Porch Prophet, and won him recognition from readers as well as from the Georgia Writers Association. We were glad to have him on the show last year, and we’re even happier that we could welcome him back as he promotes his sophomore effort Sorrow Wood.

The back cover of Sorrow Wood brands the book as a murder mystery, though it reads much more like a congenial love story. Reva and Wendell Blackmon are the principals here, and Reva believes they have been lovers for many, many lifetimes. The book gives us glimpses into many of those lifetimes, taking the longest look at the late 20^th Century edition. Atkins names the muse for this love story in our interview, even after mentioning on air that he is going to be in a load of trouble at home.

Atkins has also been busy lately planning to welcome literary lovers from around the south to his hometown of Rome, GA. Rome is the site of this year’s Georgia Literary Festival. (The folks at the Georgia Center for the Book put this on each year, and it moves around the state.) So please visit Rome for this fun and free event. I can almost promise you that one of your favorite Georgia authors will be there. You can find more details at: http://www.georgiacenterforthebook.org/Georgia-Literary-Festival/index.php.

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2009 marks the 145th anniversary of the fall of Atlanta during the Civil War, so Mark Wortman’s book is a timely look at this fascinating chapter (some would say dark chapter) in Georgia’s history. Wortman has a journalist’s flair for keen insight and detail, and above all he tells a good story.

Like most of my interviews, 30 minutes proved all too short to ask the author everything I was interested in. Some of the ones I posed to Marc Wortman: How does a guy with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Princeton get interested in Atlanta and the Civil War?

One of the things in his book that most intrigued me was the fact that we now take it for granted that Atlanta is an important city, that it’s the Gateway to the New South, the home of Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, the Atlanta Braves, Home Depot, CNN, Coca-Cola, etc., but the Atlanta he describes wasn’t all that big or seemingly all that important as a city. Wortman writes, “Few people in the North or among Union military officials had heard of Atlanta before the outbreak of the rebellion.” How then did two great armies find themselves in and around Atlanta in the summer of 1864? And why is Atlanta’s fall directly credited with paving the way for Lincoln’s re-election the following November?

A book like this is full of fascinating characters, among them of course William Tecumseh Sherman. He obviously plays a very prominent role in this book, and in fact Wortman gives him the very last word. Even today, his name evokes fierce passions and emotions in Georgia. And yet, when he returned to Atlanta in 1879, Wortman writes that “few people in Atlanta remained ill disposed toward Sherman.” How is that possible? I’m quite certain that wouldn’t be the case now, 145 years later. Last year the Georgia Historical Society had a public program about Sherman, and we received numerous letters and emails from people across Georgia (and the rest of the country) vehemently denouncing him. How was it possible that “few” of the Atlantans who actually lived through Sherman’s siege were so forgiving in 1879?

Finally, with the Civil War’s 150th anniversary fast approaching, there will be commemorative events across the country. One of the questions I like to pose to writers of Civil War history: What do the events in your book still have to teach us in the 21st century?

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Again, the setting is the near future wasteland of the U.S., roughly forty years after an environmental disaster brought about by the nation’s consumptive tendencies. The ozone layer has been ripped asunder and the inhabitants of the scorched earth fight for survival in what becomes a morbidly self-serving world. Mat Harrison was the hero of Birmingham, 25 Miles, but he didn’t survive for the sequel.

Instead, for most of Snakeskin, we follow his widow, Jennifer, and her reluctant charge, Mazy, as they try to make their way northward to the city-state of Chicago, where Jennifer’s mother lives and where life may or may not be more manageable. Braziel uses his future world as a canvas upon which to blend the hues of a handful of timely concerns, including human trafficking, the perils of dogmatic religious pursuit, and xenophobia. But chief among his foci is of course our stewardship of our natural resources.

Despite the poignant attention given the subject in each of the novels, I don’t think it really occurred to me until reading Braziel’s Southverve blog how much of a sacred space he gives to the environment in his life and in his writing. So maybe I should just direct you here: www.jamesbraziel.com/press.

But really, I want to direct you to his fine sophomore effort, Snakeskin Road, and to Cover to Cover this Sunday on the GPB Radio network. Remember, we’re on at 6 PM in the Athens area and at 8 PM in most other parts of the state. Please join us. (Oh, and if you’re from Wilcox County, where Braziel grew up, make doubly sure to tune in. During the interview James wondered aloud if anyone there read his books!)

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Former AJC Reporter Tells Tale of Murder, Bridge and the Great Depression September 14, 2009 - 2:23 PM By Stan Deaton Gary Pomerantz honed his skills as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and it was while he still lived in Atlanta that he wrote what is widely considered one of the best and most important books ever authored about the city: Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: A Saga of Race and Family. With the same narrative skills that gave that work, and subsequent others, such vividness, Pomerantz, who now teaches at Stanford University, earlier this year published The Devil’s Tickets: A Night of Bridge, A Fatal Hand, and a New American Age.

This latest work focuses on a once notorious Kansas City murder case. But, with the attorney for the defense being one-time presidential candidate Jim Reed, and the killing having taken place after a game of Bridge, a craze that would captivate the country during the ensuing decade of the Great Depression–thanks in large part to a larger-than-life impressario named Ely Culbertson, Pomerantz’s tale is truly a panorama of the era, full of wonderfully colorful characters, significant historic detail and astute social commentary.

Like in his writing, Pomerantz in conversation is brimming with energy and finds intrigue and excitement in whatever subject he immerses himself. He is the sort of fellow with whom you could talk for hours. Alas, Cover to Cover only last 30 minutes. For a little more of Pomerantz, however, he will speak about his book at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta on Thursday, September 24 at 7 p.m.

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Pat Conroy’s South of Broad, the Atlanta-born author’s first novel in 14 years, raced to the top of the New York Times Bestseller List almost immediately upon its August publication, showing the enduring popularity of Conroy’s distinctive Southern voice, lush prose, and inevitably wounded characters.

Despite his immense popularity, Conroy is as affable and self-effacing as any interview subject I’ve had the pleasure of hosting on Cover to Cover.

Deadpanning that his popularity was based on how “shallow” his stories are but also claiming that his editor, Nan Talese, destroys the magnificent 1000-page manuscripts he turns in (”she writes the checks”), Conroy understands the kind of writer he is–and how he connects with his audience–and the kind of writer he is not.

South of Broad is, as most Conroy novels are, many books in one. Primarily Conroy describes it as a “love letter” to Charleston, South Carolina. In the novel, though, Conroy takes his characters out to another favorite city of his–San Francisco–where the focus is the early years of the AIDS epidemic, which Conroy experienced first-hand. Another theme of the book is the power and workings of life-long friendships, and of course, he writes of dysfunctional families, abuse, mental illness, racial and class injustice and, the meaning of being Southern.

Ultimately, though, fans of Conroy cherish his books for his incomparable prose style, which he still renders in long-hand, and which, as he discusses in the interview, he plans to put to work next in a book focused on his long-time home of Atlanta.

And, he’s pledging to try and finish that sooner than 14 more years.

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